Eyes on the Future Blog

Our Future Looked Us in the Eyes and Demanded Action

Post by Tom Collins

I've taken the weekend to begin digesting our 2008 Eyes on the Future event. With over 1500 people signed up and a large percentage of them actually showing up, many of those who spoke remarked on what an encouraging sign that is about our region's future, despite the obvious and enormous challenges.

We heard powerful messages from state leaders Gov. Patterson and Dennis Mullen, to local leaders Maggie Brooks and Bob Duffy, to an array of business leaders, Dick Kaplan, Lauren Dixon, Robert Offley, Gerald Ostrov, Michael Reed, SBC's Tom Ioele and GRE's Mark Peterson, to Drs. Donald Bain and John Martin representing our local colleges and universities, along with numerous attendees who stepped up to the microphones to contribute questions and ideas.

Yet, here's the message I can't get out of my head:

"Make me come home!"

At least that's what I took away from the speech by Jennifer Jones, HF-L, student member of the EOTF Planning Committee. What she actually said was (from my notes), "... everything I want or need can be right here ... and I want to come back after college."

Rochester in 2020: A suburb of Toronto?

Buffalo State professor Bruce Fisher thinks Upstate NY is in for a bleak future, but that the Rochester area may fare better than most. He advocates regional planning and connecting to a "binational region encompassing Toronto, Buffalo, and Rochester as a potential world powerhouse."

Is his advice sound? Is he right that Rochester is positioned to thrive amid the problems he sees on the horizon? Read his article Predicting 2020 in Upstate NY in Buffalo's Artvoice online edition.

Questions and ideas from Branding Rochester blog

Our friend and local business woman Donna DeClemente has suggested that the Eyes on the Future community connect with Branding Rochester — another group of Rochester thought leaders working to

get more people actively engaged in thinking about how to make Rochester a better place to live, work and visit and how to better promote Rochester to the world.

The Branding Rochester event was sponsored by the Harvard Business School Club of Rochester and held on May 24, but the discussion continues on the Branding Rochester blog. And there are some tough questions and intriguing ideas being discussed there.

For example, RIT graduate and now Philadelphia resident John Sherlock offers an extended comparison of the problems and efforts in both cities and then asks (and answers) himself:

Okay, smart guy - if you think your ideas are so great, what would you do for Rochester?

The answer is elemental. Water.

Between Lake Ontario, The Genesee River and the Erie Canal, you could make Rochester the Intercoastal Waterway of the north. Your BIG IDEA will be a combination of the Baltimore Inner harbor, combined with the San Antonio Riverwalk and a centerpiece Arts Complex for music, dance and theater designed by the hottest architect in the world — all centered in High Falls. It has to be so ambitious that everyone will be talking about it. It will mean changing the very infrastructure of downtown. And everyone has to buy into it. It would bring shopping, dining and hotels into the city. The rest of the good things (and population) would naturally follow.

And after noting her view of some of our problems, long-time Rochester real estate entrepreneur Judy Columbus suggests two ways to make Rochester a "Destination City":

1. create a National Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame; and
2. develop a World Class Intergenerational Camp.

Are there common threads in these ideas? What can we build on at our Eyes on the Future event? How can the two groups work together? Are there others out there?

Is Greater Rochester like the Reno-Tahoe region?

I wanted to get an idea of who the panelists for Eyes on the Future are and what they can share with us. For no particular reason, I started at the bottom of the link list on the website and found out a little about Ron Weisinger, from the Northern Nevada Development Authority (Reno-Tahoe region), and Mayor David G. Wallace, from Sugar Land, Texas (photo left).

Why Sugar Land? "The economy in Fort Bend County, which includes Sugar Land, is rising at a rate greater than that of the 10 strongest metropolitan economies in the country. The size of the economy, earnings and employment all have grown at a rate much faster than 99 percent of all economies in the country." (SBC press release.)

Here's what Tom Ioele, Past President of the Small Business Council said about Wallace in that release: "Mayor Wallace is a great addition to our panel of economic development officials who will share their experiences and offer ideas on how we can apply some of their winning formulas to grow our economy."

So what do we need to ask Mayor Wallace when we have him here? What "immediate actions and tangible results" can he point us toward?

BTW, according to the Fort Bend Now blog Mayor Wallace also has his own online radio show! Here's a sample from his Inside Story podcast.

And speaking of online ideas, Ron Weisinger's bio includes one very specific initiative from the Reno-Tahoe region that gets me excited:

... the re-working of 18 rural regional web sites including demographic information updated on a daily basis. The web sites will be coordinated and interconnected showing assets of the region and integrated local government, for profit and non-profit relationships. All of this is geared to assist the prospective client from work force to real estate, community content to financial, and all aspects of making it easier for a national site selector or individual client to have the best possible facts and knowledge prior to making a site relocation decision.

In a December 2006 interview, he noted, "Companies don't see county lines. Our success is based on how we connect as a region."

How can we leverage the Web toward presenting our Greater Rochester region as a unified economic whole?