Gearing up for growth
From promoting its cities as prime locations for business and development to surveying young professionals on their live-and-work choices in the county, Westchester”™s two leading business groups are moving ahead on their separate initiatives launched in 2011 to stimulate economic growth in a changed and changing economy.
The Westchester County Association is selecting an agency to carry out a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign to attract businesses to relocate here, said Marissa Brett, who was hired in July as the WCA”™s first economic development director. She said the marketing campaign, an element of the “Blueprint for Westchester County” drafted by a WCA task force last spring, will start in the first quarter of 2012.
On April 25, the WCA will host in White Plains the first in a series of one-day promotional events highlighting Westchester”™s cities for the real estate industry. Brett said WCA officials are in talks with Mount Vernon leaders about scheduling a similar promotion there and will be selecting a date for another in New Rochelle.
Commercial broker William V. Cuddy Jr. chairman of the WCA economic development task force, said the first scheduled city “expo” will be geared to investor-developers, real estate brokers, site selectors and engineers “to see the properties and opportunities in downtown White Plains.”
“We”™re going to dispel the notion that the municipalities aren”™t open for business in Westchester ”“ because they are,” Cuddy said.
Reducing the county”™s high office vacancy rate is a major focus of the WCA”™s strategy for economic growth. Both Brett and Cuddy said repurposing and adaptive reuse of properties are needed in a county whose office inventory, built in a roughly 20-year span from 1970 to 1990, is aging or obsolete.
As an example of adaptive reuse, Cuddy, executive vice president at CB Richard Ellis, pointed to a sale he brokered this year that will bring a growing biotech firm in Ossining to a vacant office building on Corporate Park Drive on the Platinum Mile. “There”™s a pure office building coming on line as a research and development center for a company that has an international footprint,” he said.
At the Business Council of Westchester, members of its Westchester Coalition for Business Development in January will conduct a comprehensive survey of young professionals employed in the county on why they choose to work in and live in or outside Westchester. The Business Council, led by its Rising Stars alumni group, wants to reverse “youth flight” from the county.
The survey report is expected to be released in February, said Business Council President and CEO Marsha Gordon. “We”™re going to have a much better understanding of why young people choose to live and work here,” she said.
Gordon said the Business Council coalition also will launch in January an internship clearinghouse in partnership with the Westchester-Putnam Workforce Investment Board and several colleges and universities in the county. “It will be a way for businesses to have a central data posting to list their internships so that college students can act on them,” Gordon said.
Tim Jones, chairman of the business development coalition, said a series of financial consortiums and investor forums will begin in early 2012. Coalition members also are compiling a database on capital access that will be especially helpful for small businesses, he said.
Cuddy might have spoken for both business groups executing their strategies for economic growth: “2012 will really be when the rubber meets the road, working on deliverables.”