Mayor's Business Council Gets Down to Business

The Mayor’s Business Council held their second meeting last week, and nearly two dozen people were in attendance, including representatives from Applied Medical, Cox Communications, Y-Tel, and Kawasaki, along with the Lake Forest Chamber of Commerce, OC Business Council, the SBA, and CBRE Real Estate. Y-Tel graciously hosted the two hour meeting. The main topic was the General Plan and the purpose of the meeting was to generate some ideas in the long term for the General Plan, as well as short term for what can be done here and now to improve the City’s economic position.

Here’s a recap of some of the ideas being floated –

HIGH TECH

The City should be reaching out and trying to attract more high tech companies. High tech jobs are reasonably recession resistant and represent future growth opportunities. They are usually accompanied by higher than average salaries and have positions available at all levels. Compared to many businesses they are more environmentally friendly.

What can we do to attract new high tech companies? Some suggestions included recruitment teams consisting of existing high tech company executives and establishing high tech incubators. It was also suggested more ties with local colleges and universities would be beneficial to attract local talent.

There was great emphasis put on increasing the wi-fi abilities in the City and moving to a “smart city” model. After all, Cox Communications has their headquarters in our city ands they have already set up “smart cities” elsewhere. Moving to a smart city would not merely be good for everyone who lives here, but it would underscore our attractiveness for high tech companies.

WORKFORCE HOUSING

Most of the efforts being undertaken by the City are in the area of “affordable housing” and “emergency housing for homeless” but little attention is being paid to “workforce housing”. “Affordable housing” is a technical term and actually applies to state mandates concerning housing for people with low to very low incomes. The people being ignored are the entry level and middle management people who don’t qualify for “affordable housing” but who can’t afford the $700,000 average price for a house in Lake Forest.

Laker Forest is not alone in this problem, and several nearby cities have even higher median home prices.

The group discussed the idea of re-zoning business properties to include workforce housing. This step would be particularly useful for new hires who could come to the workforce housing as a preliminary step. From there, they could spend time looking for the right place at the right price.

RETAIL RE-VITALIZATION

There’s no need to repeat what everyone knows – traditional retail is in trouble and new ways of attracting people need to be developed. Our Economic Development team along with the Chamber of Commerce is already planning a series of experiential faires at local shopping centers in order to attract people. But these events are merely stop gaps. The City needs to work with owners and managers to re-invent retail. We are starting to do that with discussions about potential infill development, but more energies need to be devoted to this enterprise, and given the size of our Economic Development team, a lot of the work here needs to be done by the businesses.

ATTRACTION PACKAGES

The Economic Development staff has already re-designed our attraction packages, made updates to our website and created a two-year "Action Plan". We are producing quarterly “state of the city” reports that reflect the excellent and often revolutionary and visionary work being done in the city. In addition to these efforts, we are making arrangements to appear at events across the county (e.g., Asian Business Council) to pound the table about how great life is in Lake Forest. The group applauded these efforts, but even more benefits could be created by targeted messages and more uses of technology.

These are just some of the ideas raised at the meeting. Next month the group will meet again, and this time we will dig deeper into some of these areas and begin programs. Stay tuned.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest where he serves as Mayor. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook. His Twitter handle is @DrJimGardner. His comments are not meant to reflect official City Policy.

Dr. Gardner has office hours every Tuesday from 4 pm to 6 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a town hall meeting every quarter. The next meeting will be Aug 16 at 7 pm at the Lake 1 Clubhouse (Ridge Route).