Sonoma County’s Innovation Council prepares for the next decade.
Look forward 10 years from now, to the year 2018: What will the world look like? What will the North Bay look like? What kind of jobs will (and won’t) be needed? What will the population be, and what new infrastructure will be required to meet their needs? What new businesses will be here?
Nobody truly knows the answers to these questions, but the Sonoma County Innovation Council has made its job to not only identify the county’s current pressing issues, but also what they’ll likely be for the next 10 years. It’s also accepted the challenge to create a master strategy that will help Sonoma County meet the needs of residents and businesses over the next decade.
“If we look toward the next 10 years, we’ll be better prepared for the future,” explains Ben Stone, executive director of the Sonoma County Economic Development Board, who’s providing staff support to the Council. “It’s better to fly with instruments, so you can anticipate a storm ahead—or turbulence: Here’s what you can do now to get ready for that, rather than just wait for it to hit. Knowledge is power.”
A council is formed
On May 15, 2007, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors approved formation of the Innovation Council and began accepting applications for membership. Openings for appointment were publicly announced through the media and to a wide array of businesses and community organizations. A review committee—including representatives from the Economic Development Board, Sonoma County Water Agency, the Workforce Development Board and PG&E—received more than 90 applications from individuals willing to volunteer for this valuable and important cause. After a rigorous process, a list of recommended nominees was submitted to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, and the Innovation Council was officially launched on September 11, 2007, with 34 appointed members.
Council members represent a broad cross-section of various industries, government agencies and community organizations, including several Chambers of Commerce, the mayor of Healdsburg, a Santa Rosa city councilmember, the North Bay Labor Council, the Sonoma County Office of Education, Santa Rosa Junior College, Sonoma State University, the Sonoma County Alliance, North Bay Leadership Council, representatives of some local nonprofits and leaders in the professional services, utilities, agriculture and winery, technology and manufacturing, health care, and the tourism and hospitality industries.
These individuals are charged with completing a plan, within one year, that identifies actionable strategies that will encourage a viable business climate and healthy economy in the coming decade. The plan will include specific benchmarks, roles and responsibilities for dealing with the economic challenges facing Sonoma County.
“We’re going to try, in our schools, to prepare students for jobs that have yet to be invented; we’re going to prepare students for problems and challenges that no one has even thought of,” says Carl Wong, Sonoma County Superintendent of Schools. “And that’s why the Innovation Council is important—to have this global, forward vision that’s necessary. Because if we just concentrate on the status quo in Sonoma County, I don’t think we’re going to position ourselves very well.”
Putting down roots
In many ways, the Innovation Council is acting as the next level of a successful experiment conducted 10 years ago, the Economic Vitality Project (EVP). The EVP, a committee of approximately 30 people, while not as broad-based as the Innovation Council, nevertheless played a pivotal role in launching a new engineering sciences program at Sonoma State University, the countywide tourism program, new collaborative efforts among a consortium of local agriculture groups and a new local economic research program.
“When we did this 10 years ago, we didn’t even know about the Internet, really. It wasn’t that big a part of our lives,” remembers Stone. “Life’s changed in 10 years: We were experiencing a recession. We were fearing there weren’t going to be enough jobs for the workers. Now, we’re fearing there won’t be enough workers for the jobs.”
So how is the Innovation Council different than other government agencies and community organizations that also conduct their own forecasting and planning for the future?
“It’s deliberately broad-based,” explains Stone. “We have the major chambers represented from different parts of the county, trade groups, most regions of the county are represented by at least one individual. It’s deliberately inclusive. We take whatever other groups are doing on their own and try to bring all that together—aggregate it into this larger, strategic plan. That’s what makes it unique.”
While many organizations develop strategies for dealing with current and future issues, they tend to focus only on the areas they manage—education, for example, or transportation or jobs. By working together with individuals that represent all sectors, agencies and industries, the Innovation Council can use a bird’s eye view to determine how issues may overlap or undermine each other and how they can be dealt with on a larger scale.
For example, many industries in Sonoma County, such as health care, construction and engineering, just to name a few, are already lacking an adequate supply of qualified employees. Projections show the demand for these fields will increase sharply in the future, so meeting future labor demand through increasing the skills and education of our young people, keeping our aging population in the workforce and attracting others from outside the county into our workforce are all being addressed.
However, simultaneously, we already have significant transportation, housing and infrastructure issues. In addition, being environmentally conscious, Sonoma County citizens want to change and improve infrastructure to lessen our impact on the environment and ensure sustainability for future generations. Obviously, then, we can’t increase our workforce without improving the support network.
“What we really hope for from this plan is to see more public/private partnerships around all of these issues, because they all tie together,” says Randy DeCaminada, North Coast Marketing Director for PG&E and co-chair of the Innovation Council. “You really can’t solve one without trying to solve the others.”
As Cynthia Murray, president/CEO of the North Bay Leadership Council and co-chair of the Innovation Council, expresses when asked what the alternative would have been, had the Innovation Council not been created, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.
“This way, we get focused on the best direction for the county and the cities to be headed if we’re going to suppor each other in creating the right kinds of jobs and preparing and training the future workforce,” she continues. “It gives us so many different ways that we can gain advantages. It sets strategies and provides information so people are making decisions based on data rather than guessing. We’re in a scarce-resource situation, and decisions we make today can have major impacts on the future—especially if we’re making them with bad information…or no information.”
Resource realities
One of the Council’s first tasks was to divide into subcommittees to focus on key areas, identify the main challenges within those themes and create strategies for resolving them. The first team, called “Innovative Resource Use,” is focusing on infrastructure, including water, utilities, land and job stimulation affecting the county. This also includes housing, telecommunications and transportation issues.
“Water is a resource that’s going to command a lot of attention over the coming years,” explains Scott Kirk, an attorney with Spaulding McCullough & Tansil LLP in Santa Rosa and a member of the resource use team. “The ability to produce energy in the coming years, particularly with global warming issues, is going to be particularly troublesome. We’ll also address waste and how the county will deal with the waste that we, as a society, continue to generate.
“These problems don’t have easy answers. We can try to debate, argue or analyze all of these major issues forever. But instead, what we need to do—and what the committee is intent on doing—is address these issues aggressively by proposing new, progressive policies that will be consistent with a new, burgeoning environmental industry.”
One exciting issue being looked at is the North American Climate Initiative coming out of the Sonoma County Water Agency. The plan proposes Sonoma County offer carbon-free water delivery by 2015 and would make Sonoma County one of the country’s first regions to meet such an aggressive greenhouse reduction goal.
“[The Sonoma County Water Agency] is trying to become a center of innovation for alternative energy,” says Murray. “In particular, it wants to embrace geothermal. It’s going to try to do a pilot program—be the first in the United States to provide geothermal heating and cooling for industrial and commercial parks. The SCWA will also be exploring new solar energy technologies and ways to make it more widely available and less expensive, and exploring public and private partnerships for other forms of alternative energy. If we can take advantage of the growing interest in clean and green technology, we could become early adopters and really try to embrace it, both for its ability to attract new jobs and new businesses and as a way to become more globally competitive.”
Murray’s right. Simply having an energy program this innovative could motivate new, clean industries and entrepreneurial leaders in green technology fields to consider locating in Sonoma County.
People skills
The second team, called “Innovative Workforce Development,” is focusing on preparing people for growing jobs, meeting future labor demand and overall education and workforce development issues. A major part of this means closing the achievement gap in the Latino population and raising the bar to get more students graduating from college—and to encourage more of those graduates to earn degrees in math and science.
“If you want to discuss Sonoma County’s future, all you need to do is to look at who’s sitting in our public school classrooms,” says Wong. “We have 72,000 public school students, so discussion of the economic vitality of the region, workforce preparation, civic engagement, future leadership, demographic and social changes all should be linked to how well we’re doing with our school-aged children. It’s in that context that I approach my contribution to the council.”
Some preliminary issues being looked at by this task force include closing the achievement gap in public schools, primarily between white and Hispanic students (Hispanics comprise one-third of all kindergarten through 12th grade students). Indicators such as academic test scores, high school completion rates and college preparedness rates all indicate significant disparities between the two groups. Data trends compiled by the Sonoma County Office of Education found a 78 percent high school completion rate for white students and a 62 percent high school completion rate for Hispanic students (versus a 71 percent statewide average for Hispanics). While most statistics that evaluate Sonoma County’s public elementary and high school systems show consistently better-than-average statewide scores, closing this achievement gap is nevertheless important for Sonoma County’s economic outlook.
“The workforce subcommittee agreed that closing this achievement gap is important for the economic health of Sonoma County, because of the 33 percent of our students who are Hispanic [a number that’s almost doubled in 10 years], fully two-thirds of those aren’t classified as proficient in academic English on state tests,” explains Wong.
“The reason that’s such a key point is, the two-thirds aren’t equally distributed through those grades. The majority of Hispanic students coming into our schools are in elementary schools. It’s not uncommon to walk into an elementary school in certain districts and certain communities, and 80 to 90 percent of the students are Hispanic. We need to do a better job of closing the achievement gap, starting with helping students—and their parents—acquire academic English proficiency as quickly as possible.”
Some possible solutions have already been set in motion over the past few years. The Sonoma County Office of Education has created community partnerships with a variety of organizations such as United Way, Santa Rosa City Schools, the Volunteer Center and the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce, which hired a staffer to work with employers to support parents of Hispanic students and encourage academic performance. In summer 2008, the Office of Education will operate a summer algebra program for junior high school students onsite at Agilent, Medtronic and JDS Uniphase, where students can see real world applications of algebra in business technology settings. “Aiming High,” an initiative designed to close the achievement gap by accelerating English proficiency, jointly led by the Sonoma County Association of School Administrators and the Sonoma County Office of Education, is in the fourth year of a five-year program.
“There’s a countywide initiative already underway to look at how to ensure upcoming generations of Hispanic students do as well as their white counterparts,” says Wong, “because that’s going to be key if we’re going to keep Sonoma County at the forefront of workforce preparation. When you’re dealing with students, you don’t have the luxury of a lot of time. It’s not acceptable to say, ‘Well, maybe five to 10 years from now, we’ll close this achievement gap.’ That would mean a generation of students would have gone through our public school system without the same quality of education as their English-dominant counterparts. It’s not acceptable to offer up excuses.”
Help wanted
The last team, called “Innovative Economic Climate,” is focusing on how to attract and retain high-quality jobs. Moody’s Economy.com, which was retained to provide a thorough analysis of Sonoma County’s current economy and it’s future economic outlook, identified the top three fastest-growing sectors of our local economy as health and wellness, technology-producing industries and retail trade. Given this information, Sonoma County must ensure it has an educated labor sector that can meet the tech producing area, adequate real estate and the ability for retail trade to grow, and areas for health and wellness to expand.
“The business sector is willing—and eager—to work in public and private partnerships with cities and counties, but very rarely do those opportunities come up,” says Mark Inman, president of Taylor Maid Farms in Sebastopol and member of the economic climate task force. “Going forward, to make a community attractive for business growth, you must have these partnerships. Cities often don’t have the income to achieve the goals they want to reach and, likewise, the private sector may want to do things that city and county governments need to be aware of. So we both benefit if we work together. That’s one of the issues we’ve been discussing: How can we create more opportunities for the public and private sector to work together?”
Another issue being looked at is simple awareness. Simply, do staff at county offices realize that Sonoma County is actively seeking out high-quality jobs here? Their awareness (or lack thereof) of this goal could determine how easy or difficult it will be for major employers to move into the county.
“Basically, is the shingle on the county building saying ‘Open for business,’ or does it say, ‘Back in 15 minutes’?” quips Inman. “It’s just raising the question: Are county employees—the ones who actually process the paperwork and communicate with prospective businesses—on the same page as the elected officials? Are they aware of the projections for the county’s job growth, and are they concerned about that? And finally, what ideas do they have to make it easier for people to do business here?”
What’s the plan?
Economy.com is scheduled to submit a final draft of its economic analysis report, using a model that can be continually adjusted through plugging in current trend information, in Spring 2008. Using the report as a guideline, the Innovation Council plans to have a draft of its overall strategy prepared by Fall of 2008. At that point, it will share it with the community and the public will be welcome to make comments and suggestions.
“We’re going to reach out and educate the public through workshops,” says DeCaminada. “That’s where, hopefully, the public/private partnerships will be able to move forward with some of the recommendations.”
The final plan will then be presented to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors by January 2009. After that, it’ll be up to the county, cities and other public and private agencies to implement the strategy set forth by the Council. The Innovation Council itself was only established to create the strategy, not to oversee its implementation.
“One of the key things we decided as a council was, our plan and recommendations to the board of supervisors will be actionable so they can be implemented,” says Murray. “So we’re going to try and figure out a mechanism where we can stay involved in some form—maybe not the full Council, but some smaller group—to make sure the good ideas actually happen.”
Based on the motivation, passion and ability of Innovation Council members, it appears this won’t simply be another strategy session put on a shelf and forgotten about. “One of the things about this Innovation Council that I really like is, they’re ‘do’ers,’” says DeCaminada. “The first meeting we had, they said, ‘We’re volunteering our time, and we want to see things implemented.’ That’s the one thing I see driving everybody on this council. I have a very good feeling about this group—that whatever gets recommended will get enacted.”
There are many ways for the public to get involved, both now and once the strategy is created. As a first step, you can visit the Innovation Council’s website, http://www.sonoma-county.org/edb
/innovation.htm. There you can view updates to the plan, subscribe to receive Innovation Council updates via email and get information about upcoming council meetings, which are all open to the public.
“What’s really interesting about this is, we’re one of the few counties right now that’s being proactive and reaching out 10 years to see where things are going,” says DeCaminada. “A lot of counties are reactive with what they do. That’s one of the things I really like about Sonoma County, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors and the Economic Development Board. They’re really trying to anticipate where the jobs are going to be, what’s needed and figure out how to maintain our quality of life. That’s one of the attractive things about this whole project.”
And it’s certainly an attractive thing about living in Sonoma County. There’s a certain security that comes with knowing that our community leaders aren’t sitting idly by as these major issues surface. That will ensure a brighter future for us all.
