by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
As Joe Barrow works to set goals for future City development incentives, he says he’s been only slightly hampered by a lack of information on past performance.
The Jacksonville Economic Development Commission commissioner, who runs a national youth golf program for the PGA Tour called The First Tee, is heading the City’s efforts to create performance goals for the incentive money it spends. It’s a given that the City wants to create jobs, wages and private investment with its incentives. Barrow is working with JEDC staffers to attach numbers to the City’s expected return on investment.
The numbers will forecast how many jobs and housing units the JEDC expects to bring downtown by 2010. Goals will also be set for increasing Duval County’s tax base and average wage.
Barrow expects to have the benchmarks ready for presentation at the May JEDC meeting with the final draft of the City’s new incentive policies. The targets will serve as a complement to the JEDC’s move toward becoming a more accountable agency, said Chairman M.C. “Ceree” Harden.
The initiative began more than a year ago when Mayor John Peyton challenged the commission to “get the most bang for the buck” out of City incentives. That meant focusing policies that then-executive director Kirk Wendland admitted had been too open-ended in the past.
The ongoing overhaul has produced more objective guidelines for when, where and under what circumstances the City will grant incentives. A system to measure their performance is also under construction. Barrow’s performance targets will then present a standard to measure against.
By comparing them to the actual numbers in five years, the JEDC will be able to see what’s working and what isn’t, said Harden.
Setting the goals from scratch hasn’t been easy, said Barrow. His team struggled to figure out what kind of numbers the JEDC should produce in 2010 largely because it lacked reliable numbers for current performance.
“The challenge is, this hasn’t been done before,” said Barrow. “We don’t have the historic data.”
Barrow overcame that challenge by looking at performance trends in other cities. Barrow said his team will benchmark Jacksonville’s goals against cities with similar economies and demographics.
Barrow’s background is in management; he ran several national golf merchandising companies before he joined The First Tee, which is based at the World Golf Village.