by Karen Brune Mathis
Managing Editor
Jacksonville Civic Council Chair Peter Rummell said Tuesday the 50-member group of business and community leaders has its eye on another sector of economic influence: the medical industry.
“There is a theory that there is enormous potential that is untapped,” Rummell said.
“If you look at everything going on in the city from the big hospitals to Mayo to the University of Florida residency program to Shands to other research being done, there are a lot of pieces. Can those pieces be more than pieces?”
Rummell chairs the civic council, which was formed over the past year. It replaces the Jacksonville Non-Group Inc., which was formed in 2000.
“We simply want to be able to help,” Rummell said in a March interview with the Daily Record. “I think we have intellectual and financial and political resources collectively as a group that if we can identify something that needs to be done, we can help. If there’s a way we can combine forces to make something smarter or bigger or faster or sleeker, we would be crazy not to do it.”
Today, Rummell is scheduled as the keynote speaker at the Jacksonville Community Council Inc. lunch to kick off its new study, “Recession Recovery and Beyond.”
The study, on a timetable to be completed and released next spring, is intended to analyze and determine how Northeast Florida can “quickly create jobs and best position the region for long-term economic growth,” according to JCCI.
Rummell, former chair of The St. Joe Co. and a former chair of the influential Florida Council of 100 statewide business advisory organization, said Tuesday he would share with JCCI his views of statewide issues. He said he was asked for a statewide perspective of the economy and what it means locally.
“It’s a grim story that’s not going to get better faster,” said Rummell. “What applies to the state applies to the region, so it’s politics, it’s macroeconomics, it’s federal economics, it’s who’s in charge.”
Rummell said he was not an authority on the Federal Reserve or Fed Chair Ben Bernanke or the state budget, “so I am not going to spend a lot of time on that other than to remind everybody that this is the theater we are playing in.”
Rummell also plans to share the Jacksonville Civic Council’s “view of what worries us and what we think are the things we are going to think about and talk about and what we think are relevant.”
The council, whose membership includes the CEOs of major area businesses along with the leaders of other groups and industries, already has organized to focus on Downtown and has talked about the City budget, in general.
With Downtown, Rummell said, “There are physical planning issues and there are governance issues and you have to deal with both. What do you do and, once you decide, how do you get it done?”
He said any Downtown plan without an ability to implement it politically is dead on arrival.
As for the City budget, “The mayor’s projections going forward with deficits are pretty draconian. You can’t just keep kicking a can down the road.”
Rummell said the Jacksonville Civic Council is considering whether “there is a role that we can play in helping the new mayor and the City Council to figure that out.”
He said the group continues to worry about education and also has a group looking at issues of race and is trying to decide how to proceed.
“Those are the kinds of things we are worried about,” he said.
Rummell said he wasn’t going to present charts and graphs to JCCI and he doesn’t have a “four-point solution” to solve any problems.
“I prefer to deal in themes rather than statistics and I am trying to set a table of questions and issues rather than provide answers,” he said.
“One of the things these things often do is start going down a dirt road somewhere and lose perspective. With any of these big complicated efforts, it’s important to keep your eye on the goal.”
As for the medical industry, Rummell said the Jacksonville Civic Council is trying to frame the issue of growth in the medical sector
“If you divided the city into a pie chart that defined medical and accounting and real estate and transportation and the other pieces, it would be the biggest piece of the pie in the economy.”
The state reports at least 51,000 jobs in health care in the five-county area, with a projected annual growth of almost 3 percent, compared to a growth rate of 1.7 percent a year for jobs in general.
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