September 7, 2011 Building the Coast: How did you deal with bureaucracy when you walked in as the Mayor, without stepping on too many toes? Diane Watts: I come from the business sector, so dealing with any kind of bureaucracy drives me crazy especially if it makes no sense. We streamlined a lot of things in terms of our development process. If there was a large project, we assembled teams so your developer doesn’t have to go from one department to the other to the other to the other and everybody’s saying different things. And on the website, the developer can punch in his application and there’s a running diary of where things are at, when the next meeting is, when the public hearing comes up, all of those things. We also just recently launched our Red Tape Reduction Committee looking at time-consuming bureaucracy from an economic development perspective in terms of what is that costing us and can we equate that to jobs. How did you go about implementing over time a change in mentality? When I went in there in 2005, the environment that I wanted to create was that people can think outside of the box, they can be innovative and there’s not going to be a backlash. I think that it’s inherent in everybody to want to do a good job. And if you try an idea and it doesn’t work, look at something else. Failure isn’t a bad word. It’s really important to make sure that the environment at City Hall is creative and nurturing. At the end of the day, we’re all a team. And Mayors and Councils can have the best plan ever, but if they can’t implement it, then there’s no point to it.
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How would you define economic development? It’s laying out the vision, where we’re going, and having not only the buy-in from myself and Council, because we’re the ones developing it, but also engaging the employees at City Hall as well as the community. Everybody knows where we’re going; everybody gets the vision and it’s all about implementation. When investors see a city take steps to move in a specific direction, that gives them the stability to say, okay, even in this rocky climate, I can put money here. They like to know what the vision is and that everybody’s bought into it, and they like that we’re really creating an environment that welcomes investment and jobs. The Mayor plays a really key part in this because it’s selling the city and that’s my job. It’s to get out there and talk about the new, exciting things that we’re doing and what we can accomplish and really engage the community. I have an Economic Development Department and that’s exactly what we do. It’s really important that investors meet the Mayor. If somebody’s looking at investing $100 million dollars, they want to see the Mayor. Have you identified and targeted certain businesses in particular? How did you go about making these liaisons with large investors and so on? First and foremost, it was around creating the environment, laying out the vision, talking about it and really saying, “Look, here’s what we’re about”. An even bigger piece is the businesses that have already made the decision to be here.Next Page
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