Commissioner Murman quoted in this Tampa Bay Business Journal article on EDC:
Jun 5, 2014, 5:51pm EDT
County: EDC communication issue is ‘fixable’
Deputy Editor- Tampa Bay Business Journal
Note to Tampa Bay executives and elected officials: When Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corp. CEO Rick Homans has a lot of appointments to make at once, he starts texting at 6:22 a.m.
Homans reached out to all seven members of the Hillsborough Board of County Commissioners to set up individual meetings after the EDC and he personally were harshly criticized during Wednesday’s commissioner’s meeting.
“I got the message loud and clear from the commissioners that I need to do a much better job of communicating with them as a board and individually,” he said from the EDC’s new offices in Bank of America Plaza in downtown Tampa.
“First of all, all of this is fixable,” said County Commissioner Al Higginbotham after a Thursday lunch meeting in Tampa. “Rick is doing a good job and getting big wins.”
Higginbotham reiterated that he felt like Homans and the EDC needed to do a better job of communicating with the commissioners so they understand where the EDC is spending its time and resources.
County Commissioner Sandy Murman agreed that the situation is not unresolvable. “It can be fixed,” she said
“Somewhere along the way [Homan’s] attention has been diverted,” she told the Tampa Bay Business Journal. “The communication has not been there. We are just not getting it.”
Murman echoed Higginbotham’s concerns about cross-county partnerships that would divert the EDC’s attention from growing and recruiting companies and creating new jobs.
“It seems like, in the past six months, we haven’t heard about any new wins. We’ve been hearing about regionalism,” she said.
She likened the EDC’s actions to those of a child who stops bringing home his report card. “You know when they are hiding the report card, there’s something wrong,” she said.
