An Interview with Mike Oates, President and CEO of HVEDC
Part One
As I am a member of the Board of Directors of the HVEDC (Hudson Valley Economic Development Corporation) several people have asked me about our merger with WCA, the Westchester County Association. Basically, they wanted to know why the decision to merge was made and how it will benefit the entire region. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Oates, President and CEO of HVEDC.
Mike Oates:
The decision to merge the two organizations came about through a series of long conversations, meetings and considerable thought about how "economic development" now requires regional and even global thinking and endeavors.
Certainly, economic development efforts are always going on at the state, tri-state and national levels. However, such efforts are really driven by regionalism. At one time, well before the HVEDC was created, business cultivation was a "local" endeavor. Adjoining counties did not usually collaborate with each other, and in fact often competed as companies sent out their proposals.
In recent years, economic development organizations have moved to more of a regional focus, meaning that if a big company lands in Westchester County, it is understood that there are employees that live in Dutchess, Putnam, Orange and Rockland Counties. All the counties tend to benefit in some way.
The HVEDC and the WAC both have similar strengths, and some different areas of focus. We wanted to take the best work of the Hudson Valley Economic Development Corporation, which has had a strong real estate development history and marry it with the programs and the initiatives that the WCA has been working on, specifically in health care and workforce development
When we’re talking to companies throughout the Hudson Valley, one of the first things we hear is that they’re struggling with recruiting or retaining skilled workers. We knew that workforce development was a critical issue that we needed to tackle.
The WCA had just had completed a ten-million-dollar workforce development plan, which serves to get long term unemployed folks retrained and into the healthcare sector. Through their Jobs Waiting program, they trained nearly five hundred people and got over four hundred people jobs over the last couple of years.
Their work has been critical in helping us solve some of the workforce development issues in our healthcare sectors.
We also wanted to start taking that expertise and bringing it to our food and beverage industries, agriculture, tourism, hospitality, and our manufacturing sector. Adults with disabilities who are able to work are a top priority of both organizations and together we can do more to help that segment of the population to find meaningful employment.
It became clear that the time had come to merge with the WCA so that we could build off their successes and they ours.
I asked Mike: With this merger, will HVEDC keep "the local touch?" I told him about friends who own a farm in Walden/Montgomery area. The farm is over a hundred years old and the same family is still running it, but maybe not for long. The proposed Amazon project that would be built adjacent to the farm will flood at least a third of it for good. Will you still be a watchdog in situations like this and how do you go about keeping that local touch, while working on some of these broader initiatives?
Mike replied:
"Well, I think those are great questions. As for the first, yes, we will be as focused as ever on our Hudson Valley communities. We often use the words "smart growth". What do I mean by that? We want to bring economic development opportunities, jobs, investment, and the right types of projects to the communities that want and can support them.
With having very diverse real estate offerings throughout the Hudson Valley, our mission must be to find the right real estate for a developer or corporation. The location needs to appropriate so that the project does not negatively affect our farming or other vital industries. The bottom line is that we need to listen to our local community leaders and planning boards to maintain that balance of bringing in new companies and protecting those here.
If a community does not support a project, it makes more sense to understand that right from the get go, rather than waste a lot of time and effort on trying to bring in a project at a location that doesn’t make sense. Therefore, we always work very closely with the real estate community and with municipalities so that we can be a bridge between them.
See Part 2 of my interview with Mike next week!