Why Should Delaware Care?
The last report issued by the Delaware Business Roundtable directed a seismic shift in the state’s economic development efforts and now it takes aim at additional parts of the state’s economy. The new report also comes out with the implicit strategy of lobbying candidates who are running for governor in this year’s election.
A group of some of Delaware’s most influential business executives released a new strategic plan Tuesday that outlines how they will lobby Delaware’s elected officials, including its next governor, to address troubling workforce trends.
The Delaware Business Roundtable, an advocacy group that contains the state’s leading chief executives at for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations, released the “Delaware Investment Agenda,” which in many ways serves as a sequel to its 2016 “Growth Agenda.”
That report directly convinced Gov. John Carney to disband the Delaware Economic Development Office and replace it with the Delaware Prosperity Partnership (DPP), a public-private partnership between the state and private companies with shared investments in the attraction and retention of employers. Since 2018, the DPP has supported 56 projects that brought more than $1.5 billion in capital investment and either created or retained nearly 8,000 jobs.
While the new report does not call for such a significant shift in how government does business, it still calls for shaking up the status quo for how Delaware fosters entrepreneurism, trains workers and plans for the future.
Robert Perkins, the executive director of the Roundtable and a former chief of staff to the late Gov. Pete du Pont, said the reports were important to inform elected leaders, but also to help marshal private sector leaders toward a common objective. The success of DPP is evidence that the public-private approach works, he said.
With a pandemic changing the economic environment and a new governor coming to power next year, the Roundtable saw an opportunity to lay out a new vision, hiring the same Texas-based consulting firm, TIP Strategies, that completed the “Growth Agenda” to work on a new report.
“I would argue that these are the things that everyone talks about, but nobody collaboratively works together to address,” Perkins said. “It’s not that Delaware isn’t doing anything. It’s that there are so many things going in so many different directions. Someone needs to bring that together so that you get the impact of a critical mass.”
The new report focuses on three target objectives: long-term competitiveness, talent and workforce, and innovation and entrepreneurship.
Long-term Competitiveness
One of the most significant proposals in the Investment Agenda is the creation of a Delaware Futures Council, a nonpartisan body that would research, analyze, and plan efforts to address the long-term economic competitiveness of the state. Modeled after similar entities in other states, such as the Vermont Futures Project, the council is proposed to have a small paid staff to help with the work and promote it to leaders and the public.
Perkins said he viewed the Futures Council as a key objective that would help the state continue to navigate changing economic conditions in a more timely way.
The Roundtable also argued that Delaware needed to do more to prepare suitable sites for development and cut red tape in the permitting process that continues to convince some projects to avoid the First State.
Placemaking, or the reimagining of public spaces in order to attract new attention and residents, should be a focus of state and local officials, they said.
Talent and Workforce
Delaware already struggles to find enough workers to fill thousands of open positions statewide, and it also suffers from the 10th worst labor participation rate in the country, where nearly four in 10 residents aren’t working, according to the report. That is due in large part to the fact that a booming number of retirees is driving up Delaware’s population but not providing workers, and today Delaware has the fourth largest share of seniors per household nationwide.
That reality means that Delaware has to attract new workers, retrain existing ones and do a better job of retaining young people, according to the Roundtable.
“When some of the demographics are not trending in the right direction, that problem is going to exacerbate,” Perkins said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
The Roundtable proposes that the Delaware Workforce Development Board be moved from the Delaware Department of Labor and have it report directly to the governor’s office for a more responsive duty.
It also argued for increased investment in early childhood education programs, improved reentry programs for the recently incarcerated, and building public-private partnerships on training programs for in-demand jobs. A jobs board and marketing campaign for prospective workers from out-of-state should be established, possibly under the DPP, they added.
The Roundtable also supported state support of affordable housing, including leveraging state-owned land, setting up a fund for low-income housing development, and encouraging higher-density developments.
Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Delaware has a burgeoning life sciences sector that brings considerable capital investment and well-paying jobs, but the state is being out-competed by neighbors that are putting additional resources in the sector.
The Investment Agenda proposed that Delaware consider creating early stage investment funds, such as those in Maryland and New Jersey, where state taxpayers would actually make an equity investment in an emerging company. It also proposed evaluating a matching state grant for federal grant funds obtained for technology coming out of research at the University of Delaware and Delaware State University.
The state should also consider the role of the Division of Small Business and how its reach could be increased, including potentially breaking up its duties or pulling it out of state government altogether like the DPP, the report concluded.
The guideposts
At a Tuesday presentation at the Hotel du Pont, Brian DiSabatino, chair of the Roundtable and CEO of Wilmington-based development firm EDiS, told an assembly of about 75 state business leaders like JPMorgan Chase Delaware Market Leader Tom Horne, M&T Bank Market President Mark Hutton, CSC CEO Rod Ward, Wilmington University President LaVerne Harmon, WRK Group CEO Logan Herring, and more, that their leadership would be needed to move the plan forward.
“The intention of the Agenda is to be the guideposts, the inspiration, the guard rails, the idea generators. We’ve culled it down to the areas where we believe if we make investment, they could not only turn us away from that storm, but propel us into an entirely new and thriving direction,” he said.
