 I'm going to stand and get us started just and I'm going to not use the microphone right this second because I think you can hear me it is Tuesday and we have pre counts on council yet to go so and everybody's got lunchtime apartments happy holidays today is the beginning of Hanukkah you celebrate that happy Hanukkah and Christmas is hard on the heels we're delighted to have you all here this is going to be a very interesting presentation a very worthwhile presentation a lot of work has gone into this J. J. and Robert David the whole crew have worked a year better I guess on this process I think you will find it very revealing Fort Worth is a major city now 16th largest and assumed to be 14th by the 2020 census if not bigger and it is a city that's truly coming of age and coming into its own and as we do that we have to look at how do we balance our tax base how do we balance businesses and where are we going with it both the good and the bad and the really pretty and the not so pretty and this will give you a chance it will give you some items to think about it will give you some great chance to pursue this when the chambers piece comes out next month or yeah in January it will give us a nice chance to mesh that all together so thank you for being here I'm going to hand it over to Robert Stearns who's going to kick it off for you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you mayor members of council city manager. As the mayor said it is a long time coming to bring this plan to you it was really December of last year when we were interviewing consultants to go through this process but but in all honesty we really started talking about this believe back in April if you all recall we had a review of our incentive policies last year. And we really began to look at how can we be more effective in some of the things that we're doing and that was a great exercise I think we got a lot of good input and a lot of good feedback from our stakeholders that participated in that. But what we what we found was that we were we were really developing some policies without a lot of data to back up some of the changes that we were that we were really talking about implementing and I really credit David and a presentation that he gave early on in his tenure when he really began to talk about the challenges that Fort Worth is facing. So issues with issues with our job growth and the commercial versus residential tax base and really charged us with looking at some opportunities to change that. So I will say that this process has been very comprehensive as I said started a year ago. We've had industry roundtables. We've had workshops community town halls community surveys that have gone out and it's really been an ongoing collaborative effort. And so before we really get into the meat of the presentation it would be remiss of me not to recognize the economic development team that really did a lot of hard work on that. So I'd like to ask them to stand another in the crowd. Michael Hennig, Michael McClinton, Natalie Moore, Carol Griffin, Gwen, I think I saw you back there somewhere, Osana. Who else am I missing? Got everybody? Isabel in the back? Yes. And Brenna Hicks-Sortz and my assistant director who really had the unenviable job of kind of herding all the cats in this process and making sure that she kept us all on base. So without that being said I will turn it over to John Karris with tip strategies to walk us through the presentation. I will say this is a very meaty comprehensive presentation. The actual plan is over 500 pages, 500 plus pages. There are around 200 or so implementation strategies. Congrats, those lights. Outlining the plan. So what we're going to talk about today is really we're going to speak in broad spurts about what the plan talks about. Some of the specific challenges that we are facing and how our community partners are aligned to help us in that process because this truly is a community plan. And you'll hear that by the speakers that will be coming up as well as part of this presentation to talk through their input, some of the findings and how that may impact them. So without further ado I'll turn it over to John Karris and we will get into the presentation. All right, fantastic. Thank you, Robert. Good morning, Mayor and Council and glad to be here. This is a big day for me personally, for our firm and I think for the city as well looking toward the future. And I just want to acknowledge a couple of folks before we get started here. My partner in crime, John Roberts, our principal with TIP Strategies was here with me on many of the trips and throughout the process. And I think he may be coming in later this morning. He had a conflict. Also the team that we assembled, I do remember last a year ago, we were actually over a year ago we learned that the city of Fort Worth was going to be coming out with an RFP for a strategic plan for economic development. The first comprehensive economic development plan. So as a consulting firm that specializes in exactly that type of work, we were naturally excited that a city of this size and this potential was going to be thinking holistically about where it could take its future growth. And we assembled the best team that we could find and we competed for this project, just like you're competing for business investments and expansion projects. So we brought Frigganese Associates, urban planning firm out of Portland, Oregon, and they spent a lot of time with us looking at specific areas and also citywide the jobs to housing challenges and future projections of growth. We also brought in JLL, Jones Lang LaSalle, to really take a look at the real estate side of things since that drives so much of economic growth in this market but in any community. Nothing happens until something happens on the ground. And then we also brought in Isaac Barkas, one of the leading experts on entrepreneurship and technology commercialization. So that's kind of an overview of our team. Wanted to spend most of our time talking about the strategic plan itself, but first it's worth going through a little bit of how we got here. Some of the key findings what we learned during the discovery phase and then also talking about some of the implementation details and have some discussion and time for Q&A. So again our firm, TIP Strategies, we're based in Austin. We've worked with over 200 communities across 38 states and it's interesting talking with Robert and Brenda last night. I've served as the project manager for about a dozen and a half consulting projects for communities in Texas and other dozen and a half projects outside of the state of Texas. And this is hands down the most comprehensive strategic plan that I've ever worked on and I would venture to say that the same is true for our company. This is a really big deal and I think you should appreciate how much work has gone into this. Not just from our team but from Robert and Brenda and their team with the city. And everyone here that's in the room that will kind of highlight the, and you'll be hearing from many of those leaders in the community from your business and community leadership. So there's kind of three categories of information that ultimately lead to what are the strategies that Fort Worth needs to embrace to grow its economy. The first is what you tell us and we spent a lot of time listening to you, to the leaders in this community. We had a dozen round table discussions with more than 300 people. We met with every one of the council members individually. We met with major employers and stakeholders. There was an online survey that was received nearly 1300 responses. So we spent a lot of time getting qualitative information on what are the challenges, what are the opportunities. We also spent a lot of energy looking at the data and the story that it tells, whether it's good or bad or ugly, as Mayor mentioned. And we also brought our experience from working in other communities and what some things that Fort Worth can do where you're positioned uniquely. And again, just to acknowledge the work of the steering committee and the leadership team. We had several meetings and some tough discussions on what does this city need to do differently? What is it doing well already? What can be expanded? These are the group of leaders that will ultimately be held accountable for the success of this plan. It's not just the city's economic development department. They're at the center of this, but the chamber and many other organizations really play an important role. So this is the body of work. I think Robert, you're right, about nearly 500 pages in totality. And it roughly follows the three phases of the project. The first phase is the discovery phase. So that's taking all that qualitative and quantitative information and looking at how, excuse me here, how does Fort Worth compete within this metro area, but also nationally? And then looking more specifically at the industries and the workforce that you have. We spent a lot of time analyzing the industries and the opportunities that you have there. There may be a lag here, so every time I press it, it'll go black here again. Okay. I think we're good. And then all of that, it doesn't mean anything unless it feeds into a strategic plan. So that's really volume three. And kind of across phase one and phase two, we also compiled a technical analysis looking at your site selection process and understanding some of the marketing materials and with the city and the chamber and other organizations. And this is really the deliverables that we put together. So I'm going to go through some of the key findings that we learned in the discovery and the opportunity phase. Rather than read through this list, we've broken it down into basically two groups. One is the things that gave us concern. And the other one is the things that we were most excited about from the analysis. So just to start off, what worried us when thinking about the future economic potential of this city? So the first data point here is looking at the residential growth of single family housing. So Fort Worth and all the other large cities in the metro area, if you look at Dallas, they actually lost a few hundred single family units from 2010 up until now. They gained over 20,000 multifamily units on a net basis. So if you look at this map, the story that it tells is you've got this large metro area. Dallas is the urban center of that area and it's kind of surrounded by a swath of high growth suburbs from McKinney to Frisco to Denton. All the way to Fort Worth, it looks like you're the western most fastest growing suburb of Dallas on this map, which is I think there's some competitive people in this room that might take offense to that and so do we. So that's going to the extreme, the ugliest potential, but it has implications for your tax base. There are the tiny little minus 572, again, that's single family units. So they're gaining multifamily urban residential. Fort Worth gained 7,000 multifamily units during that period, but that was outpaced by single family growth. So the implications for the tax base, if you had to boil down, what does economic development mean? One good answer to that is if you can increase the commercial and industrial tax base to take the pressure off of your residents to be able to provide the same level or even better level of service, that's a good definition of what economic development means. So that was something that gave us concern and this has to be one of your key metrics growing the commercial and industrial tax base, but also job growth and not just population growth. Another area that gave us concern was if you look at the, if you split the metro area into the two metropolitan divisions, so the Dallas division has Dallas County, Collin, Denton counties to the east, and then Tarrant County is the center of the Fort Worth metropolitan division with cities or counties on the south and west. And if you look at job growth over the last several years in different sectors and you look at professional services, which is a lot of the highest paying jobs in technology companies, accounting, marketing, architecture, engineering, the Dallas side of the metro has gained over 50,000 jobs in that timeframe. There's been essentially no growth in Fort Worth and same story with corporate headquarters, financial services. So that if you had to pick one set of industries or one category of job growth to really target, that's one that you want to keep your eye on and it has implications in the real estate market. So this is from JLL, the metro area is broken down into a bunch of different sub-markets. So we looked at office space and as of the first quarter of this year, so there was six and a half million square feet of office space under construction in just one sub-market, the far north Dallas sub-market. So that includes part of the city of Dallas, the north end near the Galleria, up through the Dallas north tollway, Addison Plano, up to Frisco. More new office space being built in that small corridor than the entire rest of the metro area combined, which is again, it's responding to the growth of professional jobs, but it also impacts where future job growth will occur because companies that are growing and expanding, they need space, so they will go where there is high quality space. Another area, and this one requires a little bit of explanation, there was an online quiz called Sporkel, kind of brain teasers, that asked people, okay, you have 12 minutes, name the 100 most populous cities in the United States, go. So about half a million people filled out this survey, so they had to guess, all right, from one is New York and so on and what are the biggest cities all the way down to the 100 largest cities. And the title of the article that this came out of actually referenced San Jose and said, San Jose, California is the most forgettable big city in the country. They're the 10th largest city by population, but people thought they were about the 43rd, 44th largest city in the country. They're under the shadow of San Francisco, even though they're the center of Silicon Valley, and they're the largest city in their region. So does that sound familiar, Fort Worth being under the shadow of another city? So you look, same story here in Fort Worth being the 16th largest city in the country, actually on track if you take population growth trends to be the 12th largest city in just a couple of years, passing San Francisco and Columbus and some others, but people thought you were the 45th largest city in the country. And Dallas is actually the 9th largest population, but people thought it's the 4th biggest city in the country. Of course, the metro area is the 4th largest metro after New York, LA, Chicago. So this is something, the perception, sometimes it's for people in this market, it's such an intense competition between cities within the metro area and it's such an opportunity rich environment for business growth and expansion that it's easy to kind of get bogged down in what's going on in North Texas and not look outside and what's going on around the country and nationally, the city's potential for greater recognition outside of this area and outside of the state is huge. There's a lot of room to make up there in that gap of perception. One last thing that obviously gave us some concern in the middle of the planning process, we come to find out that one of your local homegrown successful companies was moving the majority of their jobs to the greater Houston area and vacating a bunch of downtown real estate. So XTO, that's something that was on our radar in June and July. Another company, the local homegrown company that was being acquired by a larger corporation, VF, out of Greensboro, North Carolina, that's something that you could say, well, that's an opportunity, maybe VF could have a bigger presence in Fort Worth, but still that's something to be concerned with. Anytime you have a local company that's acquired, it's definitely at risk of downsizing or relocating. So enough about the challenges. There's some incredible opportunities that we were really excited about right from the beginning and throughout the process. So this is, I encourage you anytime you have a few free moments to look at this. This is the online map called Geography of Jobs. It's an animated look at job growth and job loss across every metro in the country. And you have to really start with this as your top strength, that this is the leading market for job growth in the country. No other metro in the U.S. is creating as many jobs as the Dallas-Fort Worth metro. So that's an incredibly strong starting point. And then you zoom down to the city of Fort Worth and you among big cities in the U.S. have actually been the largest, fastest growing population over the last decade and a half. And this is something that I think a lot of folks don't quite fully appreciate. And so where is that growth coming from? This is, again, this is the Fort Worth metropolitan division looking at migration patterns. And you've been gaining more than 3,000 people since 2010 from Chicago. Same for New York, Los Angeles, 2,000 from Atlanta. And what's not on this map, the Fort Worth side of the metro has actually gained 3,000 people from the Dallas side of the metro from a population standpoint. So this is incredibly promising that you're gaining people talent from all over the country. Okay, so now let's take a look at what's some of the things that are happening on the ground. One of the reasons for a lot of the growth in not just Fort Worth but the metro area is the long-term vision that back in early 1990s, this was just a wheat field and there wasn't much going on. Now, Alliance is one of the leading global business hubs and it's driven lots of growth in transportation, logistics, data centers now, a lot of other industries. So this is an incredible asset that you have that few cities can really claim to have such a dynamic suburban growth center. And then, of course, downtown. If you had come here 10 years ago, I did. My first experience consulting was with the central cluster of urban villages, South Main and Marine and Six Point. Downtown was nowhere near as dynamic then as it is today. A lot of your future growth is going to hinge on what happens not just downtown but really the entire kind of inside of the loop urban core from the near south side, Panther Island, Cultural District, Southeast Fort Worth, a lot of the other portions of the urban part of the city. So we looked at where population growth has happened. So we talked about you were the fastest growing big city in the country starting in the year 2000. It was interesting during that decade from 2000 to 2010, you didn't have any real population growth in the urban core. The downtown, unlike some other cities, Chicago, Dallas, were experiencing nearly 10% annual population growth rates in their central business district. So you've been kind of late to the game in this back to the city movement as Richard Florida calls it. But now fast forward and there's been a market change. Since 2010, your urban core has actually gained residents at a faster pace than the surrounding metro area. And this will have some discussion on this later, but it's actually the secret ingredient to a successful dynamic downtown business district. Cities like Austin and Denver and Seattle, they didn't start off by saying let's recruit a bunch of tech companies downtown. They said we want to have a population residential base, a housing strategy first. And once they were successful with that, then you have commercial office development, then you have technology companies coming into the downtown because of that environment. So you've had a lot of success in recent years with that. And I think it's only going to accelerate with what's happening not just downtown but in the neighborhoods immediately adjacent. Definitely. Yeah, Sundance Square has been an incredible engine of growth. And within the last few years, that's been a big driver of residential but also commercial. So that's something that citywide that's what's happening in Sundance Square and the surrounding neighborhoods is absolutely important. So another thing that was really exciting is you've got a lot of industries in this city and in this region that are leading companies nationally. So Uber, this is the dream of the 1950s of the self-driving car. So this is actually, they're starting to develop this and test this with not just on their own but with some local companies. Bell Helicopter is a partner in this. Hillwood from a real estate standpoint. And cities from Dallas to Fort Worth to Frisco are piloting an idea of what it would be like to have transportation in the air above taking, not having to deal with the freeway traffic. So this is something that sounds pie in the sky but it's actually innovations that are happening and we think Fort Worth can be at the center of a lot of this. Another area that is incredibly exciting is what is going on with the largest concentration of healthcare jobs in the entire metro area. And the new, we spend a lot of time with Dr. Flynn and your new College of Medicine. And of course with the near south side, the urban vitality that you have there. The idea of an innovation district centered on medical and healthcare and life sciences. And the Bass family has been evaluating this on a national basis, looking at innovation districts in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma City and other places. You have all the ingredients in the near south side to create a real dynamic district that's focused on innovation and business growth that can have transformative city-wide and regional impacts. So we looked at your industries as well. So on the left side there are, that's basically the past and present economy of Fort Worth. The industries that really have driven your growth up until now. And on the right side, if I encourage you to look at the Volume 2 report, there's a lot of information on the emerging opportunities. The sectors and focus areas that are, this is really your target list of business recruitment and business development opportunities over the next several years. I won't go into detail on these because I know we've got some speakers that we want to have come up and talk about their role. But really quickly, the vision, so the strategic plan you've got is kind of a pyramid at the top. You've got the vision and the goals. Then you've got the strategies and at the bottom are the specific action oriented details. So a vision, it's not something that's short term or tactical or it can't be just validating what you're already doing. It has to be pointing somewhere. So a successful vision is something that you can rally around. It's a framework for your goals. It has to be concise and committed. If John Roberts was here, he would say, what does the vision commit you to actually do? What resources do you have to commit to implement to get toward this vision? And it's a touchstone. So you come back to this vision of a city that is competing for high growth companies, for creative businesses, for talented individuals nationally. So this is something you come back to when you have to make decisions about where to allocate resources. The framework of the plan, so we have three goals. There are the three C's, competitiveness, creativity, and community vitality. And somewhat separate from those, the goals are really what needs to be done in Fort Worth to have a successful economy. And separate from that are the resources that need to be applied to help support those goals. So the very first one, competitiveness. Economic development is a competitive sport. I think we'll have some discussion on this in a minute, but I wanted to briefly introduce the specific initiatives within competitiveness. Brandon Image, we're not talking about a generic marketing branding campaign. We've actually focused this and embedded the real estate community, developers, brokers, very much in using that as a vehicle for elevating Fort Worth's image among those who make things happen on the ground. That's incredibly important. Number two, the recruitment and targeting of specific industries, specific companies. So that's those emerging opportunities. Obviously, you have to take care of your homegrown companies and help them stay here and expand here. So that's number three. And then number four, you've got some great partners already, whether it's Tarrant County Workforce Solutions, Tarrant County College, your industry partnerships, the DFW Aerospace Consortium. That's something that you've got already that's going well that can be expanded on. So with that, I'll bring up our first speaker. So I guess they're in order from top to bottom. So, Brandon, I'll let you have the floor here. Good morning, Mayor and Council. I'm Brandon Gingelbach with the Fort Worth Chamber. Fired up to be here. First thing, we have to give a shout out to Robert and Brenda. This is a huge deal. I can't tell you as a partner in economic development how valuable they've been and how valuable this study is. You can see the data. The data is the first step for making any type of decisions in terms of where we need to go and how we need to get there. So thank you so much for your leadership. This is a huge deal to be able to get this information and figure out where we need to go. A couple of things from my standpoint on the economic development side that I wanted to communicate with you all. The first thing, the overarching theme that I'm seeing is that you all as council and leaders of this community and those before you have done a tremendous job. The speakers that you'll hear from have done a tremendous job in growing this community. And as a result of all the growth that you've seen and heard, a majority of work that we do is what I call reactive. We are facilitating growth because we are a popular area and people want to be here. The challenge is when you start to see this data and you see that we're reacting, we're missing opportunities to be strategic. We're missing opportunities to be proactive to determine the right type of growth and the right types of talent and individuals that need to be in our community. So that is, to me, the biggest takeaway from this strategic plan is that this is a point to take a step back and say, okay, we need to align and reallocate resources and structure to be able to be more proactive from an economic development standpoint. And this is what the data and information shows you. Two key points when it comes to being proactive. Number one is the marketing piece. And the speakers after me, both Mike and Johnny, will allude to some of the specifics of marketing. You've heard about this number of people thinking we're the 44th largest. Everyone in their grandma has friends and family that come here and they come here and they're blown away with how amazing it is. Robert and I hosted site selection consultants last week, stayed at the Omni, went to the Bird Cafe, got some popsicles, took them to the Cowboys game, loved it. Had no awareness of Fort Worth until they came here. So from the chamber side and the marketing side, we're looking at increasing our budget 60% from a little under $5 million to $8 million. The majority of those dollars are going to go towards marketing. So people can know and understand what Fort Worth is, what our brand is, who we're about so that we can track the right types of individuals and the right types of companies. The second thing is we need to continue to do that while facilitating the growth. I mean, we're a popular place, growth is going to come. So we can't be all strategic without making sure that we're taking care of the people that are knocking on our door each and every day. It's sort of the blocking and tackling piece. So moving forward on the competitiveness, it's not just the strategic piece, but it's the blocking and tackling and making sure that when we have the Amazons of the World come knocking on our door, we're ready to go to service them better than anyone else while at the same time we're also over in China or over in Europe working on some opportunities for Fort Worth as well. Last point, traditionally, economic development is about jobs and investment. And with this strategy, we're completely changing the way we measure success. We're talking about some of these measurables, these measurables about commercial tax base versus residential tax base. It's not just jobs and investment. Traditionally, we've been reactive facilitating growth. And if we're honest, it's growth in the southwest and the north of the community. And economic development moving forward has to be something that you see as a shared responsibility among all of us. So as we look at being proactive and moving forward, it's not just the growth in these specific areas. It's working with our partners in a new and exciting way at the Black Metropolitan Chamber, with the Hispanic Business Chamber, and focusing on opportunities on the east side of town and the southeast of town, all over Fort Worth so that we can proactively market economic development moving forward. And Fort Worth is about raising the tide and economic prosperity for everyone, not just about jobs and investment in certain areas. So you'll see in our strategies, when you see in the details of what we're doing, it's about providing this opportunity. That in turn makes Fort Worth a more attractive, more livable place, and will bring in even more people that are interested in the area. So I'll hand it over to Mike. We'll talk more about the marketing piece. Excuse me. Here you go. Good morning. Surprise, surprise, Robert, but I'm going totally off script. Robert gave me three minutes, and as those of you on the council know, I've never done anything at the podium in three minutes. But I will keep it to three, but I'm not going to talk about what you think I'm going to talk about. I woke up this morning and I thought, you know, how am I going to tailor my remarks to the bullet points on my slide? And I decided to call an audible. I put on my purple tie, and I thought what I would do is use an analogy of one of the great Fort Worth institutions to talk about competitiveness. Because I think it's a great example that we can take a lot away from, and it applies very much to the conclusions that we've drawn in the study. And I do want to say that the TIPS group did an unbelievable job. If you've read the entire report, and I've read lots of it, not all of it, it's a PhD in economic development. There are so many great ideas, but I think what we have to do as we go forward is we've got to realize what our strengths are and we've got to focus. And to the TCU analogy, if you look at what the universe I've been involved on the Neely School Board and now the Board of Trustees for the last 20 years, we decided, made conscious decisions over a decade ago, that we had strengths in certain areas that were the most important opportunities that we could utilize to grow our brand. And we focused on athletics, as we all know. We focused on the business school, and we recruited in talented faculty in supply chain and entrepreneurship, and those programs are now considered some of the top in the country. We now have turned our focus to the medical school, taking advantage of the economic strength of healthcare and the medical community in Fort Worth and building on the infrastructure that we have here, which I thought was a very shrewd move, but we haven't tried to be all things to all people. We have decided that it is a focused strategy that will allow us to raise the entire brand of the university. The other thing that we've got to think about as it relates to this plan is resources. If you read the plan once again, it's an amazing set of ideas and strategies, but the first thing I looked at when I read it was, how do you staff it? How do you pay for it? We're not going to be able to do it overnight, so we're going to have to really think about how we phase it. We're going to have to build a team to execute the plan, and we're going to have to raise a lot of money to execute the plan, both from the private sector and the public sector. I think TCU has been a great model in that regard as well. They've raised over $400 million in less than a decade to accomplish all of the things that they've done. Branding, we've got to overcome some of these misconceptions about our city, about the scale of our city, about the scope of our city, and we're going to have to raise our brand, and that's a lot of ways. You've got to get on airplanes, you've got to go see people, you've got to advertise, you've got to promote, you've got to use the people in our community who have networks to tell that story because you can cover a lot more territory by using the resources that we have today and networking out, and there are a number of ways to do that, some of which are in the plan, some of which we've tried to do over the years at Hillwood, which I'll be happy to work with Robert and the team on as we go forward. And last but not least, customer service. If we want to raise our game, if we want to elevate our status in the national economic development arena, we've got to walk the walk. I often tell the mayor, making some of the deals that we make is not always about just giving incentives, it's about bear hugging the customer, and whether it's a local company that's been here for 50 years or whether it's a new company that we're trying to recruit from California and New York, we have got to give them a consistent, responsive, open-armed welcome when they come here, and that's everything from good old-fashioned salesmanship to how their plans get processed at City Hall. We've got to make it easy for people to do business here, and I think once again using my TCU analogy, if you look at the way from an incoming freshman to a graduating senior, you look at the way that everybody on that campus is treated day in, day out, I think it's a great model. So Robert, sorry I diverted, but hopefully that was a good analogy to make my point. Thank you. I'm now going to turn it over to Johnny Campbell. Thank you, Mike, for setting a precedent that we don't have to follow the slide. That's excellent. I'm Johnny Campbell from Sundance Square, and the first thing I would say is this plan and this study is probably in my 17 years the most exciting economic development move that's been made, Mayor and Council and the Economic Development Department of the City and the Chamber. And I say that because by now we must know that the scattergun approach, the approach of just dealing with deals as they walk in the door by surprise is not the way that we're going to pick the right strategies. It's not the way we're going to be able to focus our efforts, nor is it the way that we're going to be able to measure the success of our efforts as we operate and work on them. And I would even carry on with Mike's thought about the need to fund and the need to use our resources wisely. Yes, we're going to need more resources dedicated to this effort. We also need a plan to follow so that we're using the resources that we have in the most efficient manner and in the best way to get where we'd like to be. You know, I will say in recruiting over the years in Sundance I have been suspicious for a long time that some of the things we learned from this name recognition analysis are there. I think Mike will tell you and many others in this room who do this kind of economic development and recruiting, if you have to start by explaining what Fort Worth is and who we are and where we are, you're a little bit behind the curve when working to do a deal. And I have sort of evangelized a notion for a little while now that says that if you think about how headquarters relocations happen, if you think about how businesses make decisions, where they're going to land, oftentimes it's a business we don't know, in an area we don't know, a CEO we don't know, at a time we don't know, we don't know, who's making a decision to move a headquarters or bring a business to a new location. We have to ask ourselves what is the chance that we're already on the top of mind of that CEO we don't know, in the company we don't know, in the area we don't know, at the time we don't know, because that's when the first short list is made of the places that these folks are going to go. And so we really need to be thinking that way. And I was thinking about the Mayor's comments about going from the 14th largest city maybe to the 12th. Guess what happens when you climb the ladder of size? Your competitive set gets more competitive. And we have to think about ourselves in terms of how we want to approach competing on a higher and higher level to continue accomplishing those things. And I think this idea of a marketing program focused on telling the relevant, up-to-date business components of what is in Fort Worth is important for us all. And I might also carry on one other thought about this. It's our responsibility, I think, to get our share of relocations and the deal flow to this region. We're responsible to do that. And I think we should probably consider that this is not a campaign for a year or two. If we believe we're moving up into that higher competitive set, this is a part of our game perpetually going forward. And I think this is a great opportunity. Thank you to the Economic Development Department and Council and everyone for letting us participate in this. As I said earlier, I am really energized by this. And like everyone I hope in the room, learned a lot of things in seeing this study underway. Thank you. Okay, fantastic. So the next goal is really being from Austin, we think a lot about innovation and creativity and the role that entrepreneurship and creative businesses can have in expanding a regional economy. This is really top of mind for us. And we think this goal has so much potential for Fort Worth and for specific areas, geographic areas and specific industries. We've talked a little bit about the medical district in the near south side. What Austin did recently was create its own new medical school and formally designated an innovation medical technology district around that new medical school. And they've just been open for, I guess, earlier this fall or last fall. They just opened their doors so they're just getting started. And already you have Merck, a global pharmaceutical company that's expanding 600 job technology hub to locate in that medical district because of the public investments that were made because of the academic institutions. And we see a whole host of similar opportunities in the near south side. And by the way, there is no Magnolia Avenue in the medical district in Austin. It doesn't have the same level of urban vitality that you have. So that's a unique opportunity within Texas and perhaps within the country to have a district of that potential that has the fine grained urbanism. The second one there, entrepreneurship. I know we'll have Tech Fort Worth representing talking about the incredibly important role of supporting your businesses that have high growth potential. And it's worth drawing a distinction between entrepreneurship and small businesses. So entrepreneurial companies, we're talking about export oriented high growth potential. They're often capital intensive and IP intensive versus small businesses that are locally serving. They're locally owned and they're not really capital intensive and they're not really aimed at high growth potential. And we'll talk more about small business in goal number three. And then the arts as well. So that's something that you've got a lot of assets. I think everybody appreciates the museums and the arts that you have in Fort Worth, but there's some potential. For instance, the Main Street Arts Festival right now. It's about 80% of the people that attend that it's an incredible event, but they're coming from within a 50 mile radius. There's examples of similar events that have embraced technology and have become national appeals and bringing people in from outside of the metro area and outside of the state. So tying the arts community to the startup community. We have definitely recommendations along those lines. And then the fourth one there, the city itself. Being one of the biggest cities in the country, your purchasing power and around solving specific challenges. We're recommending the creation of an internal city, futures oriented thinking long term but influencing purchasing decisions and bond packages and those types of major city investments. And how you can be a real economic stimulus in and of yourself and engaging the private sector as necessary to do that. So with that, I will bring up Paul Payne from the near south side. Thank you, John. Mayor, council members. If I could boil down this whole workshop study into a word, I would say inclusiveness and I thank you for that. Bringing in the whole city has been wonderful for me representing the south side and including all of the parts. And I've used this metaphor before of a grandmother's quilt. Each patch is completely different coming from different fabrics. They're very unique, but together they make the quilt. And the south side's uniqueness to making that quilt is the medical dominated by the medical industry. Seven hospitals and all the private doctor's offices and that it's healthcare by far. And a few years ago, we had a annual banquet where our keynote speaker was Bruce Katz with the Brookings Institute. And it was very exciting for me to have that interaction with Bruce Katz when he came down here because he knew of Fort Worth, but he didn't have current experience with it. And Mike Brennan, our planning director on the staff, spent an entire day on a bicycle, by the way, touring our area. Bruce Katz was so excited about the area because he was talking about innovative districts. He left our banquet to go to Toronto and he was so excited. All he could talk about for the next two days was what was happening in Fort Worth on the near south side in the innovative district. And what's so important about that is that an innovative district creates an energy throughout this healthcare which brings in a creative class. And what Bruce Katz highlighted was that the healthcare industry bringing in other creative class industries. So what you're seeing on the near south side is it emerges into an important part of the whole Fort Worth fabric part of that quilt. It is industries that you're seeing blossom up starting on Magnolia, now on Main Street. Boutique shops that are coming down, if you haven't been to 411, go into those boutique shops. They're open now. We have Creative Event Centers, The Brick, 411 does small weddings and that. We have several breweries. We have several distilleries. We have small PR firms, advertising firms. All of these are part of the bigger creative class being energized by healthcare. And John showed earlier a slide that said the number one, what was the number one employer industry, healthcare, number one. And so take that in the economics that we did a study four years ago. We were 4.2 billion to the city of Fort Worth that I don't think anybody knew. I know they didn't know it because I brought in the presidents of the hospitals and my premise for even doing the study was we are bigger than we know and I put out the assumption that we were going to be over $3 billion. And one of the presidents looked at me and said, Paul, we're bigger than that. I said, that's the point. We don't know. We don't know how big we are. Let's do a study and show it. And in the city we were 4.2. That's four years ago. And at the medical summit that we just held, the DFW hospitals just did a study. They just completed it. Most important stat from that for me was in four years healthcare industry grew by 4 billion. That was the growth over the last four years. DFW hospitals, 90 hospitals in DFW area grew by $4 billion. So healthcare on the near south side is the creator of this energy, Innovative District, that's bringing in these other shops. Main Street is blossoming. Vickery will be the next one. I think the Hemp Hill Lamar connector is going to be so important for several reasons. It's going to give us connectivity with our beautiful downtown area, energize the Lancaster, Vickery, but also bring those two big economic drivers together. And back to my original point, we're a part, we're very unique to what we're doing, that healthcare, which is complementary to the whole. And if you're going to do healthcare somewhere in the city, you're going to be able to help grow a downtown or an alliance corridor because of the medical density there. And we're drawing in the other industries to come with it. So I'm very excited about the near south side and I appreciate the opportunity to address you today. Thank you. Mayor and council, it's a pleasure to be here to represent the conversation of entrepreneurship. There's definitely a tribe in this city that just eats, sleeps and breathes this. The spirit is strong, but there's a whole lot of opportunities. In the recommendations, I really believe in that definition of that entrepreneur, that high growth company and what they're needing. And so that expanding the network ability of where they need to find new players. So entrepreneurs lead and really exist in this local ecosystem of players like government, like universities, the TCUs, UNT Health Science Centers, UTAs. They have the investors, the mentors they're looking for, they've got service providers, lots of different media and the support organizations like Techfort Worth. And so we're at a stage that we're really getting activated. There's a lot of ecosystems across the U.S. and the planet that have very robust systems where entrepreneurs can connect to entrepreneur, entrepreneur connect to all those players and those players connect to each other. So we have a lot that's happening right now, but how do we ramp this up is the frequency of opportunities. These connection points that entrepreneurs have need to be very frequent to really let them amplify the transfer of knowledge. I mean, networking at its core is that exchange of information and building very productive relationships. So for all of these people with our geographic spread really bringing them together, how do we activate all levels of stakeholders to really be able to plug a first touch entrepreneur that's moving here or self-identifying of I've got an idea, I've really wanted to do something to get them into an opportunity for at least three levels of engagement. One with the individuals, one with the organizations and events that they can connect with. And new connections can be built in existing ones strengthened by really finding new creative ways to bring those parties together. So ideas like a reverse pitch competition for major corporations to find new engagement levels with the innovators that call Fort Worth home. These types of ways can really amplify the innovation and how tech community can really grow together. But if we're only looking at local, we also have to look at a global scale. So really strengthening those connections from an international standpoint to Silicon Valley to Boston to New York to London and Singapore. These really strong ecosystems really a lot of the data that's starting to come out once an entrepreneur identifies I want to focus on a global scale they grow faster. So with this three part framework you've got the space and consideration too and we have a growing amount of demand for a lot of prototyping, making spaces. We've kind of heard more and more conversations about maker spaces and really having these kind of thrive. But these collision spaces that entrepreneurs meet each other, these co-working spaces. Many of us are familiar with WeWorks, they're coming to Fort Worth, they've got two locations kind of identified. So these co-working spaces really start to create a hive kind of location for all these entrepreneurs to really gather. But really where are all these wet lab spaces? Within the context of the medical innovation district or an innovation district for itself, we need those places that entrepreneurs and invaders can start to play. And so these wet lab spaces, these small scale manufacturing and light assembly and warehousing that doesn't always come attached with a long term lease, really flexible. So strengthening the connections to the real estate community to find really clever ways to allow a company to stay and grow and thrive in Fort Worth will be very key to this. But there's two buckets that entrepreneurs will always end up facing and always trying to find more of, talent and capital. And so how do we really address these things, I mean with robust networks these types of talent and the university's companies out can really address it. But investors are really self-motivated. So how do we ramp up what we're already seeing benefit from CalTown Angels, local investor group that's already seen an exit with a homegrown company on core vision, but everything from seed to scale. Where do we see all of these investment opportunities and capital identified from every life cycle of that company? And brings it back to that final point of the futures forum. And so these ideas and these innovators can really bring some value. In the entrepreneur ecosystem we continually communicate, I'm neither the smartest in the room and you're neither the most ignorant in any situation. And so that's where continual learning can happen. And it's been really interesting from the city standpoint even the economic development department has seen investments in this of investing and engaging in business with a local technology company doing electric vehicle charging stations. So even some of these non-traditional type of solutions are already coming to fruition. And so as a representative of Tech Fort Worth and entrepreneurs as a whole across Fort Worth I'm excited to work on this and execute on this plan. Thank you. Mayor, council, good morning. My name is Jessica Christopherson. I'm the director of marketing for the Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau and also serve as the film commission for the Fort Worth Film Commission. We are proud to promote Fort Worth as a fun creative city for nearly nine million people that visit Fort Worth each year. Now more than ever there's an opportunity to align our organizations to promote Fort Worth. That's why we're so excited to be working closely with the city and the chamber on their respective plans. And February we will announce our own master plan for tourism which will be aligned with these efforts. I'd like to address four important points with you today. Fort Worth is a visitor destination with untapped potential. There was a reoccurring theme in many of our media placements over the past year. Top six cities to watch in 2017. The most underrated cities in the United States. Eight underrated U.S. destinations you should visit right now. There's a growing interest in Fort Worth and now is the time to leverage this buzz. Brought a promotion of the arts and raising the profile of signature events such as Main Street Fourth Arts Festival for national and international visibility. Visitors love Fort Worth but there are a lot of choices when people travel. So we must continue developing big reasons to ensure we stay on top of their list. Signature events as Main Street Fort Worth Arts Festival are beacons for our city. There are more opportunities than ever to create and promote events that package the arts with our exciting food, music and film scene. In fact, Fort Worth was recently named the first music friendly city in Texas by the Texas Music Office and the Office of the Governor. Support of the Film Commission and film projects can elevate the brand image of Fort Worth as a dynamic city that supports creative class and talent attraction. As I shared with you last week, the Film Commission is reporting an economic impact of $11.1 million for film, television and commercial related projects in our first two years. Support of the moving picture industry will allow us to highlight our local talent, the locations Fort Worth has to offer and to grow our creative class. Productions like Flip or Flop Fort Worth can also boost awareness of our city domestically. Stronger leaks between Fort Worth's convention tourism promotion efforts and business recruitment activities. We are preparing to roll out a landmark collaborative marketing effort between tourism and business next spring at the Fort Worth House at South by Southwest with straws and international audience. We will showcase Fort Worth tourism, music, film and innovation. We are proud to be working in partnership with the City, the Chamber, Hillwood, Bell Helicopter, Lockheed Martin, local musicians, artists, filmmakers and more on this initiative. Our goal is to use this as a scalable model for other markets where we can promote the city for visitors and creative talent. We're excited to be working together and continuing to improve the quality of life in Fort Worth and thank you for this opportunity to share. Thank you, Jessica and everyone that spoke on the creativity as well as the speakers, Mike, Johnny and Brandon on competitiveness. I think this goal is, we kind of started off by talking about how Fort Worth competes within the region nationally and the creative energies and the potential to really grow and create new companies and attract individuals. But it's the quality of place, or some people say quality of life, we like to talk about quality of place that really the strength of your neighborhoods, the vitality of the downtown, the connectivity between different districts, the things that make a city attractive to people and to companies that really is undergirding all of the successful economic development strategies. So community vitality, the first one here, downtown. I could spend all day talking about this. It's something that we as a firm are passionate about. You already have what's probably the most walkable downtown in the state of Texas among big cities. And you have that kind of fine grained urbanism that, thanks to Sundance Square and investments over many years that have been made. But the next step is really to become that mixed-use business district that corporations, corporate headquarters, professional companies, technology firms that they want to locate in the downtown. And we talked about the housing first strategy, so we'll talk more about that. Neighborhood alignment. So let's get real for a minute. You've been a successful city that's grown, but just because the local and regional economy does well, that doesn't mean prosperity is shared for everybody. And it's true in other places that have grown well. We've worked in Minneapolis, St. Paul's, it's true in the Denver area. A lot of successful communities, they still have geographic areas and populations that are left behind. So we have to also be honest, honest brokers, that this plan is not meant to solve every problem or to bring in energy everywhere where it hasn't been before. But at the same time, the city has, can and should play an important role in bringing in new energy and new investment into neighborhoods and corridors that have not seen the benefits of citywide economic growth. So the alignment of your neighborhoods and commercial corridors to the growth of opportunities within the city and making sure that there are opportunities within those areas, that's an important part of the plan as well. And then so now we get to small businesses. So we drew the distinction between entrepreneurial companies and small businesses. So small businesses are really, when you talk about community vitality, what's happening on Magnolia? What's starting to happen on Ray Street? These are, this is what gives your city a real strong identity. The small locally owned businesses that are serving local populations that as Paul was right, they flock to areas where there's larger economic engines, but they really create that identity, having those small businesses here. So with that, we're recommending that the city really reevaluates the entire way that it goes about supporting small businesses. So with that, I'll bring up our first speaker, Andy Taft. Yeah, who's in Rotary? Mayor, I'm going to use your little trick using one of these things. So let's talk about vitality. It's the state of being strong and active, energy, liveliness, life, energy, spirit, vivacity, exuberance, buoyancy, bounce, elan, verve, vim, pep, brio, zest, sparkle, dynamism, passion, fire, vigor, drive, punch, get up and go. Right? I think there are parts of Fort Worth where we've got vitality. We need more of that. And this section of the plan digs into how the city can re-embrace the center city and drive more vitality, creating a place that people want to be, not only the people that are here, but the people who are looking to relocate. And from downtown's position, this plan not only looks at downtown, but it looks at West Seventh and the South Side and Ray Street and Panther Island eventually. I think we can all see that there's going to be vitality there and in the neighborhoods that radiate around downtown. The districts that I just mentioned all share a trait, don't they? All of these emerging, exciting districts that we talk about every day have vitality. We can see it. Some of it's nascent. It's just starting to happen, but we can see it. We can feel it. Downtown certainly has it. The near South Side's got it going on, and we know that West Seventh has got it as well. This is something that this city council and the city councils before you have been working on for years, and it's starting to pay off. So for downtown anyway, which is what I'm going to talk about, the first thing that the plan is recommending is that we become the choice for corporate relocations in the metroplex. If they're going to choose a downtown, we want it to be for at worth. And the way that we're going to do that is to give our message and economic development booster shot of incredible proportion. It's going to be a steroid shot. We need to tell the world what we've got. There are cities in the metroplex who are kicking us right where we would get the steroid shot. And we need to illustrate a sense of vitality and being in the game that rivals the messages that we're sending. And so that suggests a very significant economic development messaging plan that results in companies looking at Fort Worth. And they will come to Fort Worth, and they will not only fill up the buildings that we have, which is what we're working on now, but what we should be talking about are the other buildings queuing up to be built. That's where our level of success should be, is how many new office buildings are being demanded in our central business district. And as a result of that, we'll have even more hotels and more restaurants and more retail and more people on the street and more apartments and condos being built in downtown. We'll have people meeting on the street and talking to each other and sharing ideas and creating new visions of what is possible and creating new companies. They'll move from one company to the other. People will move to Fort Worth because they know they'll be able to get a job. That's vitality. That's what we need. I would submit to you that we're not quite there yet, but that's where this vision takes us. We'll create an incredible demand for all of these new uses in our center city. And when we do that, that compression in downtown will radiate into the adjacent center city neighborhoods that for far too long have not had the kind of vitality that we're looking for. And that's what the plan calls for. This new series of tactics will communicate the advantages of office in downtown Fort Worth. And it will attract companies from around the country because we're telling our story and we're telling it in a competitive and vibrant way. I can tell you that the private sector is ready to partner with you and we're ready to take off the gloves. It's time for Fort Worth to step into the ring. The second item on the list is about what we're going to attract, service firms, corporate headquarters, all of that is in the plan. I'm not going to detail that, but clearly these are what downtown's are made of and where we should be going. The interesting thing that the plan suggests is that by virtue of our proximity to Bell Helicopter and Lockheed Martin and the tech firms and the hospital district, that we've got an opportunity in downtown to target high tech firms in a multitude of disciplines and that's something that we should be doing. The final item is the plan's recommendation that we should double down on high rise residential development. You know, the apartments that we've got coming into downtown right now are great. We've got a thousand under construction. We've got another thousand in the pipeline after that and that's really fantastic but they're consuming a lot of land. And when you want fatality, you want a lot of mixed uses next to each other. We don't want monocultures of land use and blank walls. The apartments that we've got going up right now are very exciting and from the percentage of growth increases that you saw in the chart earlier this next couple of years, it's going to be quite impressive. But we're creating monocultures on two, three, four, five acres. Fatality requires mixed uses adjacent to each other. We want apartments and condos and restaurants and retail and office and we want a true mixed use environment where that exchange of ideas and that exchange of energy builds on itself and works because that's the way human beings interact. High rise development can put the same number of units that a three acre site occupies on a one acre site. And something that you'll be interested to know is that high rise apartments from a tax standpoint act like high rise office buildings. You get a lot more taxes by virtue of these, by building these high rise apartments. And not only that, the land consumption is lower which means you can have different uses in a smaller, more compact space. So the plan calls for the city to look at incenting high rise development. We've seen some interest just in the last month or so. We've seen some interest for the first time for purpose built high rise condos and apartments in downtown. This is extraordinarily timely given the plan's announcement or suggestions. But we submit to you that you ought to, when those developers come in the door and they identify a gap, you should pour some fuel on that fire very intentionally to prove up that the office, or not the office, the residential rents and the mortgage payments work for high rise development in downtown Fort Worth. If we can do that, we will get the kind of vitality that the plan calls for, that our city deserves and that this council and your previous councils have been working on for decades. Thank you. Good morning, Mayor and Council and everybody. I'm here to talk about the community and the tax incentives and, I'm sorry, all of the information that's going to help grow all of East Fort Worth. The plan is very important because it has not neglected one side that has been neglected for a number of years and that's Southeast and East Fort Worth. And so we're very happy to have that be a part of the plan itself because it's going to address the issues and the needs for more development to happen, to focus on all of our corridors from Texas Wesleyan University, which is a gym within Southeast, to our Lake Arlington side, which is the pretty side as well, and to talk about our housing, so to speak. I'm sorry, I'm a little bit under the weather so y'all bear with me right now. But basically the plan itself, I'm sorry, the plan itself has allowed Southeast and East Fort Worth to sit at the table and dress the knees and talk about, you know, we're being a part of the interloop and helping the development to happen within the city of Fort Worth. And so like I said, as we continue forward with the plan or whatever, developers are going to come on board or whatever and see all of the incentives that can be available to them or whatever and so that we can make things happen. I'm sorry. To the mayor, members of the city council and the economic development team that I enjoy working with every day, thank you for this opportunity. Stacey, you just warmed me up. And I'm going to take a metaphor from Mike Berry earlier. And the metaphor is the East Side of Fort Worth. The development of what can happen over there. Most of you may or may not know about a couple of months ago, we got together with the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce and some city staff persons and we went on a tour of East and Southeast Fort Worth. And on that tour, I think the city, especially the new staffers and the chamber, learned a more comprehensive idea of what could happen on the East Side of 35. And fortunately, we do have that divide in the city and we need to cure it. The Fort Worth Chamber is looking for opportunities to do that. And we, as the Southeast Inc. route, the African American Chamber, which is the Black Chamber, and East Fort Worth Inc. along with the East Fort Worth Business Association are looking at creating what I call an East Side Alliance. So we can kind of speak and talk in one tongue and have a promotional opportunity among ourselves to promote East Side of Fort Worth. And we think this can make a difference. The difference will be that we would have better outcomes for better business development. But going back to Mike Berry, Mike, my favorite institution is Texas Wesleyan University. I served on that board for several years and I will tell you when it was trying to move, I was one of those folks that said you can't. And it has made a difference. Just drive by today. And if you stay with it, it went from what you call the Polly Main Street plan until what you see today. And it's made a whole lot of difference in East Fort Worth. Now, how do we expand on that? We look at those opportunities that are on the East Side that are looking us right in the face today. What is the new vision? Where are those opportunities? It's three that I can tell you about. But the Housing Edition, Caval Place, and the West Side of Arlington Lake. There's an opportunity for several things to happen on those properties, including relocations. And we encourage you to look at that. Like Mr. Dr. G, as I called him, Gingen Barkham said. Dr. G, I really messed him up. And as Sylvester Turner usually say to the mayor of Houston, I want to take my small boat out where the big boats flow. And we can do it with this plan. Thank you. Good morning, mayor, council. It's always hard to follow Mr. Jennings. And I tried to use Mr. Taft's definition and bring this energy. And I drank a lot of coffee and really all I accomplished is the shakes now. Stop shaking. But thank you so much for having us this morning. You know, the Fort Worth Hispanic Chamber, I took over a couple of years ago. And we've been very fortunate to almost double our membership in that amount of time. We've been very fortunate to start becoming kind of a viable resource for small business. And so we've done all that by just really keeping our message simple, right? So what do we do? When people ask what do chambers do, what does the Hispanic Chamber do? We help Hispanic businesses start, expand, and connect. That's it. We support an educated workforce and we really engage and serve our community. And so that message has really resonated with our small businesses, our medium-sized businesses. And we work very closely with the Metropolitan Black Chamber and the Fort Worth Chamber. Mr. G has been very helpful since he had town. And so a lot of people don't know that over half of our membership is non-Hispanic. When you think about Fort Worth being 35 to 40% of this population, that's a huge population that we're trying to move the dial on. But in our research, we found three really harsh truths, right? One, a lot of our small businesses are looking for assistance and advice outside of Fort Worth. Number two, they're looking for business outside of Fort Worth. And number three, this MWB program, as great as it is, has kind of acquired this negative connotation about it. So what did we do? We started this very unofficial push calling it Fort Worth First, and I stole that from Mr. D. He's smiling at me now. It's Fort Worth First. So when we talk to businesses, we say when you think about anything having to do with your business, whether it's talent, training, when you're looking at resources, tools, think of Fort Worth First. When you're looking for business, when you're looking to network, think of Fort Worth First. And lastly, really dig down into your business and analyze your business readiness. And if you're not ready, let us help you get ready. So that's kind of our big push in the community. Only in my speaking point by really thanking Mr. Stearns and Ms. Wilson, our partnership is stronger than ever. We leverage each other's resources. We've come in and started translating some of the city's information so we can bring more businesses to do business with the city. Second of all, we tell the truth about certification. This is not a golden ticket. You have to have viable business and then you bring that business to Fort Worth. And then last but not least, we have to really encourage businesses to stay in the game. For those entrepreneurs out there, owning your own business is the most difficult thing you can do in your life. It's the most rewarding also. We as a city have to come together, bring that vitality and that strength that we all have as a city, come together, and we'll make this city a lot stronger and better. So thank you. Well, thank you so much, John and Dee and Stacy and Andy as well. When you're talking about trying to be competitive and bringing in business investments and attracting people from all over, especially when you talk about international business, something which is one of those really untapped opportunities for Fort Worth, having a community that you can see and feel the diversity, that it's a place where people from any background can come and succeed and grow a business, that is absolutely important. And just to talk a little bit more about some of the specific areas that we looked at. So we had a workshop in each one of six, what we called Target Geographies, Target Areas, and this is our friends with Frig and Azi Associates helped us out with really analyzing the land uses and the opportunities for future job growth and development and redevelopment. Three of them were on the east side, so Stop Six, East Lancaster, Evans and Rosedale, also the near north side, all the way to West Camp Bowie and Alston Mason and McCart. We wanted to use these as kind of test cases and examples of, we encourage you to, it's actually well over 500 pages, 600 pages if you include the analysis of each one of these target areas, but we wanted to use these as what are some of the targeted developments and not redevelopments that could go in these neighborhoods throughout the city and use them as models. So probably the one with the most immediate commercial potential is Evans and Rosedale, given its proximity to the near south side and some of the city investments that have happened there with the Urban Village Program. So using these as what can work in these areas and applying those same strategies and tactics throughout the city. So again, the plan is very comprehensive. The three C's really spell out the direction and the vision that Fort Worth needs to go, but it doesn't really happen without the appropriate tools and resources, whether it's the bond package that the city is looking at with infrastructure improvements and how specific projects that support the economic development program can be elevated within that, whether it's taking a hard look at the city's incentive programs and the resources available. We've talked about the competitive environment. One thing that is unique in Texas is the sales tax corporations that a lot of the suburban cities like Frisco and McKinney have tens of millions of dollars of resources they can just throw at business expansion projects. You don't have that, but neither does the city of Dallas, neither does Plano and Richardson. They have created a piece of their property tax to create an economic development incentive fund. So that's one option among many other options that will be on the table for creating new resources. And then of course the role of the city and the chamber and the many other partners and bringing together all of those groups and defining what are the roles, what are the responsibilities within each one of those. So with that, I'll hand it over to Robert and Brenda. Alright, so the challenge when you have a group of speakers that we have this morning is always the risk of someone going off key. So I'm going to take a note from both Mike and Johnny and disregard my own slides and call an audible and try to get us a little bit back on schedule as to some of the things that we're looking at at the plan. I do want to go back to a couple of things that both Mike and Johnny mentioned. This issue of the resources and the capacity to pull this plan off, that is going to take some significant investment, not only from the city side, from the chamber as well. And as Mike said, this is not a simple, or Johnny said this, not a simple one-year, two-year plan. This is a long-term goal that we have to focus on. So it's not going to be these significant changes happening in year one. We're going to build this up and ramp this up over time as we begin to really flesh out how we want to improve our economic development capacity within the city. But I will say that the one thing that I've been very pleased with throughout the entirety of this process is the collaboration that we've had with the chamber in talking about how we address some of these challenges in particular. Brandon and I meet weekly, sometimes twice a week, it seems, to really begin to flesh through how this works. And that started really months ago. I mean, when we started getting drafts of this plan, we realized that the things that they were talking about were some significant changes, some significant deviations from how we've operated in the past. And in order to do that, we didn't want to wait until we had this presentation and we got into the new year and really started thinking about how to do this. We wanted to start having those conversations now. So Brandon and I have been having those discussions and really trying to work through how we develop opportunities for the plan. I think the one thing that we heard as part of this five, six hundred page document, there's a technical memorandum that JLL completed. So it was kind of a reverse site selection process. And the one thing that we heard kind of consistently was that there's a lack of clarity when it comes to companies that are looking at Fort Worth as to what that opportunity looks like. So we need to really take a look at our policies again to provide that clarity. We have to be proactive, very proactive and not reactive to what's going on in the market. I think historically while we've had some great successes, that does not mean that we can or should we take everything that walks through the door from standpoint of incentives. We have to be very focused, narrowly focused on the types of industries that we go after, the types of tools that we apply to bring those opportunities at Fort Worth and the locations where those opportunities present themselves. I did, John did mention the competitive region. I did like the comment that the more our city grows, the more challenging and competitive those opportunities will be. And so I think we obviously are cognizant of that. Again, this idea of effective implementation of this plan really lies on this partnership between the city and the chamber. And we have talked through how do we come memorize that? How do we memorialize that? We've talked about really establishing an MOU between the city and the chamber that would outline those specific areas where the chamber is going to take the lead on, those specific areas where the city will take the lead on, and those opportunities where we're going to be in lockstep and working on business attraction, recruitment, and building the community overall collectively. And then the final piece that I would mention is this challenge of the marketing issue that the chamber is really embarking on. So as you all know and Brandon mentioned, the chamber is going through their own strategic planning process. They have a significant goal on the table to help them and the marketing piece of that. I think that's going to be a critical component of how we are able to be successful in implementing this plan. If the chamber is not there as the entity that is out pushing the city, marketing the city, branding the city, and helping to craft that message, we're just going to have some significant challenges in being able to basically hunt the types of companies that we want to see in the marketplace. And so obviously we're very supportive of the initiative that they have underway for us. So with that, I'm going to come back and we'll talk a little bit more about what Fort Worth looks like once we begin the implementation of this plan and what's going to be different from what's on the ground today. But I want to have Brenda come up. I did mention briefly our challenges with our incentives, and we've been working through what our incentives look like today and planning to bring some additional revisions back to council early next year. So I want Brenda to come forward and talk through that a little bit and give you a flavor of what we're thinking as it relates to the incentive process. Good morning, Mayor and Council. And just again, thank you for everyone who's here today. This process has been so fantastic with all of the stakeholders engaged. And I wouldn't have expected anything less this morning, but again, thank you for everyone being here. As Robert indicated in the introduction, this plan really is a result of the conversation we had during the last incentive policy conversation in that we were talking about our incentives, which really are an investment strategy. And what are we investing in as the City of Fort Worth? So as we've worked through this process, we've really taken a hard look at what the recommendations are. We're currently in the process of reviewing best practices, not just in the region, but nationally as well as internationally. There are some countries that do fantastic jobs when it comes to target industries and so forth. So the team has been up to their eyeballs, so to speak, in looking at best practices and policies and what we think could be the most effective for Fort Worth and growing those targeted opportunities here in the city. So we do plan on coming forth in the next few months with an investment strategy, as we like to call it, focused on competitiveness, creativity, and community vitality. So just more to come in a pretty short order. All right, so we're almost done. We'll start talking about next steps, but I'm going to do what my partner in crime, TIP Principal John Roberts often does and call on him without any warning or preparation. So John, go ahead. And Madam Mayor, Council, pleasure to be here. Sorry, I was a little bit tardy. I just want to say by way of conclusion to this really incredible process that it's been an honor to work with the team and the staff and Brenda and Robert in particular. You have a very dedicated team who, I think, and focuses on economic development all the time. And as you know, we're a national firm and so we don't always see that. And it's gratifying to us to have someone as committed as you have been to this process. And John is asking me to talk briefly about the metrics that govern a plan. And really, this is important because this is how you will judge your progress. And nothing takes precedence over high-wage job growth. It affects every aspect of your business. It's not that we look at the lower-wage jobs as being unimportant. Clearly they are. But we're also thinking about tax base, the second issue. And you can't have one without the other. You cannot grow your sustainable tax base. You can't address the imbalance between commercial and residential unless you have higher-wage job growth. And it's also true that the lower-wage jobs very important in the service sector trail those higher-wage jobs. You can't sustain your service sector unless you have high-wage job growth. And for those of you who track these things nationally it's a little bit of a shocking figure but it's worth relating that of all private sector jobs nationally almost 84% of them are in the service sector. It's really a shocking figure for me and that is driven by your ability to attract these higher-wage employees. But as we also know that doesn't just happen at the corporate level anymore. Any community that thinks that it's going to grow simply by attracting major corporations is missing part of this really changing dynamic economy that we're all part of and that is in the creative industries and the talented individuals. So when you think about something like Uber you have a company which came from nowhere whose valuation in the New York Stock Exchange is higher, hold your breath here, higher than General Motors. And this is a company that has very few employees and has no assets. Those Uber cars that you ride in they're owned by the individuals. So this doesn't make sense to me. It really doesn't, it's not easily explainable but the market has spoken on this and so you have these massively disruptive industries that are the direct result of these creative companies and the individuals that drive them and Fort Worth has to be part of this. And I had breakfast recently with the person who shepherded the med school in Austin, Greg Hartman and he was asking what we were doing and I said we were going to be rolling out the plan in Fort Worth and he said, you know, by the way Fort Worth is the most underrated city in Texas. Those are the first words out of his mouth and he wasn't prepped and he didn't know I was going to say this but it really struck me right away that what Greg was saying was really spot on and that has to change and I think this notion that this strategy is about signaling that change is saying that Fort Worth is not only part of but a leader in a changed mindset for economic growth so it's not just about corporate attraction it's not just about higher wage per se it's really about building on and by the way when you think about the innovation district at your med school and the relationship between TCU and UNT the innovation district in Austin's med school exists primarily as a tool to recruit talent that's literally what Dr. Bright and others have said to me we need that because there is no other way that we can be creative in how we attract talent and then last is this notion of quality of place and many of you have heard us talk about this before everyone in economic development talks about quality of life but the difference in our minds is that quality of life reflects the value of existing citizens and that's important and we have to build on that but quality of place asks what do you look like from the outside what is Fort Worth like for the people who don't live here how welcoming is it? not welcoming in, we're friendly to you but we want your business to be here we want you engaged we want millennials to look at this as a place where they can live close to where they work and grow the business there so these metrics we have them in the plan with specific indicators that will show progress on that goal but we believe this is the way that you will be different and John if you'll wrap up and thank you so much it's really been an honor to work on this project John? so last one last two actually here then I'll let Robert finish up so the implementation so we've got this plan with all the strategies and at the bottom of that pyramid the actions so this is where the actions live and we've broken them down according to each goal but also according to, and I don't expect anybody to read this but in the plan itself you can see this we've identified every single partner organization that is responsible for implementing each action and time frames associated with those and this is basically your starting point your editable document that you'll be working on month to month, year over year and we're going to come back a year from now to do a check in of the plan to measure progress so laying out the time frames of all the actions is part of that but also we talked about at a high level what are you measuring your success on so high wage jobs, tax base but we've also identified some very specific target metrics and I love this question how will Fort Worth be different there's two ways you can read that one is here's where you are today you've got only two Fortune 1000 headquarters a lot less than Irving and Plano and Dallas so this plan calls for targeting the recruitment of more Fortune 1000 headquarters so you will be different five years from now because you will have more of those Inc. 5000 is measures companies based on their growth of revenue so right now you've got about a dozen super high growth companies mostly technology companies if you add five more of those companies every year and by the way a lot of them are in the Dallas Fort Worth metro area already and maybe looking to expand or relocate then you will have three dozen of those companies five years from now and then we've talked a lot about residential density and development in the urban core so making city policies that target the growth of residential in and around your downtown area that's another very specific target of how Fort Worth will be different today compared to today five years from now but the other way to answer this question is how will Fort Worth be different than its competition so that's the last I think that I'll have here and hand it back over to Robert thank you John and just to wrap this up we did talk about this alignment between the city and the chamber and their strategic plan and our strategic plan obviously you see from a standpoint of metrics and goals there's a heavy focus on the Fortune 1000 companies heavy emphasis on the Inc. 5000 and then growing our residential tax base in the central business district but that's not the entirety of the metrics that we'll be looking at and as John mentioned there is a long list of items outlined in the plan that will judge how successful we will have been over this five year period and putting these things into place the things that I would say the worst thing that we could do and the worst thing that I think would happen is if we move forward we implement this plan and five years from now Fort Worth looks exactly the same as it does today we've got to make some changes as it relates to how we do business and while there were some uncomfortable truths outlined in this plan I don't think there were anything that we were really shocked by I remember when we had our first presentation Council Member Schingleton said I don't want the sunshine and roses version of what's going on in Fort Worth give me the dirty stuff and I think that's what our consultants did they got down and dirty and really gave us a tough view of what's happening in Fort Worth so we're going to continue this process as I said City and Chamber are already working through aligning our respective strategies to making sure that they all make sense and we're going to be determining which agency takes the lead on specific initiatives but I would like to ask everyone in the room who was part of the advisory committee or was a part of any of the workshops or round tables to just please stand up for a second so when we talk about shared responsibility this is your team it's not just the city it's not just the city staff it's not just the chamber and the chamber staff it is this team of community stakeholders and community leaders that's going to ensure that the outcomes outlining this plan are able to be realized over this five year period and so with that I know we are running short on time and I want to allow you to have some questions so I will turn it over to John I think we've got one more slide nope, that it, okay I'm done so we will just turn it over to some questions I will outline really what the next steps are so again we have the presentation today there will be an M&C on the council agenda tonight to accept the findings of the plan and then we will begin the implementation process truly in January of 2018 so we've already begun to outline some follow-up meetings so those people that participate in those industry round tables get ready because we're going to have some more of those make sure you clear your calendars so we're going to continue this discussion so I said this isn't just something that we're putting a stake in the ground and we've got the plan and now we're done this is going to be a very fluid process we're going to be reacting to what's happening in the market we're flexible enough to adjust our policies and procedures as those changes occur and then as Miranda mentioned Tiff will be back in a year to give us an update and talk to us about how we have been doing so far in the plan so with that I will turn it over to questions yes mayor I have a couple it's on I think but maybe not it's on I just had a couple of brief things and obviously I have not read the plan but my first question is was transportation part of that creativity is the T board part of the fit into the mesh of the plan it's part of the discussion and specifically when we're talking about those things like the medical innovation district and how we address issues of walkability and transportation I think the T will be a key component of that and that's going to be a piece where we're going to have to sit down with them and talk through what the plan outlines and how we can engage them in that process once again I'm back to that matrix of that Mike Barry talked about with bear hugging and the big items I can see targeting but once again as someone mentioned early on that mom and pop business that fills in those gaps in the matrix that's who we need to bear hugs okay I'll definitely agree with you on that Robert are we going to get copies of the plan you should have already received a copy of the plan did you not there's a flash drive this week so you're not going to give us any old paper wait wait we are actually going to print out well the letter said we were going to get it we wanted to get through this presentation but we will have hard copies for you so you'll have that I remember the flash drive Gina and I and Kelly and several others Carlos were just in Charlotte and it was interesting to hear Charlotte say they're the fastest growing small town the mayor of Charlotte said they're the fastest growing small town and that we've always been part of our mystique does the plan address how we're going to keep the culture of what Fort Worth is along with the growth I mean that's an important aspect I think of our livability it does talk about that and we actually had a lot of feedback during several of our industry roundtables about Fort Worth's brand and how do we continue to embrace our western heritage while at the same time showing all the great attributes we have as a large scale growing progressive community so I think there's some things in the plan that spoke to that but I think it's going to be incumbent on us to continue to work with our stakeholders to refine what that message needs to be and that can be a partnership with the chamber it can be a partnership with CVB it can be a partnership with DFW airport I think there's some opportunities there that we want to try to exploit and we've got a couple of them sitting on shelves around that we need to execute and I think Thomas Edison said something to the effect of vision without execution is a hallucination and we need to be attentive to where we want to be and what we want to look like and I think that definition and that's what I want to look at is what is the definition of what we want to look like and that's really why we're having TIP come back in a year and say okay we laid out all these strategies for you how far are you down the road in making some of those things happen so we don't have a situation where the plan gets put on the shelf and forgotten about and we move on to something else Gina Thank you Robert and staff and all of our stakeholders who participated Robert I'm sure you remember a couple of years ago I posed the question to our city manager whose job is it to market Fort Worth or do we just sit back and wait for the chamber to tell us who's coming what's coming whose job is it to market I still posed that question today and I'm hoping when I take a look at my flash drive because I've been whispering do you have a copy of it do you have a copy of it I'm hoping when I get a chance to read those hundreds of pages there's some type of airplane there also is an executive summary with it that will be helpful one thing you know Robert is that I started conducting foreclosed property sale workshops because the average citizen didn't know how to buy a foreclosed property and before you knew it you'd have an unsavory neighbor moving in right next to you and so my point of bringing up that is we could not have a foreclosed property sale if we have sections of it where there are just swaths of vacant blighted land and so thanks to some changes that you guys have made we see development going on in places like stop six where there's a 5400 square foot home under construction right now go figure but a Ken Newell can run into a road block as he's developing lakes of river trails and but far council intervention it's just our communication and so I'll continue posing that question whose job is it to market Fort Worth what I will tell you is I want to see the day where we are no longer incentivizing companies who bring us $15 and $18 at our jobs that just has to stop and so I heard an inkling of that and I find that very appealing and the last thing I'll say to you is when I hear from Dave Reagan from time to time he's just checking on himself by calling old friends and for folks who don't know Dave he is the former mayor of Richland Hills Dave had a challenge a few years ago because he had a wealthy middle easterner who wanted to send his children to Texas Wesleyan college or university but the closest he could get to what that guy wanted was South Lake and what he wanted was five bedrooms two swimming pools just the kind of stuff that big money people would want and so it's important that we make sure all of Fort Worth participates in this prosperity and this study because our very future depends on it and again I'm so glad to see some things come out and look forward to working with you on this and making sure that at least the east side and do you like that idea what do you call that east side initiative like that can I join forward to that and thank you so much Carlos yes thank you Mayor and thank you my mic on thank you Robert it's been said that marketing without strategy is just a lot of noise so I do appreciate that we have a substance and plan here in place I have read most of it I have not finished reading all of it I'll leave you with this thought this is something that was already worked on before I became council member the idea for a non-profit organization to shepherd and make sure that a given area develops in accordance with the business environment around it and specifically I'm talking about the TRV the stockyards north main corridor you and I have spoken about that before separately before this meeting my focus is not deviated on that we already have a plan that was crafted back in 2011 I would ask that whatever discussions going forward in light of this strategy include that plan and we need to update it in light of what's going on in TRV and in the stockyards because this is prior to the majestic development that it be updated so we can all tie this in I still have hopes that we can get this non-profit organization in place Paul Payne and myself and other stakeholders in this room took part in that workshop several years back to brainstorm on how we can get it to come to be fact of the matter is we need money and we need a common umbrella or vision to see that all business interests can be represented within that type of organization like a south side so that's what I'm really hopeful for and then one question as far as a medical innovation district not to give too much credit to our dear neighbors to the east but is that similar to a UT southwestern type of you know medical innovation really is a combination of your medical entities on the ground university researchers and your technology companies so it's not a singular focus on one of those entities it's really a combination of all three we're focused on bringing new innovative and transformative ideas into a specific area of town okay then my final point as far as DFW being an asset you know to promoting Fort Worth completely agree there and I would ask there's even some low lying opportunities there what I have heard from international travelers for instance is that when they come into Fort Worth what are they here the pilots might say welcome to Dallas or you know the flight attendants might say that it seems harmless on the surface but it does impact you know our visibility so I would ask to engage American Airlines to help us out a little bit trust me they'll listen to the mayor I'm sure one of Doug Parker's comments is that they send that message out but invariably it's not local crews coming back in who say it it's international crews or it's crews coming from the northeast or somewhere who just don't know the region and he has promised that they would work on it when I flew in from London on Friday I noticed that the pilot made a concerted effort to say welcome to Fort Worth Dallas so well that's good to hear and thanks for everyone's involvement in that thank you thank you Robert and everybody who contributed and who presented today I think we all appreciate that this is comprehensive and that there's been a tremendous amount of work put into this and I know it's making me feel confident and comfortable that we are going to be going in the right direction which is so important in my opinion this is our number one issue as a city and I don't mean that in any way to minimize any other issue because we have tremendous problems to tackle but the reason I believe this is our number one issue is because business growth builds the wealth that pays for everything else it allows the nonprofit community to do its thing on and on and on it allows us in government to do our thing as we're trying to do a couple of thoughts I didn't see anything about a new logo or a new tagline and maybe it's in there I haven't read it I like Molly I like cowboys and culture but I'm from here and I don't know how much that means to somebody from elsewhere in the world or elsewhere in the country who's in a Fortune 500 company making decisions on whether or not they should come here and I'm wondering how much does it contribute to our irrelevance in people's minds and I'm referring to the 45 versus the 16 chart up there I love Molly I want to see all right so we need the creative people to show us the way here but I think it's a good question to ask there is no reason why we can't become another tech hub and the person that I like to talk about and I met a bunch of them at the biz press entrepreneur summit in October it's the entrepreneur who knows how to take a product or an idea and develop it from nothing into a global product that person is one in a million and what I loved in the presentation here is from a city standpoint let's focus our efforts on getting those people here who aren't here and for those that already are here and they're coming up in our farm system let's help them stay here Hayden made a comment about oh the we work type of concept more of that here and perhaps some of our tax abatement incentives need to be shifted in those directions Mike made a comment about the permitting department and I know we're working hard on that and I appreciate it and this is controversial to say but if we can't get there we need to bid it out to the private sector and get it done I didn't hear any comments about public school education in my opinion we are making great strides and need to continue to do that and I commend our superintendent for the work that he's doing and then the last thing I would say is and this is probably the most important all the communities have to be brought into this I love seeing the camaraderie from the leadership in the communities today the Dr. G comment Mr. G that means we're already working together and when the leadership is working together all the rest of us are going to work together with it so those are my comments for what they're worth thanks very much thank you I did have an opportunity to go through the plan over the weekend and what it doesn't surprise me that we chose the four target areas it doesn't surprise me at all and I think that makes perfect sense what I want to make sure that we don't lose sight of are those target areas because one of the things that we have said continuously especially about Evans and Rosedale it will come online as near south side grows out near south side has pretty much almost grown out and actually now it's growing up and we're still seeing that that urban village immediately adjacent to near south side is still struggling but we also did a great work session with East Lancaster and one of Genus Groups and one of Jungus Groups so I don't want us to lose focus on that I'm really excited to see all of the chambers here they're being a focus Dennis touched on it having a focus on small businesses because we can talk a lot about big business but when we have a turn in the economy it is always the small businesses that continue to carry us and the economy comes back and big business comes back so I don't want to make sure that we figure out how we keep our mom and pop businesses but then also how we have our MBEs who are not in other places doing work because they can't do work here in Fort Worth or we've made it a little more difficult for them to do work here in Fort Worth and so they go other places I do like the plan that we keep talking about our target areas and also recognizing that many of those target areas already have a plan and how do we take these pieces of this plan incorporated into the existing plans because we are truly planned out I know if we create one more plan for East Lancaster or Evans-Rosdale I'm gonna scream and so I know that's how the community feels and so if we figure out how we put all of those things together and move it forward at least pieces of it it doesn't have to be the entire plans but pieces of it and I think if we do pieces of it the community feels better about progress coming so as near Southside is continuing to grow Downtown is continuing to prosper, Alliance is continuing to do well the inner city communities are not feeling left out and that's what we want to make sure that we are figuring out how to touch every community so that something is happening there again going last is not always the best a lot of people that touched on the same things that I was going to touch on I was going to follow up with what Kelly talked about I was pleased to see the focus on many of the successes that we've had in a lot of the areas that are in the urban core and looking at those target areas and I participated in one on the north side and there was a focus talking about the fact that we weren't just doing those target areas because that was going to fix the problems in that area but we were looking at the areas that were scalable and could be used in other target areas as they're identified so I think this connects well with our data driven process that we're moving towards that we keep track of the areas that need the focus and the input and the limited resources that the city has and continue to make those decisions based on that that equitable distribution I cannot be the one that doesn't know because I think that's absolutely important everybody knows where I stand on that so I'm very pleased with this plan pleased to have participated in those target areas pleased the focus on the successes that we've had and scaling those successes to other parts of the city as well I know two hours is about all year backside can stand to absorb and we promise to keep this on task there's a lot of detail yet to come in this plan about transit certain areas you have to remember this plan is the first comprehensive economic really broad economic package that we've done and then how we drill into those details and where we go will make a big difference there are wonderful opportunities in Fort Worth there are challenges that we have to face but there are continued opportunities that we will build on the commitment is this is a very important part of the city and all of you I assume are willing to help us tackle that at your expertise one of the challenges that we have going for us and one of the opportunities is that we're an incredibly young community we are 31.4 on average age and Austin is 34.6 Dallas is older than Austin so that makes a huge difference for the future of where this plan is in 2022 we're re-densifying so many of these we got great competitive people we got great innovation it'll be up to us to take all that we've seen today that all of you have worked on for the last year take those assets find where your piece of this passion is but mostly begin by reading it I've read it probably read 500 to the 600 pages of it it's an incredible work body of work the executive summary alone is an incredible body of work I think we just have so much going arts medical community involvement great I will say great place but great quality of life to because you have to have both you simply have to have people who are caring loving and compassionate to make great places where people want to come and that's one thing Fort Worth has going for it the branding you know Molly either really fires people up or it doesn't I will tell you has incredible draw but it is not the sole piece we will have to go further than just that and build on what we have here very little afford I hope nothing that really matters in Fort Worth will be forgotten in this package the great life the friendly people the small town feel for a big city our Western heritage all have to be retained but they have to be built on we have to understand where we are in this competitive world today and first and foremost we have to be ready to go out and sell Fort Worth to be our biggest cheerleader to raise that profile I was in London last week and every mayor of every city is dealing with the same issues that we are but almost without exception they just have a very vague idea of where Fort Worth is and we were there as the largest city talking to their new mayor so it's time we go to work it's time that we look at where are we going to be in five years it's your Fort Worth we together will make it better so ready set let's go thank you all for being here today