Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Daniel, what a pleasure to have you on the show today. We're going to touch one of my favorite topics, which is economic development.
But I think a lot of our audience don't even understand what economic development are. So we're going to start at kind of ground zero.
What do you do for a living? What does it actually mean to be in economic development?
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. It's a question I get all the time, and my fellow economic developers get all the time as well.
In a nutshell, basically what we try and do is grow the tax base for either the local community that we serve or the state, which I worked for the state of Mississippi in the past, but ultimately create high paying jobs, high quality of life, and ultimately grow the tax base for the community.
Bring in companies, whether they're manufacturing, industrial or retail commercial, that really help communities thrive. We try and go with a holistic approach, very strategic approach, to make sure that the companies or the businesses that want to locate to an area are the right fit for the location and for the area.
And so it's really more of just trying to make our communities better one day at a time. The hard part is it takes years to really build a strong community in that way. And so trying to be invested in the community with your family being local to the area always helps. So you get an idea of what the DNA is really like for a community.
So ultimately, it's just creating jobs, providing opportunities for people to have great companies to work for, great quality of life, great restaurants to eat at, all the above. It's a fun and challenging workspace. I say I love that.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: And you mentioned that being native is a plus, helps you, and you are born and raised. Tell us a little bit about what you love about Mississippi and your job, how that personally affects you.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Yeah. So I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and Jackson sometimes gets a bad rapid just with stuff that's going on. You can see it in the national media.
But really, what Jackson is and where flow it is now, where I currently live, which is across a river from Jackson, is just. It's a close knit community where everybody knows everybody. Even though it is a large metro area, there are connections that go beyond working with one another. It's families that. That play sports against one another, that they work in the same offices, that they go to restaurants together.
It's kind of just the same heartbeat. And when things go wrong, such as whether it's natural events that take place or there's just a need in the community, everybody rallies together in Mississippi, we don't have a lot, I'd say, of financial resources.
We aren't the most wealthiest state in the country, but we have each other's backs. We fight for one another. We care for one another. We don't see racial lines. We don't see any type of any bias. We just take care of one another because it's who we are. It's what we've always done, and we try and make the best of every opportunity that we have. When I work for the state, we always use the line that we punch above our weight.
We're not the biggest, we're not the strongest, but we're gonna fight for what we believe in. We're gonna fight for what's right and for what we think can help move our state forward.
And we do that by taking care of each other. Doesn't matter where you're from in the city or where you're from in the state, Mississippians are gonna take care of mississippians.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: I love that. I mean, it feels like in different places in the states, you know, you can live next to somebody. You have no idea who they are. So that sense of being neighborly is something that we've lost oftentimes.
I found it magical. That there are these communities that are kind of embracing those values is absolutely delightful. I want to drill down, with your permission, into. You talked about creating jobs. What are the tactics? How does a organization go about creating more jobs for the local community?
[00:04:32] Speaker B: First, I think it's understanding what the local community has at its disposal, whether that's workforce, whether that's property, whether buildings or land. But then understanding what is that community going to look like in the future, in 20 to 30 years, what do we have going for us now that we can build off of? What do we see coming down in the future that we could really have an impactful relationship with?
For example, I had lunch today with a National Guard member.
He works for Mississippi National Guard. They're located in Jackson.
And we discussed, what does it look like to partner with the National Guard and companies that are in Flowwood to create a workforce pipeline. The National Guard is going to train those employees, and it's going to be pretty much those employees are going to learn how to do their jobs and get paid at the same time. Well, what happens when they transition out of the National Guard? What kind of skills do they have, and how can they use those skills that they've learned in the National Guard and translate that into the private sector? And so connecting National Guard with companies is really an idea that we thought about working on in the future, but truly just understanding the DNA of the community, being on the ground and saying, for example, Flowwood is a hotbed for a medical corridor. We have numerous hospitals.
What is technology going to look like as medicine advances? And how can we be ahead of the curve and maybe look at technology companies that help advance medical sciences and really tap into, well, those jobs. You'll need scientists that we can tap into our university system and say, hey, we can see these jobs coming down the pipeline. Can you create programs that cater towards science degrees or scientist degrees and engineers and start with the workforce and then grow from there? And hopefully in the future, if we continue with partnerships and alliances, then we can really grow in a specific corridor of technology, but create a foundation that allows us to build off what we have.
[00:06:57] Speaker A: So it immediately comes across that economic development is incredibly complicated. You're trying to, on one hand, bring employers, new companies to the region. On the other hand, you're trying to upskill your employees. You're working closely with academia in order to create future skills.
But on the other hand, the question that comes to mind, well, where are you going? How do you know? How do you decide? What is the vision of the future?
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Example is our mayor here in the city of Flowood. He's been mayor since 1989.
He's retiring in June.
He's tired of dealing with the politics of it, but he has been a phenomenal mayor. He's one of the longest tenured mayors in the entire state, and he gets things done. And he mainly talked to me about the foundation of having a successful city, a good city that people want to come to, and that revolves around safety, making sure that if people know that they're going to be safe, then they're going to most likely want to move there or they're going to locate a business there because they won't have to worry about crime. There's also, we also have the lowest taxes in the entire state. We haven't raised taxes in 30 years.
And so that's another draw. And so we try and create this ecosystem, this environment, for people to say, like, okay, we know we're going to be taken care of in our permitting. We have the fastest permitting time in the state, whether that's a business or industrial or whatever it is. So we know if we can get people that understand all of the beneficial factors of locating the flow wood and we start that relationship, we can understand that they're going to tell their friends. So then it comes to a point of, okay, well, for example, the hospitals and medical, that was a dream of ours. We wanted people to stop in flow wood and get taken care of. But then once that started, we got those restaurants, we got those hotels, we got the schools that started to pop up. And so the vision was, let's do things the right way upfront and the right companies, the right businesses will follow.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Is there models that you work by? Is there some kind of rules of thumb or does every location really just make it up? And when I say location, I mean cities, states, what are the, let's say, rules of doing it right?
[00:09:40] Speaker B: I think it's honestly communication and transparency with the public and recognizing and listening to feedback from constituents inside the community.
For example, sorry, I'm using so many examples. It's just helpful to define is pickleball. They haven't been as familiar with pickleball in a long time. And the people that have been, they came to us at leadership and said, hey, y'all should really invest into some pickleball because y'all would bring in a lot of people to flow with. And we were like, okay, what does that look like? We did some research on it. We transformed a few of our tennis courts into pokeball courts. Well, there ended up being 150 people out there every single night trying to play on four pickleball courts. And so then the pickleball cohort came to us and said, this is amazing. Is there any way that we could have more?
And we said, okay, let's look. And so we looked at another park in the city. And long story short, we're building currently, right now, we're building 18 pickleball courts.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:10:55] Speaker B: We're converting the old pickleball courts back to tennis courts. We're going to have a pickleball complex.
And so we're going to host, hopefully, national tournaments.
I was on the phone with USA Pickleball a few days ago, trying to get it sanctioned, and then that way it's a quality of life aspect, but we wouldn't have known that if we hadn't listened to the public. We haven't listened to that feedback.
So I think that's one, is to understand your community and what they want in one sense, but I think in another sense is to, it goes back to safety, it goes back to providing resources for schools to thrive, whether that is giving them money by not taking away with the legislature, going to the legislature and fighting for the community, and not just, if they say, no, don't just turn around and go back, keep fighting for it. We're trying to expand our highway that runs through the middle of Flowwood. And at first, the Mississippi Department of Transportation was kind of like, I don't know if we can make this happen, but we just kept pushing. We just kept saying, look, this is a safety hazard. This is a need in the community. And we're widening our highway to six lanes to help with school traffic. So I think there's a lot of things that our current mayor has done right and our aldermen have done right, but ultimately, it comes down to putting the people first, putting instead of their own political agendas, it's really putting the people of Flowwood first, the people of Mississippi first, understanding that's what's going to help long term.
Yes, we get a lot of negative feedback. People don't like certain things, but what is ultimately the best decision for Flowwood when it comes to decision making? Not just for one person, not for a group of people, but the entire city as a whole?
[00:13:03] Speaker A: We talked a little bit before we started recording, but I asked the question and everybody's safe and flowed. We just had a natural disaster.
So that was great to hear, very happy to hear. But I want to dig into that a little bit more and things happen that you don't expect. Right. And it can be anything. Just because we had a natural disaster now doesn't mean that's the next thing that's going to hit. How does economic development think about risks? It's not just about, oh, let's bring the great thing, but also about what are the bad things that can happen and how do we protect ourselves from them?
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
We prepare. We try and prepare for every possible scenario, whether that's a tornado or a flood or whatever it may be for. I hate to say this, but just, you know, like, if there's a gunfight or anything like that, we try and prepare and make sure that our community knows what those steps are.
And so for us, we have a very close knit team in flow wood. We have emergency director, our city clerk. We all work together, we talk together, we go to lunch every single day together and really get, get close with each other on, hey, well, like, if this happens, like, what are we going to do? Or if. If we're trying to plan for the future, how do we successfully do that?
If someone passes away, or whatever it may be, who. Who is prepared to fall in line right after a succession plan, more or less.
But it's for every type of scenario. So it's really, to me, just the idea of communication with one another. We all have great relationships within city hall and our aldermen and all of our department heads.
We have our meetings every other week. We get everybody in the room together and talk about what's going on. So everybody's all on the same page.
So if anything does happen, we know where each person is and what resources they have that help can contribute to the, the team as a whole.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: How is the, is economic development just working in a vacuum? Do they just do their thing, or is there a broader strategy within the government, in the state? How does the interaction with other organizations work?
[00:15:40] Speaker B: That's a great question. So for us, I am a team of one.
For the city of Flowwood, we also have Rankin county, that has an economic development team that they work with other municipalities and other county owned land. Then we have the state organization, Mississippi Development Authority.
I'd say we're in a fortunate position. I used to work for MDA, so I have a very close knit relationship with the governor and the head of MDA and then Rankin first as well. They also have a close relationship, and so we have. I would say the relationships are. What makes us strong is if I have a question about something, whether it's through finance or tax or whatever it may be, or how to do due diligence on a certain piece of difficult property, I can text or I can call with our state, our head of state official or our county official and say, this is the problem that I'm having.
What have you seen or what do you think is the best way to mitigate and get to a solution for that problem?
And so there's a lot of texting, a lot of communication, a lot of calls and emails back and forth.
Whether the state gets a lead on a project first or whether we get a lead on a project first, we immediately let each other know and communicate that way so that I can get the resources I need in place and the state can work on getting their resources in place and say, okay, I'm going to get, I'm going to get our city attorney prepared for this. Y'all can get, like, the financial calculations of what it's going to cost.
So that's what we work on. And then going with workforce, we have accelerate Mississippi, who's our state workforce arm. They do the connections between career coaches in high schools and with the universities and with the municipalities to make sure that there is a pipeline of workers.
If there is a project to locate 500 jobs, then we can work on that at the same time as we're working on the other, the other scopes of the project.
[00:17:54] Speaker A: Amazing. How do we bring our work for us along on this journey? So we're ahead of the curve as opposed to behind the curve.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: Trying to leverage the resources that we have here is something that I'm really kind of focused on for the next five to ten years. For example, we have a portion of our city, it's called West Rankin Parkway. We're building a new road that's going to connect our highway that runs through flowwood to the interstate.
It's about a mile and a half long, and it's currently under construction. But it is right next to the interstate corridor of I 55 that connects New Orleans to Chicago and I 20, which connects Dallas to Atlanta. It's the intersection of both those interstates. So it's a huge opportunity for us to leverage that logistical location and transportation corridor with something that could be transformational for the entire state.
One of our congressman, well, Senator Roger Wicker, he is the chair of armed services, and he's also on the committee for commerce, Science and Transportation. And so how can we use his power, I guess, in Washington to work on that technology corridor that I kind of envisioned in my mind?
How can we use the National Guard to leverage their engineers and their kind of network of workforce to talk about AI?
We're getting Amazon, we're getting so many. We're getting data engineers here in flow or here in metro area. How can we use that, use this momentum that we have and push that into the future and talk about AI? I use AI and what I do, but I have a fear that I feel like I'm correct on this, but a lot of Mississippi doesn't know what AI is because they're either scared of it, they're just ignorant about the uses for it, or just don't understand what AI is and doing that education piece for the whole state and then leveraging that with the resources that we currently have.
My goal is to make Flowwood a technology hub. We have medical here. We have, we have a lot of, we have four headquarters, national headquarters and international headquarters here in Flowwood. How can we tap into those businesses and use technology to boost the entire state?
[00:20:47] Speaker A: I heard an economist once talk about what is the greatest force that is driving equity and equality throughout the ages. And I was expecting that it would be all these movements because that's what we think about. But he said something really surprising, and obviously he's looking at this from an economic standpoint, but he said it's technology.
And then when you start to think about, it's like oh, that, you know, that's right, because the printing press did revolutionize and redistribute and then, you know, the Internet and then, you know, mobile phones. And it's like these, these are huge shocks that just shuffle the cards and allow people to, you know, to take themselves to new frontiers. So I, it's such an interesting topic, in my opinion. I was just talking to one of my friends and she was like, oh, I'm so frustrated, you know, I'm trying to write this out. I'm like, just, just dump all your ideas into chat GPT and write the following prompt and say, rewrite this for grammar. Just dump everything that you think about this topic and then have it rewrite it for you. And I said, look, this is not plagiarism. This is all your ideas. It's all you. You've just asked chat GPT to rewrite it so it sounds and looks good. And I showed her how I do this live and she was like, oh, my God, this is amazing. And it's so easy, right? As opposed to other technologies that you kind of need to wrap your head around. You just speak English to it, right? So such an opportunity, I feel, for, you know, to put that fear away. You know, AI is not, it's not general AI that. It's not a, like a human that can think and take over the world. It really is a statistical model that knows how to do really cool stuff. So I think those, those fears of the, you know, Armageddon and our future, they're going to happen, but they haven't happened yet, and they're not here right now. It might be ten years, it might be 100 years before we have general artificial intelligence. What we have now is really sophisticated statistical machines. I think that's worthwhile understanding. We're just using math to do really cool stuff.
It's such an exciting area.
I want to ask you one start to wrap up and ask you, if I may, with your permission, ask a personal question.
What was your proudest moment throughout your kind of career and also non professional stuff? What do you kind of brings you comfort when you think about your community?
[00:23:16] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. I appreciate you asking.
Proudest moment of my career.
There are times where I worked for the state and it's not really, I wouldn't say it's one specific moment, but it was those moments where you would work with a company.
This is for an expansion project. You would work for a company in a rural part of Mississippi. These people barely have a high school education, if that. And you go into this manufacturing plant and they don't know who you are, they don't see where you're from.
But you go in there and you work with this company for months and you get a deal done where it's going to increase their salary, their worker's salary, and it's also going to increase jobs for those communities and for those people in that manufacturing plant. And then you go back and after the deal is complete, the announcement's made of, and then you go back and you see the same people again and you hear their stories. They still don't know who you are, but you just sit there and talk to them. And you sit down at the lunch table or wherever you talk to them. It's like, well, like, tell me your story, like, where you from? And they're like, oh, well, I just got out of prison and I was just looking for an opportunity, or, like, I didn't have a home. And now that, like, I'm working at this job, I can provide for my two kids or I can provide a. A house over my head. I can look forward to the next day because I know I'm going to have money coming in.
It's just stories like that, that as I worked across the state, it was just really remarkable to see that the opportunities that other people may not have, and then they get those opportunities and they make the most of it, and then they're able to provide a better life for their kids that they didn't have.
That's what has been so enjoyable. And just like, it's a beautiful thing to see.
And it really keeps me going and motivated every day to provide that for my kids.
So, like, on a personal note, like, for me, like, I want to see if my kids, I have three small kids, a five year old, three year old and one year old.
If they have the opportunity to stay in Flowwood and work and raise a family, I want to provide them the best opportunity possible that they can do whatever they want to do. They can be whatever they want to be right here in float. If they go off to a major market such as New York, Dallas, Nashville, wherever it is, they know that if they want the opportunity to, that they can come back and have a life that they would be proud of back at home. So that's what kind of fuels me. Lights a fire under me to get up and get after it every day is to make sure that not in five years or ten years, but the next 20, 30, 40 years, that my kids and my grandkids have opportunities to be successful, to be proud of where they're from and ultimately change the world however they see fit.
[00:26:29] Speaker A: Daniel, thank you so much for sharing that. It's kind of delightful. I mean, many of us work in things that are going to have probably no impact, sold an extra, you know, whatever, 10%, widgets like who cares? But having the opportunity to really impact local community long term, that is, on the one hand delightful, but on the other hand, very difficult because many times don't see the value of your work and it takes a long time for it to manifest. And these are very long projects.
So it's both a challenging environment where you don't really get the accolades right. People don't know who you are. So I kind of have this thing. I think that economic development, they're really, in their own way, the heroes of the community fighting for its growth and success. But I feel like many times get more criticism than accolades unjustly. So I want to say thank you, Daniel. What an absolute pleasure.
We ask this question to every guest. If you had to go back, you know, 1020 years, what would you tell yourself?
[00:27:36] Speaker B: Oh, man, I love that question.
Let's see, probably, you know, there's never.
[00:27:47] Speaker A: A guest that isn't stumped by that line. Everybody needs a moment.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
It's a good question. For me, it's a fight for what you believe in and take care of everyone. Treat everybody the same. That's what I try and do every single day. No matter where you're from, no matter what you've gone through, make sure that people feel loved because you are loved.
And don't let anybody tear you down. Believe in yourself, because if you don't believe in yourself, how can someone else believe in you?
And so, yeah, I've had a whole life transition. This is a little off topic, but 1520 years ago, my life looked completely different. I had a tragic life event occur and I wouldn't change it because it made me who I am today. It made me who I want to be and it shaped my life. And so just fight for what is right and always remember that love. And I hope that. I hope people hear this and recognize that they are loved and to never stop caring for yourself.
[00:29:03] Speaker A: I love that. Daniel, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate you.
[00:29:07] Speaker B: Thanks, Ari. I appreciate you. Mandev.
