We’ve just witnessed within a single week the polar opposites of economic development in Flagler County. On January 13 the County Commission mercifully did what it should have done years ago: pull the plug on the extremely expensive life support that had kept the county’s economic development department going, at half a million dollars a year, with hardly any return but its own fantastic fictions about how great it was. No one turned up for the funeral, and there were no eulogies.
At the opposite end, last weekend at Palm Coast City Hall, we saw city offices transformed into a tiny astroturfed oasis of Silicon Valley as computer coders and developers clustered from around the state to take part in a competition and devise useful apps for real-world problems in local healthcare. It’s not the first thing you think of when you think economic development. But it should at least be part of the mix. It works better than when a local government picks and chooses winners among existing or imagined companies and hands out tax breaks like indulgences.
In a strange way for something so forward-looking, it harks back to eras when governments and scientific societies put up big prizes as incentives to discovery: the Orteig Prize, worth almost $400,000 in today’s dollars, was the financial Jet Stream behind Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. Scientific societies, think tanks and companies were doing that since the 18th century. In 2007 Congress passed the America Competes Act, gives government agencies authority to sponsor invention contests. When Obama signed its reauthorization in 2010, purses were raised to $50 million. Palm Coast’s purse this weekend was $12,000. Same idea. It’s worth the money.
Reporters were given a tour of City Hall before the competition began. The place looked like it had never looked before, with weird zen spaces for yoga, a beach surrounded by tiki candles by the lake, a city council chamber turned into a playpen even more pronounced than when the city council gathers. The whole thing contrasted so much with how City Hall had seemed to me in previous years–the atmosphere anyway was more like a concentration camp than a public space–breathing as it did with the creativity of the kind of community it wants to advance. City Hall this past weekend conjured within its walls what it hopes to see happen beyond them, in Town Center’s “innovation district” and across the county.
It was not cheap. The city put up $60,000 from its Town Center Community Redevelopment budget, and four companies and the University of Florida combined for an additional $23,500 in cash donations (Coastal Cloud chipped in $10,000, AdventHealth and UNF $5,000 each, Douglas Properties $2,000, the Chiumento law firm $1,500), with another $20,000 in-kind. So a total of just over $100,000. Those dollars will have to be examined closely, as will the spending and the connection between the donors and the city: nothing is given for nothing.
But compare that with just one of the county’s economic development subsidies of the past few years, the $90,000 it put up for that so-called spec building on U.S. 1 that was supposed to attract new businesses, and that still sits there empty–even as the former economic development director was reportedly trying to get the county to build another structure like it on airport property. That initiative went nowhere, attracted nobody, and produced not an iota of good publicity for Flagler County. So it’s been with most of the county’s alleged economic development projects, many of which, like the recent vaporization of a furniture-manufacturing deal, ended up blackening the county’s eye.
In contrast Palm Coast’s Beach Tech Hackathon, as the weekend was dubbed, brought to the city value-added attention and marketing possibilities, and can do so again if this turns into an annual event. Yes, it was expensive, but only relatively so. It was not speculative money so much as seeding the sort of industry and economic energy the city wants to develop here, especially along the lines of medical and technical fields. If you’re going to spend the money, might as well spend it on something with a direct, visible impact, and with accountability measurable in the present, not on a spreadsheet fabricating made-up windfalls years down the line.
Of course there’s risk and none of this is exactly proven, either. It could all fizzle to nothing and City Hall could very well go back to the $10 million Potemkin façade it had been in its more lugubrious days. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve been hoodwinked (which is why I’m not a great fan of government pretending to know how to do economic development). But indications say otherwise. The competition was exciting, and for a first edition of such an event (the whole thing was somehow developed in three months by what amounts to a team experienced elsewhere but still adapting to Palm Coast), it was pulled off with remarkable skill, as contestants themselves told us, and what I thought was touching, loving attention to detail in so many regards. This was not gloss for its own sake or even PR’s sake: the quality was authentic.
Just based on what was accomplished this weekend, including the embryonic creation of actual apps that caught the attention of AdventHealth, we know the city is at least onto something original and creative. As risks go, Palm Coast is spending less money for a greater chance of returns on an approach less trickle-down than entrepreneurial: hackathons make things happen in the here and now, essentially manufacturing a future before our eyes, custom-made to our own community.
We don’t need economic development departments, their cults of confidentiality, their dubious subsidies, their bogus projections of happy days around corners that never end. We need more of what Palm Coast did this weekend: send convention packing and unbind Prometheus.
Pierre Tristam is FlaglerLive’s editor. Reach him by email here or follow him @PierreTristam. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.
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CB from PC says
The competition is exciting to those participating.
The reality is that unless you have a number of corporations physically located here, the tech labor force, beyond Coastal Cloud , will have nowhere to work in this “one horse town”.
The taxpayers should not pay for capital improvements to promote this high-tech “vision” , which has been tried and failed in places having a lot more going for them than Palm Coast.
If local high-tech companies are so confident this will work, let them pay for the improvements.
Spare the “work in the cloud” BS.
A corporation using consultants wants them on site…which is why if you want to live here and work in IT, be prepared to travel.
Cmon Man says
Peer deep into the bowels of Coastal Cloud and their financiers and it is there you will find Palm Coast government. They are playing this little rinky-dink old-people town like a fiddle. This particular event, which is not uncommon for Salesforce.com partners all around the world to hold, was coordinated end-to-end by Coastal Cloud, with Coastal Cloud being the predominant benefactor. What makes this hackathon (note that the usage of this word is very subjective for anyone who works in the IT industry can attest to) different from a “normal” hackathon is that somehow or another a small local private corporation was able to convince the city government to foot at least HALF OF THE BILL!
This same small local private corporation was able to convince the city to allow it to compile all of our (mine and yours) information into their rented Salesforce.com software platform, bypassing all of those pesky, annoying competitive bidding processes. Now that same small private corporation has untethered, unabated access to the citizenry’s private information without the encumbrances of contractual law and personal data privacy. Not to mention the hiring of the city’s mayor for clear line of sight into, how was it said, “voluntary” contribution of software services?
Coastal Cloud may very well have 200 employees, but rest assured that a vast majority of them are NOT in Palm Coast. I’d venture to say that a majority are actually overseas development groups (in India no less), and even then not actual payrolled employees of the company.
Companies like Coastal Cloud need to get creative in order to entice developers to punch around in Salesforce.com API code. Programming CRM’s isn’t exactly what every millenial dreams of doing in their spare unpaid time. That doesn’t mean that you and I have to PAY for that. That should have been and should always be paid for entirely by the corporation themselves, not the taxpayers. I have literally never heard of a hackathon held in a public city hall, sponsored and promoted by that city, where the city itself was not a sole benefactor of the code or applications created. Great for Coastal Cloud, but the City of Palm Coast will never see that $60,000 return. It is gone away to money heaven never to return just like the $100k salary of the city’s Innovation Director.
CB from PC says
The only ones to benefit from moving this forward are the owners of Coastal Cloud.
Btw, is Mayor Holland Salesforce Certified? That was a requirement for employment with Coastal Cloud.
The participants in this hackathon
probably have no ownership of the apps they developed, which will now provide a basis for software owned by you know who, and subsequent profit.
Same stench, different pile.
KC says
We are software developers at the top of our industry and moved to Palm Coast a couple years ago after looking at cities all around Florida. Literally the only reason we moved here was to have a certain lifestyle: we live near one of the few pristine beaches left in the US, with miles of trails right at our doorstep, and Florida is a friendly state for homeschoolers (we homeschool our daughter, as many tech people do). When you are in control of your financial fate and can live anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection, those are major attractions. The fact that we landed in an area of Palm Coast with AT&T Fiber was icing on the cake – we have faster systems now than some of our corporate clients. Premium infrastructure is probably the one aspect of this community that is not being marketed nearly enough.
That said, these hackathons are not going to accomplish anything. For actual software developers, the prize money is not worth the time of entering the competition – you get paid multiples of that doing contract work in the tech industry. If you work in tech already, to enter these contests is to turn down money, not make it. What you are getting at these events are kids out of computer science programs at area universities who are headed into entry-level software jobs, assuming they even qualify for them. You are not judging them on creating a real, marketable product either, but on creating a PowerPoint presentation about a theoretical product for people who generally are not serious tech personalities themselves. These are not people who are in the position to locate a bona fide company to the area. This is not a way to grow a local economy.
Infrastructure and a well-educated population are what attract lucrative business to an area. Not gimmicky economic development events. Not “affordable” “workplace” housing going up everywhere – which, let’s face it, is more likely to turn this city into a village of thousands of Airbnbs than a serious economy.
KC says
I should also say that encouraging younger generations in the tech industry is not inherently a bad thing. Events like this can be great for local schools, showing kids why they need to learn the information that is being presented to them in their classrooms.
Pretending that these events are going to transform the local economy is the problem.