WEDC official: Look beyond jobs to gauge agency’s effect

By Polo Rocha
WisBusiness.com

WEDC officials heard calls from Dems last week to end the agency, but a top WEDC leader says they’ve turned the agency around and hope to earn “the respect that we believe we deserve.”

“We all feel like we’re right there [and] poised to be the economic development organization that everyone will be proud of, and I don’t want to lose that momentum,” Tricia Braun, the agency’s deputy secretary and chief operating officer, told WisBusiness.com.

The two Democratic lawmakers on WEDC’s board — Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca and state Sen. Julie Lassa — said last week that WEDC is “irretrievably broken” and proposed replacing it with a hybrid agency.

Their proposal, which Barca acknowledged has little chance of passing as is, would replace WEDC with a state agency that handles all of the state’s economic development awards, as well as a state-owned private corporation that handles marketing and strategic planning.

But Braun said WEDC is headed on the right path, pointing to its new economic development report and crediting outgoing CEO Reed Hall for much of the work.

“The work he’s done trying to put all the pieces in place to get us to this point, he deserves a lot of credit for,” Braun said.

The report, which WEDC will present to its board Thursday for approval, shows WEDC’s signed contracts this past year are set to create about 7,500 jobs and retain about 19,300 jobs.

In fiscal year 2015, WEDC handed out 351 financial awards that amounted to $246 million, much of that coming from tax credits, and that’s expected to lead to $1.2 billion in capital investments in Wisconsin, the report notes.

Braun said the report also shows the “diversity of ways in which we impact Wisconsin,” pointing to its partnerships with several groups across the state and programs that revitalize downtowns or develop abandoned property.

She also said people shouldn’t just look at jobs numbers, but take a longer-term view of WEDC’s work, highlighting the work underway in Milwaukee’s Reed Street Yards just south of Milwaukee’s downtown. WEDC has awarded a $1 million grant to that project, which will eventually become a 17-acre water technology park.

“If we simply talk about jobs, we are missing the majority of the conversation or the majority of the picture,” Braun said. “It’s truly about making investments … that will have significant impact on communities for a long time.”

Still, WEDC has had several stumbles since it began operating four years ago, facing headlines over questionable loans the agency awarded, and audits detailing how the agency has broken with its own policies and certain statutes.

Earlier this month, Braun and other top WEDC officials told the Joint Legislative Audit Committee that some of those awards shouldn’t have happened — and wouldn’t be awarded under WEDC’s current policies.

“We were in existence for four years [and] had some growing pains, making sure that our systems and policies are as efficient as they can be in enabling us to just do our jobs, which is to provide global economic development services,” Braun said.

And like any startup, Braun said, WEDC is focused on how to improve its operations and is currently working with the Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness to get recommendations on that.

But the agency is also trying to explain its work better, particularly those early-stage projects it helps out with and hopes to see “from start to finish.”

“We’re really trying to help people understand it’s not necessarily just jobs,” Braun said. “That is, we can’t actually create jobs except for the people that we employ. But we have to build a foundation and environment in which businesses can create jobs and in which communities can attract and retain the people that are going to work in those businesses.”