Chamber Doesn’t Need To DO Ec-Dev, But Can Support It

Edition: June 5, 2014

Editorial

As when machinery forced farm workers into the cities in the 19th century, and cars and highways shifted populations from cities to suburbs in the 20th, we are living in an age of disruption.

The Internet has juggled the formula in retail, media, politics, entertainment, you name it. In effect, human transactions are being replaced by electronic transmissions. It comes as no surprise that chambers of commerce – in Otsego County, as elsewhere – are facing the future with some uncertainty, as is every sector.

Traditionally, chambers brought business people together; can the web ever fully replace human interactions? Chambers, like Cooperstown’s B&B referral service, connected customers with members; the web has to a degree replaced that. Chambers aggregated small businesses to obtain group rates on health insurance; the electronic exchanges spawned by Obamacare are challenging that.

Nationally, as reflected in a recent report of Chamber Strategies, a consultancy, there’s a lively debate about what chambers need to do to remain relevant.

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What’s amazing is how many of those things Barbara Ann Heegan, who has just passed her second anniversary as director (now president/CEO) of the Otsego County Chamber, is doing. Be visible, Chamber Strategies recommends, and isn’t she everywhere? At least it seems that way.

“It’s all about membership,” says Chamber Strategies, and Heegan – she and Scott Davis, co-owner of Country Club Automotive and chair of the Otsego Chamber board, sat down for an interview the other day – gets an A+ in this very challenging area: In Heegan’s two years, membership has risen from 400 to 520, almost 30 percent.

“Build solid relationships,” Chamber Strategies says. The Otsego Chamber’s quarterly networking luncheons are at capacity. Likewise its two annual galas.

The Annual Banquet & Celebration of Small Business, Octobers at The Otesaga – at the latest, Brooks BBQ won the Breakthrough Award and Five Star Subaru, the Small Business Award – had a healthy crowd. The chamber’s annual Dinner & Celebration of Business in the spring – in March, Brewery Ommegang was the Distinguished Business and attorney John Scarzafava the Eugene A. Bettiol Jr. Distinguished Citizen – drew a record 320 to SUNY’s Hunt Union Ballroom.

This is a two-fer: In addition to building relationships, the banquets honor outstanding executives and their enterprises. Chamber Strategies would be pleased.

Barbara Ann has done much more, launching “Think Local First” with the Cooperstown Chamber’s Pat Szarpa, reviving the Otsego Leadership program for business leaders of the future, spreading TREPS to Laurens Central (and beyond) to inspire young entrepreneurs, affiliating with Broome Community College (a session on workforce development is planned this fall) and, most lately, affiliating with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to plug local members into the national dialogue.

With Scott Davis’ level-headed leadership, which will be extended when Joe Sutaris, Community Bank’s regional executive, succeeds him Jan. 1, there’s plenty of reason to feel good about the Otsego Chamber’s future, particularly after the success of its leadership – then-board chair Roxanna Hurlburt was particularly outstanding – in moving past traumatic difficulties in its insurance program in pre-Heegan days.

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As the chamber met so many of its challenges, the community’s economic-development leadership was also going through a challenging and promising repositioning.

Fueled by the two “Seward Summits” on economic development, one at The Otesaga in March 2012, the second at Foothills last November, a strategy coalesced around a “single point of contact” that would identify and develop “shovel-ready sites” and seek employers to fill them. This was recommended by “Seward Summit” keynoter Dick Sheehy of CH2M Hill, one of the nation’s top industrial recruiters, and he was completely convincing.

The Otsego County Industrial Development Agency (IDA) has committed some $3 million of its reserves over the next three years to the effort, and recruited Sandy Mathes, one of the state’s most successful business recruiters, to lead it. Wednesday, June 4, the county Board of Representatives – embracing the “SPOC” strategy – appeared ready to shift its economic development office under the IDA purview.

Knowing this, and listening to Heegan and Scott Davis, it was easy to get excited at how the chamber’s 500 members, fully on board, could be a powerful engine to ensure SPOC’s success. Who is more qualified than these 500 to tell Otsego County’s compelling story to prospective new businesses and manufacturers?

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There has been some talk – evident at the first Otsego Leadership panel discussion at the Cooperstown Graduate Program in the spring – that prospective enterprises from elsewhere shouldn’t get breaks not available to companies that have been serving the local market for years.
This, of course, is self-defeating. When a major employer is recruited – sooner or later, but inevitably – everyone doing business in Otsego County will benefit.

Behind the scenes, attention is no doubt being paid to making the Otsego County Chamber a full participant, along with its Cooperstown partner. Certainly, the chambers may lack the economic-development expertise that the IDA is building; but that’s not the chambers’ role.

But by ensuring the 500 are fully knowledgeable and supportive of the consensus drive to ensure a more prosperous future for everyone, the Otsego County Chamber, with the Cooperstown Chamber at its side, will be performing a service well beyond Chamber Strategies’ most glowing vision.