Staff Writer
PRESQUE ISLE — The Northern Maine Development Commission and the Aroostook Partnership for Progress are teaming up on Thursday to host the Mobilize Maine “Discovery” Forum, from 2:30 to 5 p.m. at Northern Maine Community College’s Edmunds Conference Center. The event is designed to encourage participants to take part in shaping Aroostook County’s future. Refreshments will be provided. “We’re inviting people to attend, give updates since our last meeting. We’re looking at setting regional goals and designating action teams,” said Walt Elish, president of the APP.
Mike Eisensmith, director of economic development at NMDC, said this is a continuation of earlier discussions on ways to improve the local economy.
“Back in mid-June we held a major meeting, a ‘foundation’ meeting, and brought 90 people together to talk about this strategic plan initiative. At the end of the meeting, we came up with several areas that we felt needed to be addressed over the course of the next couple months,” said Eisensmith.
The Sept. 17 meeting, he said, will serve a couple of those purposes.
“We’ll look at regional strategic goals. We’ve come up with some goals and will present those on Thursday. Another area that’s been refined since our earlier meetings is the idea of what our quality of place is for the region,” an idea that started about three years ago when the governor had a task force convene to look at ‘quality of place’ from the state’s perspective, said Eisensmith.
Eisensmith said these topics will be more “dialogue than ‘here it is,’ but they’ll provide the basis for doing other components which will start at this meeting and will actually expose people to how things are done.”
The approach to this is significantly different than strategic planning in the past, said Eisensmith.
“We used to say ‘what do we need to grow, to survive’ — you looked at what you needed and what you had to do to get it. This approach looks at resources, maps them out, then looks at a couple specific industries — or clusters,” said Eisensmith, noting the specific industries or clusters hadn’t been determined as of last Friday.
“We’ll be looking at potential cluster industries to map and looking at the county’s indigenous resources, looking to map what we already have,” said Elish.
“We want to expose people to these ideas in a more concrete form,” he said, adding that other considerations will be rolled into the discussion.
Eisensmith said consideration will be given to where people would like to see the area in the next five or six years.
The goals will help direct us to what clusters we need to focus on, looking into the year 2015. Goals will help guide which particular clusters will be eventually analyzed and mapped,” he said.
Mobilize Maine is a statewide economic development initiative involving all six of the state’s Economic Development Districts (EDD), including the Northern Maine EDD which is administered by NMDC. The initiative to build regional capacity is funded in part by FairPoint Communications through its planning consultant ViTAL Economy Alliance, the latter which specializes in asset-based community economic development. A Rural Business Opportunity Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to NMDC funds a portion of the project taking place in the county.
“This was a real opportunity for us. We became aware about three years ago, when FairPoint announced plans to take over Verizon, that they planned to do this,” said Eisensmith. “Businesses need phone services, so everybody wins.”
Eisensmith said invitations to the event went out some time ago and that this is more of a reminder.
“We invited a ‘target’ audience. We’re trying to create a little momentum here. We believe we have some good information and we’re just trying to get it in front of people,” said Eisensmith, who said the process will be going on for the next year, with a final report due out around June 2010.
For more information on Mobilize Maine or the event, contact Judy Dinsmore at 498-8736 or e-mail jdinsmore@nmdc.org.
Mobilize Maine Leadership Committee for Aroostook County includes: Dave Peterson, Kris Doody, Jon Prescott, Larry Shaw, Virginia Joles, Bob Clark, Alan Landeen, Chris Anderson, Scott Kent, Richard Daigle, Steve Gagnon, Dave Gordon, Nate Berry, Ryan Pelletier, Ray Mersereau, Dr. Don Zillman, Dr. Richard Cost and Tim Crowley.
