Lunch with Gray Swoope, Florida Commerce Secretary | Tampa ...

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Some are still trying to figure out how Gray Swoope can help reinvigorate Florida?s?economy. ?These are some bullet points from Swoope as he addresses those concerns in a conversation with the?members?of FCGAR?July 19th at the Centre Club in Tampa.

Swoope jumps right in with jobs:

• Digital Risk, LLC a Maitland company chose to stay in Maitland over considered moves to Dallas and Denver.? Claims to adds 1000 jobs over next 5 years?..500 over next 24 months

• Florida is a great place to do business.? Perception of CEO?s around the country is Florida is #2.

• Challenge ? strong Tourism State.? We have no business brand.? We need to build a business brand.? How do we tell the story that we are a business State as much if not more than a tourist state

Gov Scott ran on campaign of 700,000 jobs in 7 years.

Listen to Audio (I apologize as the audio is horrible, but for those that want to hear the entire discussion, here is it is

Gray Swoope ? FGCAR 07-19-2012

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Three types of ways to create Florida jobs:

1. Competitive jobs ? in competition with other cities. Companies that are wanting to relocate. ?Use incentives to make Florida more competitive.? It is important to beat out other areas, because it creates image of momentum and others will start looking to see why Florida is doing so well and will make unsolicited inquiries to consider moving to Florida.

2. Facilitating growth ? State makes a conscience decision to make an investment ? i.e. tourism, $10m for entrepreneurship (i.e. USF), Institute of Commercialization, Trade. ?These are the efforts that Florida makes to grow business from seed.

3. Organic Growth ? This is about leveraging 19 million residents in the State ? Wawa (the upscale convenience store concept) is a perfect example. ?They are moving in to Florida in a big way. ? Swoope said that we have to continue to make doing business in Florida easier. ?Permiting in Florida takes 2x as long as NJ, as he was told by a national financial institute that wanted to expand in Florida.? How do we make our State easier to do business?

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Q&A

What is your elevator speech for the Republican National Convention?

You know us because of tourism, but let us tell you about our business brand.? If you want to make a profit, this is the State.? US Chamber rated us number #1 work force.? Our people have the right attitude.? They will train for the skills they need.

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Tampa is in the best position to trade with Cuba, What are the programs?

Wait for people in Cuba to be free. ?Making a lot of progress in South American and the State is prepared to do business. He mentioned Brazil and Colombia.? This State will benefit in doing the business with our neighboring countries.

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Real estate taxes in Florida are high with neighboring states.? What are you doing to change?

Swoope doesn?t feel like over all total cost puts us at a competitive advantage.? We are very strong with corporate income tax.

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What is Enterprise Florida doing for existing business?

Existing customers need to be taken care of.? But Enterprise Florida is very challenged with low human resources, so they rely heavily on local ED partners to put together programs to serve the existing businesses.

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What are you doing to streamline regulation between the various Florida agencies (i.e. SWFWDM and local agencies)?

• Striving to keep permitting under 60 days
• Dept of Economic Opportunity runs interference to help cooperate State and local entities
• Mayor in Tampa has been working to streamline
• Gov Scott wanted to rank the counties who was doing a good job, but they decided that would not be a good idea

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Are you working on trying to get rid of sales tax on commercial rents?

(He got confused between property taxes, sales tax and property tax)

Said they had already discussed, but would look at it.? Said they looked at the total costs, but Florida is relatively low.

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Elaborate on initiatives to get business to come and stay.

• Says local press is very interested in analyzing

(Went on a tangent about criticism of incentives?mentioned most controversial program)

• Said they had only had one company in the program file bankruptcy. ?Only 6 or 7 companies in the history in the program have had difficulty
• This is a good track record

(Back to original question)

• Has programs for retention, expansion or new.? There needs to be flexibility in decision making. The incentive amount should not be a straight-line formula. ?Humans involved need to be able to move freely to make a good deal better and work and should not be held to a rigid incentive formula.

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Source: http://floridatriplenet.com/blog/tampa-business-political-news/lunch-with-gray-swoope-florida-commerce-secretary/

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