August/September Business View Magazine

240 241 Tallahassee is a government town. It is also a University Town. Those are the two largest drivers of the economy. Together, they have also created a very entrepreneurial culture, and it is the recog- nition of this that allowed the County to leverage those assets. For example, the University has the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, one of only two in the country, and so they are doing a lot of work around the Magnetic Lab to create a sort of magnetic industry cluster. “And it’s not all vertical development,” says Long. “Another project that worked that way was a cross-country running facility.We completed building it and we very quickly realized that we had tapped into something really big, something that was needed.We had used the expertise from Florida State University and teamed up with our local track club here in town and we used the experts to design a facility designed by runners for runners.What we ended up with was one of the premier cross-country venues in the coun- try. And so, we just landed the bid for the NCAA Cross-Country Championships in 2021. That will be the first time in the tournament’s 80 years that it will be held in the State of Florida.We are really excited about the economic potential that has. And what we realized in the process was that sports tourism can be a great economic driver as well.” “We talk about this a lot around here,” he points out. “When they write the history on Leon County, they will look back at this time and there will be people who scratch their heads and say, ‘Wow, how could they have done it?’ because the year LEON COUNTY, FLORIDA aligns with what was the middle of the Recession. Again, when all the music had stopped, we took on some of our most am- bitious public infrastructure projects. And I am including in that parks and greenways, sidewalks, and things where the private sector clearly looked at it as leveraging smart money in a shaky economy.” Another really innovative step the Coun- ty took was to partner with a venture cap- ital company out of Atlanta to create Domi Station, a community business incubator, set up in an old, abandoned county ware- house. Since opening in May 2014, Domi has, through various co-working member- ships and incubator programs, engaged at least 467 individual members, hosted or organized 450-plus events, and worked with companies that have gone on to raise $5.4 million in investment. “And we have just launched something that I am not sure there are a lot of local governments doing,” Long adds. “We have tended to be pioneers among local gov- ernments in terms of sustainability and one of the things we just launched is a sort of a Paris Accord type of compact with the large organizations like the County, universities, hospitals, Tallahassee, and others, whereby these large organizations would come together and collectively try and reduce our greenhouse gas impact and our carbon emissions through working together in a collaborative fashion. And we are very thankful to our private sector partners who have agreed to join us in those efforts - many of whom were doing really good things on their own. But we think, collectively, we can have a better impact.”