Beginning in 2009, eight leading Berks County organizations — The Berks County Industrial Development Authority, the Berks County Planning Commission, the Berks County Workforce Investment Board, the City of Reading, the Greater Berks Development Fund, the Greater Reading Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Greater Reading Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the Greater Reading Economic Partnership — began collaborating to develop a new economic development plan for Greater Reading and Berks County.

Their efforts culminated with the June 2010 release of the Ride to Prosperity: Strategies for Economic Competitiveness in Greater Reading. The original RTP plan has helped guide key county economic development initiatives over the past four years, and spurred a new spirit of collaboration around the important work of building a more prosperous and successful Greater Reading and Berks County.

In the fall of 2013, the coalition partners published, Ride to Prosperity Version 2.0, building on the original work plan and laying out a new vision for economic development in the coming years. The newly proposed strategies focused on five key areas: Entrepreneurship and Innovation; Workforce and Talent Development; Sites and Infrastructure; Quality of Place; and Business Friendly Berks — a new effort to bring top quality business expertise to help local governments redesign how they interact with local businesses in areas like zoning and licensing, and to become national leaders in providing high quality customer services.

As we near the mid-point of 2014, Route 422 Business Advisor checked in with some of the individuals and organizations working on the various initiatives of the RTP plan, to report on the progress being made on key components.

Workforce and Talent Development

The goal of this initiative is to transform the County’s Career and Technical Education system so that area youth are better prepared to enter growing technical career fields and local employers can tap into a skilled and career-ready workforce.

Greater Reading Economic Partnership’s (GREP) award winning “Careers in Two Years” program is reaching out to students and their parents, encouraging them to consider high paying careers in key manufacturing technology fields. These positions, which require post high school education short of a four-year degree, are known as middle skill jobs, and are projected to be the fastest growing employment segment in the US economy. By building a strong base of middle skill talent, Berks County not only provides promising career options to area youth, but it also benefits employers who will be attracted to Berks County thanks to its strong pipeline of skilled technical workers.

“There has been some very good progress because now the entire effort has been in place long enough so that the Career and Technology Centers, as well as the Community College, have been able to share some numbers,” said Jon Scott, President and CEO of GREP. “In the areas where we have been promoting specific jobs and careers, in companies that have current openings, there has been an increase in enrollment. There has also been a significant increase in the number of hits to the website (www.careersin2years.com), and so we are very confident that the campaign is working,” he said, adding, “That’s what Careers in Two Years really is, a promotional campaign to get people to think differently about the validity of going to a career and technology center or to a community college as a very viable alternative to a traditional four-year education. That’s the best path for some people, but not necessarily everyone. It’s not an either-or situation, but what is best for a given person.”

GREP’s Careers in Two Years program is now expanding its outreach beyond young people entering the work force for the first time. “The first phase of this effort was really targeting people coming out of high school or in their first year or two of college, and not having a great sense of direction at that point, and looking to get good job training and get a good high paying job, getting their feet solidly on the ground,” Scott explained. “We are now in the process of trying to get things set up to do a second initiative that still targets the manufacturing sector, but is looking at a different group of people, specifically those who might be under-employed, unemployed and returning veterans,” he said.

“Typically that would be a somewhat older demographic,’ Scott explains. “We’re going to do a campaign that would have a similar theme. We’re hoping to have that completed by the end of this year, and if things align really well we might even be able to start launching in the fall.”

Last November, members of the partnership, working on educational initiatives, held a county-wide summit to engage parents, educators and students. “That worked out well,” Scott said. “A month or two before that, thanks in great part to the lead of Dr. Solomon Lausch (executive director of the Berks Business Educational Coalition), over 4,500 high school freshmen heard information at an assembly, and then went out to visit businesses, all in one week,” Scott said. “They heard first-hand what various businesses are looking for in their line of work,” Scott said, explaining many were manufacturing businesses, but not all.

“More importantly,” Scott continued, “ these students got to hear from business people, what they expect out of an employee . . . The people that were sharing the information were folks that worked within the various companies, and it was a real life example. I think it was proof positive for many of those students to realize that if they do a good job in school, pay attention, learn some core ground rules, that they will have a much more successful time gaining employment than people who don’t do that.”

Entrepreneurship and Innovation

The RTP plan proposed a new county-wide effort, Reignited in PA, to groom a new generation of high growth companies in Berks County. The Greater Reading Chamber of Commerce and Industry applied for and received a PA Ignite grant from the PA Department of Commerce to work with small and medium-sized manufacturers to facilitate growth acceleration.

Diane Reed, Director of Business Services for the Greater Reading Chamber said the grant was awarded “specifically to identify small and medium size businesses to assist with a growth strategy.”

Reed defined small and medium size businesses as those having between ten and 100 employees. Reed explained that the Ride to Prosperity Reports determined that the rate of start-up businesses in Berks County was on par with other counties. “Where we lag behind some of the other counties is the upturn in the business,” she said. “The 10-employee company growing to 20. The 50-employee business growing to 100. Manufacturing is vital to the economy for all of us. Every manufacturing job creates nine jobs downstream in the service industry, plus the dollars spent,” Reed said. “There are between 600-700 manufacturing companies in Berks County alone. We do have a good base. What I have been seeing is there are a lot of good things being made here that people probably don’t know about. Our success and growth will probably come from that group. From inside,” she said.

The PA Ignite grant involves both assessment and assistance to small manufacturers in Berks County. The scope of the grant is to assist companies with growth strategies. “The first product is a ‘core values business assessment,” Reed explained. “We sit down with all the key executives of the business and we take them through an assessment, which takes about three hours.”

Upon completing the assessment, the business is assigned a score, and given a dollar value in terms of what the business is worth today, and also what it is potentially worth. “Analysis of the assessment points out the areas that are holding the business back from voiding that gap, creating that value,” Reed said. “So our first step with the grant is to do the assessments. That is done at no charge to the company. After seeing what came out of that analysis, we look at areas to work with them on, to help increase the value of the business. Since November we have done eight full assessments and we’re looking to do six more between now and the end of June,” Reed said. “Our goal is 30 companies.”

Reed noted that on the first five companies that participated, there was a common theme that went through their assessments— “The executive team not having a clear vision of where they want the business to go,” she said. “How do you get everybody in your company on the same page at the same time, and how do you get it done? The key executives of all five companies are now participating in sessions to work on developing the vision for their companies. They are in different industries so they all agreed to participate together. That program is going quite well. These first five are the test case, but we’re really excited with what we are seeing from that,” Reed said. “We’re trying to find the commonalities among the companies, and work with them. By bringing them all together we can spread out the dollars and get a bigger bang for the buck, rather than do an individual plan for each company.

“Throughout the two years of the grant, we will constantly have different companies at different stages of the process,” Reed said. “The other thing that is very unique to this is we are assigning a case manager to each of these companies,” she explained. “Typically companies have management teams. They may sit down and have meetings and assign tasks, but three meetings in, there are fires to be put out, a meeting gets cancelled or somebody can’t make it. Before you know it, time passes and the project doesn’t get done. So we’re assigning independent case managers as we come up with a plan for the company. The case manager is going to be there, holding their feet to the fire.”

One other requirement of the grant is the program should be sustainable. “Written into our program is, in the initial stages, supplementing the grant funds, companies are putting some skin in the game,” Reed said, “but as we go on and we have some successes to show from it, we may be funding a smaller portion of it. If we help a company and they grow and become more profitable, we might ask them to fund or partially provide funding for a next company coming into the program,” she said.

Regarding the criteria for inclusion in the program, “They need to be a manufacturer or manufacturing services or supply chain,” Reed said. “I’ve been seeking them out by going out and talking to companies, or they contact us. Our determination comes from the interview, understanding their business and determining if this is a company positioned to grow, and we look at them on a case-by-case basis. “Manufacturing is alive and well in Berks County,” Reed concluded, “and there are businesses and a lot of neat things being made here and being done here.”

Sites and Infrastructure

The RTP partners have enjoyed great success in developing new sites for industrial development over the past four years and continue to expand on this success. “There is a huge amount going on in that arena, with multiple organizations that have coalesced and are all working together on various aspects of trying to make sure that we continue to get more land, properties and sites available for economic development purposes, including new property, as well as the adaptive reuse of existing sites and properties,” said GREP’s Jon Scott.

Berks County can point to some impressive infrastructure-related achievements since 2010. A number of new sites are emerging across the county. In Bethel, Berks Park 78 is thriving, with new tenants including PetSmart and Dollar General. On their own, these two firms are expected to employ more than 1,000 people. Near Morgantown, 200+ acres at the New Morgan Business Center has been designated as a Keystone Opportunity Zone (KOZ), greatly enhancing its desirability for new businesses. Other smaller sites are being developed in locations such as Amity Township, near the Reading Regional Airport, and Hamburg Logistics Park.

Jon Scott said some important work is currently going on in the city of Reading as well. He pointed out that the Redevelopment Authority has recently regained control of 50 acres designated for Keystone Opportunity Zone (RiverView Industrial Park project), and the city of Reading has taken over some properties right in the heart of the city, the 400 block of Penn Street (Penn Square project). Scott added that work is also going on in townships and municipalities throughout the county, where there is an interest in seeing increased economic development, because of the tax benefits that accrue to not only their municipality, but to the county as well.

According to Scott, RiverView Industrial Park is an important project, and a “big step.” With 50 “shovel-ready” acres in a KOZ, plus the site is contiguous to the successful Buttonwood Gateway light industrial park. “There is really a good opportunity for great economic development at that site,” Scott said. “A former project was started there and didn’t come to fruition, but what that translates to is a lot of the infrastructure work has already been done.” RiverView Industrial Park is located within five miles of I-76 with easy access to Rt. 183, Rt. 422, and Rt. 222. It is an ideal property for manufacturing, light industrial, and water-intensive industrial use. The site is ready-to-go with utilities, offers plentiful labor supply, a 10-year tax abatement program, KOZ benefits and other incentives.

With Albert Boscov’s development of a new Doubletree Hotel and Convention Center underway across from the Santander Arena, and the Penn Square mixed-use development project, located directly on Reading’s Keystone Community Main Street Corridor, exciting things are happening in downtown Reading. “Those are very important projects that have the capacity to really become an anchor at the eastern side of the Penn Corridor,” Jon Scott said, adding, “Albert Boscov is one of the most amazing men I have ever met. As an octogenarian, he still has more vitality and energy than most people who are 30.”

The Penn Square project encompasses an entire half-block, including the nine-story, 68,000 square-foot Callowhill Building at 10 North 5^th Street, and the 24,000 square-foot Farmers national Bank building at 445 Penn Street. The site offers excellent amenities and proximity to great restaurants and entertainment venues. The contact person for information on RiverView Industrial Park and Penn Square is Adam Mukerji; 610.655.6025; email: development@readingpa.org.

Quality of Place

The RTP partners recognize that hospitality and tourism are key, but little understood, anchors of the Berks County economy. Under RTP 2.0, they seek to develop a stronger tourism sector that provides high quality jobs to local residents and attractive amenities for visitors.

Crystal Seitz, President of Go Greater Reading — Greater Reading Convention & Visitors Bureau, chairs the RTP Quality of Life initiative. Seitz and her group are working on developing a Destination Marketing Analysis growth plan.

“We will be going out for RFPs for this study shortly and hopefully we’ll be taking it on in July,” Seitz said. “It includes collecting visitor data on who is coming to the area and, if they are not coming to the area, why not? Do they even know about us? Who are our competitive sets out there, not just in Pennsylvania, but up and down the mid-Atlantic coast? What are our strongest assets, and from a research perspective, does it make sense to promote and choose one of them to build upon to bring new industry, new business and grow the businesses we currently have around that, or is there a totally different type of product that would do well in this area, that we don’t have to offer, and how do we make that happen? How do we invest in that to make it part of Greater Reading?”

Seitz said that a consulting firm will be selected to conduct the data collection process and analysis. “There is a visitor data collection methodology,” she said. “Part of the RFP is to tell us how you are going to collect the data. Our assumption based on talking to several consultants is there will be phone interviews, email surveys of people who have visited here, or are within a proximity of our area that haven’t visited here. There will be man on the street interviews, looking at who is here, and what are they saying at events. There will be other data that is analyzed about our competitive sets. They need to look at other similar cities with histories like ours, or size like ours, or amenities like ours. Who is that and why are they our competition? What do they have that we don’t have? When we get the RFPs back, we’ll have the methodology and how they are going to collect it,” she explained.

According to Seitz, who describes the project as “ambitious but doable,” RFPs are due back June 6. “We’re going to ask each consultant to tell us their time frame,” Seitz said. “My guess is, because of the collection of the data, the analysis, and we’ll get business leaders involved, and the community, that takes time. Our hope is to have something to look at and move forward with hopefully by the end of January or February.”

“(This analysis) will support the tourism industry and help us understand the direction we need to head,” Seitz explained, “because a lot of things have changed all over the country the last five or six years. Some of our product here has changed, but we also have a lot of product that we believe we can look at as becoming a niche for the area and a destination. How do we differentiate ourselves? That’s the key,” she said.

“We have terrific restaurants,” Seitz said. “We have great entertainment at really good value. It’s quality entertainment. Outdoor recreation is huge in this area. We have road cycling, and motorcycle riding, all kinds of hiking trails and some areas for boating and skiing. With all those things included, we know that outdoor recreation is really strong and we need to look to how do we build that?”

“What this all goes back to is creating a stronger Berks County that young professionals want to come here and stay,” Seitz concluded. “They find a lot of great things to do, so they want to be a part of it. Business looks and that and wants to consider moving in. It helps to instigate them to consider moving in. To look at this and say ‘Wow, this is a pretty nice place. They have great things for everybody to do and it would be a really nice place to have a business. And I know I can get skilled workers and white-collar workers.’ It’s also building a much better place for our local residents,” Seitz explained.

“It’s important to have a vision and direction,” Seitz said, “and I think the Ride to Prosperity has given us that. The key to this, when we’re done with this plan, is to get our business leaders and our economic development organizations to implement the plan, and be willing to invest in that plan. Based on conversations we’ve had within our Ride to Prosperity committee, in theory, everybody is on board with that. That’s the most important piece.”

Business Friendly Berks

The RTP partners have created a Business Friendly Greater Reading Task Force in a new effort to bring top quality business expertise to help local governments redesign how they interact with local businesses in areas like zoning and licensing, and to become national leaders in providing high quality customer services.

Related to site development, progress has been made in the development of a countywide water and sewer plan that maps local infrastructure and its capacities for various uses, and the mapping of dozens of smaller industrial sites across the County. These smaller sites are often located in communities seeking redevelopment opportunities, and the reuse of these sites is excellent use of former industrial land.

According to Shannon L. Rossman, Intergovernmental Affairs Planner, Berks County Planning Commission, “We have a couple of initiatives that have gone really well. In our municipalities, we’ve been working on initiatives centered around regionalization. One of the things we try to do is get the municipalities to work together on planning issues,” she said. “We’ve had a fairly successful joint comprehensive planning program and zoning program since the early ‘90s, and we have a number of municipalities that have done joint zoning and also we have five joint zoning ordinances in the county.”

“We’ve also been working with the municipalities on trying to coordinate whether it’s a project as simple as them working together to share equipment, also up to and including regionalization of water and sewer systems, in terms of cooperating with one another,” Rossman explained.

“In 2011 we did an update to our 1998 water and sewer regionalization study, where we gathered all the information on as many systems as we could who cooperated in the county, and we came up with a number of different ways for them to work together and provide information to prospective developers and the public about their systems.” Rossman said. “We tried to help them come up with ideas of ways they could work together that would be financially beneficial.  In the 2011 update, we recommended the development of a Berks County Water and Sewer Association, to take the study and turn it over to that group and ask them move forward with what they think are the most appropriate items. We now have more than 70 participants in that association. We’ve appointed the Center for Excellence at Albright College as treasurer so that we could have a non-profit be the organizational structure. It costs to be a member, so nobody is joining for free. We’ve had a number of educational programs. We’re working with their operators to provide local educational credit programs, to keep them licensed properly. We’ve worked on getting them more open to the idea of sharing information. We’ve developed a map that shows where current zoning for commercial and industrial or mixed use is located in the county and where water and sewer service is located in the county. You can overlap those maps and see where those types of services are. That’s been very well received. Most of the larger public suppliers and a couple of the private ones have joined, and are working together,” Rossman said.

“In general, a lot of municipalities are trying to determine how can we be business friendly and juggle everything so we still have good residential areas, good schools, everything is in its place, and a good tax base or other revenue coming in without too much reliance on one entity,” Rossman continued. “We have some municipalities that are slower than others (to regionalize efforts). In some cases, that’s because they haven’t had as much pressure. Some are more forward thinking and they’ve also had more development pressure. We’ve had a series of programs that we’ve worked with our municipalities on in the early ‘90s involving joint comprehensive planning, zoning, conservation zoning initiatives, agricultural preservation initiatives. We’ve had one of best agricultural preservation easement purchase programs in the country. I think we’re over 66,000 acres that we’ve purchased easements to. At the same time, we put a lot of effort into economic development on the other side of things towards business and manufacturing.”

Beyond the RTP’s notable achievements in specific issue areas, the initiative has spawned a new way of working in Berks County. Regional collaboration is now the normal way of doing business. It is not tied to a single project or initiative; it is how economic development gets done today. These collaborations are producing better outcomes, as more partners bring new and better services to local businesses and to companies considering relocation to Berks County. Board members of partner groups now have a more complete picture of how other organizations contribute to the local economy. Even better, collaboration is creating a more efficient system where waste and duplication are reduced and where partners are publicly accountable to each other and to the wider community. The day-to-day work of economic development in Berks County is smoother, more collaborative, and, in the end, more effective.

The RTP partners will continue to develop and expand their partnerships so that they can support key economic development initiatives while also serving as smart stewards of both public and private investments in the community.