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Released less than two weeks after St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch’s selection of a developer for the Tropicana Field project, the Tampa Bay Partnership’s 2023 Regional Competitiveness Report would’ve been easy to overlook — f not for the treasure trove of valuable data and insights it contains.
Produced in conjunction with the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business, the Community Foundation of Tampa Bay and United Way Suncoast, the report, now in its sixth year, is essentially a snapshot — a report card, if you will — of how the region is doing compared to 19 other cities of similar size. It measures economic vitality, infrastructure, talent, innovation and civic quality, using more than 65 key indicators to show where the region is excelling and where it needs to improve.
The 2023 report is also notable in that it’s the first one to be compiled under the auspices of Bemetra Simmons, who in October 2021 succeeded Rick Homans as president and CEO of the Tampa Bay Partnership. Simmons’ name is likely familiar to many people in Tampa Bay’s banking sector, as she’s held leadership positions with BB&T, Wells Fargo and Mutual of Omaha Bank over the past 15-plus years. Prior to joining the Tampa Bay Partnership, she most recently served as chief strategy and operating officer at United Way Suncoast.
“I was a nerdy banker for many, many years,” Simmons says with a laugh. “But I had some engagement with the Tampa Bay partnership when I was working with United Way Suncoast.”
Simmons says her background in banking has prepared her well for a more public-facing role as the head of the Tampa Bay Partnership, which is a non-governmental coalition of about 40 business and nonprofit leaders that works to promote inclusive growth of Tampa Bay’s eight-county regional economy.
“When you're working in banking, especially as a relationship manager, you're working with business owners, family-owned businesses, publicly traded companies, middle market companies — it really runs the gamut,” she says. “You're working with CEOs or CFOs, those C-suite folks, on a regular basis to solve their business needs, cash-flow needs, expansion needs or whatever it may be.”
Simmons has also served on the board of the Tampa Bay Chamber of Commerce, in addition to being appointed by former Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, and reappointed by current Mayor Jane Castor, to the Tampa Housing Authority’s board of commissioners.
The latter qualification is especially salient given Tampa Bay’s well-documented affordable housing crisis, which, when coupled with persistent transportation challenges, has the region fighting a two-front war for economic prosperity.
“When you tie transportation and housing together, for every dollar that our residents earn, they’re spending 54 cents on housing and transportation, and they haven’t eaten anything; they’ve had not one bite of food. So, we’ve got some work to do there.”
The numbers are indeed troubling. Whereas rising home values, in past regional competitiveness reports, had been viewed as a net positive, the rate of acceleration has gotten completely out of hand, officials say, leading to economic imbalance and exacerbating socioeconomic disparity.
“Tampa Bay is clearly a region on the rise and demand for space has accelerated prices for real estate,” the 2023 report reads. “Tampa Bay ranks first in existing home sales price growth rate with an increase of 26%. Nationally, this increase was 11%. Tampa Bay has an average wage of $57,427 and ranks 18th among comparison communities. Seattle, by comparison, has an average wage of $103,110, and saw home sales prices grow 10%.”
One way to close that gap, says Simmons, is to focus on improving the region’s talent pipeline, developing the skills of the existing workforce and luring employers that will create higher-paying jobs.
“We are seeing affordability issues,” Simmons says. “With an average home cost of almost $380,000, if you make $80,000, you can’t afford to buy a house — and $80,000 is not a bad job.”
In some ways, Tampa Bay’s uneven report card — “a little bit of a mixed bag,” Simmons says — is indicative of how the region could be seen as a victim of its own success.
“The secret is out,” she says. “We’re No. 1 in net migration.”
Time magazine’s recent inclusion of Tampa in its 2023 list of the world’s greatest places will only serve to attract more newcomers.
“The challenge that could bring us is if we keep having people who come here from, say, New York or Chicago, and they think $378,000 for a home is a steal,” Simmons says. “We want to see folks coming here who are going to create business opportunities … advanced-industry, higher-paying jobs that our residents will have access to.”
Buckhorn, however, takes issue with the characterization of Tampa as paying a high price for success. In an interview with the Business Observer about the regional competitiveness report, he puts it a different way.
“With our success comes additional challenges that we didn’t have before, and that’s a good thing,” the former mayor says, “because I have lived and served through the alternative, which is where nobody is coming here, no one is investing, no one is building and our best and brightest young people are leaving, because there is no hope, no future. I've lived through that. I didn’t have the luxury of some of the problems that we face now, which are challenging, but they’re better than what we faced 10 years ago.”
Buckhorn, who after leaving office joined Shumaker Advisors as a principal and executive vice president in the Tampa-based lobbying firm's U.S. cities practice, believes transportation is nothing less than Tampa Bay’s Achilles’ heel, and the numbers in the report bear that out. The region has fallen woefully behind many of its peers in several key infrastructure metrics, including transit ridership per capita, which is an abysmal 7.19, and transit vehicle revenue miles per capita, which amounts to 8.95. Compare that to Seattle, whose numbers in those categories are 30.3 and 26.96, respectively.
The kicker is there’s real passion for change. Several voter-driven efforts have arisen over the past decade to address transportation shortcomings on both sides of the bay. Yet those efforts have failed at the ballot box or in court multiple times. Case in point: the sales tax increase that would’ve raised billions of dollars to be applied to a growing backlog of delayed road safety and transit projects in Tampa and Hillsborough County.
Voters OK’d that tax hike via a 2018 referendum only to see then-Hillsborough County Commissioner Stacy White mount a legal challenge. The lawsuit went all the way to the Florida Supreme Court, which in 2021 ruled, 4-1, that the measure was unconstitutional.
Florida Chief Justice Charles Canady, in his ruling, said the violation of state law in the invalidated the entire ballot measure because the tax increase could not be separated -- or, in legal terms, severed -- from the plan for spending the money, according to a report from WUSF Public Media published Feb. 25, 2021.
“Despite those who have repeatedly attacked me, I was delighted with this ruling,” White posted on Facebook, according to the WUSF story. “It affirms my position that the way this referendum was written was unlawful.”
Buckhorn, meanwhile, more than two years later, doesn’t mince words when he discusses what could have been.
“Shame on the small group of people who, to use a transportation analogy, derailed that referendum,” he says. “It’s a handful of folks who literally overturned the will of the people and set us back decades. There's a special place in hell for them.”
On a more positive note, one can almost hear the pride in Buckhorn’s voice as he discusses the region’s net migration and in-migration rate for people between the ages of 25 and 34.
“When I ran for office in 2011, my campaign, to a large degree, was based on the fact that I wasn't going to lose my kids to Charlotte, North Carolina,” he says. “If you remember, all the young people at that time were leaving Tampa and going to Charlotte, or Atlanta, or Austin, or Raleigh-Durham. That has completely reversed itself now.”
He adds: “The in-migration of intellectual capital will drive our economy for the next decade. That, to me, is the most promising development over the last couple of years — we've now become the place in America that everybody wants to be.”
Becoming the most desirable, hippest home for highly educated 20- and 30-somethings is all well and good.
But Simmons is concerned about an even younger cohort: kindergartners. According to the report, less than half of Tampa Bay children are ready for kindergarten, and that number is not only trending in the wrong direction, but it’s affecting kids’ educational development, with only 50.47% of third-graders passing the English Language Arts Florida Standards Assessment, also known as the third-grade reading test.
“A lot of people might ask, ‘Why does the business community care about that?’ but kindergarten through third grade is when you learn to read, and then beginning in fourth grade, they assume you know how to read, and you read to learn, and so it becomes much more difficult for students to catch up. That's going to have an impact on our talent pipeline in the very near future.”
She adds, “We already have an issue with what we call disconnected youth, so we've got to find a way to improve our kindergarten readiness and our third-grade reading level scores.”
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