Mark Anthony Thomas has long believed the Greater Baltimore Committee needed to better define its purpose and goals to make a mark on the region’s economic development.
A new 10-year strategic plan, unveiled Thursday evening, sets out to do that. The plan calls for a “sea change” in what it describes as a lack of urgency in attracting business and nurturing entrepreneurs,
The plan, the first big project Thomas took on after becoming GBC’s president and CEO in December 2022, sets priorities to guide private and public investment and regional collaborations that can spark transformational change over a decade. The GBC presented its ideas during its annual meeting Thursday evening, a networking event with cocktails, hors d’oeuvres and entertainers in a cavernous warehouse at Tradepoint Atlantic in Sparrows Point.
The blueprint seeks to position the region’s people, businesses and amenities as a globally recognizable and competitive brand. It stresses the need for Baltimore and six surrounding counties to collaborate in order to better compete.
And it suggests narrowing the focus of future growth to three specific industries: life sciences and predictive technologies, logistics and light manufacturing; and creativity and culture.
The idea, Thomas said in an interview, is to “drive GBC’s work and help the broader market, internationally and domestically, understand here’s what we’re doing as a body of partners that will grow jobs, really amplify our economic opportunity and tackle some of the key challenges where the private sector can lean in.”
Gov. Wes Moore kicked off the GBC’s annual event Thursday, saying the business community’s involvement will be key to making the plan’s ideas reality.
“If we’re serious about building the kind of city and the kind of region that those who came before us hoped for and those who come after us deserve, it means that every single one of us needs to have our fingerprints on the blueprint,” Moore said.
The blueprint lays out three key areas of economic development.
- Industry and innovation: The plan recommends improving the Baltimore region’s culture of entrepreneurship and supporting a broader diversity of people to participate, ensuring that more research gets translated into new products and firms, and developing sites and transportation infrastructure to attract national and international investors.
- Place and community: Goals include investing in existing and emerging areas of concentrated economic activity as well as local communities with potential and need by having individual jurisdictions take more regional approaches.
- Talent and people: The plan aims to tackle labor supply and demand challenges by better aligning labor skills with employer needs and addressing barriers faced by marginalized communities.
“The plan is meant to be ambitious at a global level and put the region on the global stage,” said Jennifer Vey, a former Brookings Institution senior fellow who became the GBC’s executive vice president of policy & research in September.
It calls for a shift in approach for a region that has relied historically upon institutional and public sector resources, so much so that the GBC says Baltimore has lost a sense of urgency in courting prospective businesses and workers and developing an entrepreneurial culture.
“The region needs a sea change to signal to local, national, and international investors that it is ready for transformative, private sector-led growth,” the plan says. “Changing the narrative will require ambition and a long-term commitment from businesses, political leaders, developers, educators, workforce providers, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, and others.”
The region must do more to boost its science and technology entrepreneurial ecosystem, the plan says. Despite heavy investments in research and development and strong institutional anchors, the region has underperformed the nation and its peers in bringing scientific discoveries from the lab to market.
The region has been restricted by limited industrial real estate needed to support the export economy, even with key logistical assets such as the Port of Baltimore and BWI Marshall Airport.
And the area has had difficulty coordinating outreach efforts and joining forces to take advantage of “game changing” opportunities. A stronger GBC, with the help of the Maryland Department of Commerce and county economic development organizations, can work to change that, the plan says.
Other challenges include an underperforming real estate market. The region’s construction rates are lower than those in competing regions in office, industrial, retail and multifamily housing, which has led to a continued loss of corporate leaders and skilled workers to faster-growing regions in the South and West.
And though the region’s economy has been generally stable, opportunity for advancement has been uneven based on race and location, with many Black residents living in areas of Baltimore with greater poverty, the report says. Inequities extend to transportation, with low-income people of color — the region’s largest group of transit riders — often subject to longer than average commute times because of lack of access.
Thomas said he expects the GBC to continue expanding its role beyond advocacy and policy work to include leadership on initiatives such as the region’s federal designation last year as a national tech hub, and the group’s involvement in Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s $3 billion plan to attack the city’s thousands of vacant properties.
“Those types of opportunities are things as we build the organization up that we’re well positioned to convene and make happen for the region,” Thomas said.
The plan also looked at the changing geography of economic activity, which no longer necessarily flows from a dense central business district into decentralized development but instead includes “multiple nodes of activity.” The blueprint calls for supporting clusters of economic activity in specific areas to foster more efficient transit systems, greater collaboration among entrepreneurs and more walkable access to shops and amenities.
It identifies several priority areas for long-range growth by reinvesting in existing hubs and re-imagining underused properties. Among those mentioned are the Tradepoint Atlantic logistics hub in Sparrows Point in Baltimore County, Baltimore city’s downtown entertainment district, Columbia Gateway and downtown Columbia in Howard County, Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford County, and National Business Park in Anne Arundel County.
GBC created the plan with the help of TIP Strategies, an Austin, Texas-based consulting firm, that gathered input and analyzed data during an 11-month process overseen by a 34-member steering committee. GBC eventually will establish a way to follow progress, Vey said.
“If we do things well, we should be seeing more recruitment and expansion for the region, we should be seeing more entrepreneurship, starting, growing, staying here,” Vey said. “We should be seeing more economic mobility. We should see that investment in regionally significant activity centers.”
