New Jersey consultant tapped to help the city of Cape Coral grow economically

Cape Coral keeps growing faster and faster, so the city has brought in outside help to further develop economically with the consultant saying the city may need a taller landscape downtown and a younger professional group to ensure its future.

New Jersey-based consultant tapped to help the city determine an economic development strategy as expected growth will present both opportunities and challenges.

T. Sharon Woodberry, Cape Coral’s Director of Economic Development, said DCG Corplan was selected after a national bid solicitation in June. The contract was for $118,120, and the work will be completed in 12 months, so in August 2024.

"(DCG will) identify and prioritize key areas of focus to promote sustainable economic growth, attract new investments, foster innovation, and enhance our city's competitiveness," Woodberry said in a press release.

Last week, DCG Corplan Consulting met with residents and leaders in Cape Coral to kick off work on an economic development strategic plan, which they say will be vital for meeting the cost of growth, infrastructure, resilience, and recovery from climate change and storms like Hurricane Ian.

"Because we have such unprecedented growth it challenges the sort of suburban nature and the sort of the older planning paradigm of Cape Coral by the original master planners and developers," said Bruce Hoch, managing director of DCG Corplan. "It was a quiet wonderful waterfront, suburban-oriented, automobile-oriented community, but we are now facing a major expansion and therefore a city of potentially 400,000 people, that's the size of Tulsa, Oklahoma."

Hoch said the lack of urban elements or components makes it hard for the city to attract new residents and businesses to help support the growth.

"If the economy doesn't grow in step with the population or potentially even exceeds it, then we're just catering to an aging population that's going to require more and more health services and all the other things that are associated with older populations, and younger folks will either not come here or they will find that there's not enough work here," Hoch said.

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Cape Coral has a population of 216,992, according to the census, and is expected to grow by more than 430,000 residents by 2070. The city is also adopting a budget for the fiscal year 2024, which is almost $1.1 billion, the highest it has ever been.

Hoch said the consultants will take into account the city's infrastructure as they meet with the public works department to improve the resiliency of the city.

He said resiliency is essential to manage and think about the cost and how the city will pay for it.

"How can we use technologies and engineering expenditures, capital expenditures, to floodproof and to stop these events from happening?" Hoch said. "So that when an outside investor such as a corporation looks at Cape Coral and says, 'Oh, yeah, they are really leading the charge on resiliency. I don't have any kind of concern that my company might be affected if I moved to Cape Coral.'"

The downtown area also piqued the consultant's interest as he said there's an opportunity there for more development in the vein of The Cove, which is under construction, and mid-rise offices where people can live and work.

"There's still increased numbers in younger workers even though it's not as the ratio may not be as high as it was three or four years ago," Hoch said. "They need places to work and Cape Coral has enough workforce to support increased medical services, health services, IT, a lot of other targets that we're going to be looking at to get these people to say this is a great place to relocate out of the Midwestern northeast."

He wants to see a younger population that matches the size of retirees and can stay and work in the city instead of driving to Fort Myers for work.

"There's a lot of roadblocks and there's a lot of people will probably say 'no, I don't want change,' but change is inevitable," Hoch said.

The work will take at least a year, but interim reports will be issued monthly on a website that residents may access once online.

There will also be opportunities for public input, and Hoch said he wants to hear from residents who have concerns such as increased traffic from developments.

"We want to hear from the naysayers, we do, we want to understand what it is that they're objecting to," Hoch said. "Our job right now is to listen, to ask pointed questions, and do a lot of data research. And then in a month or two as we start to digest all the data that we're gathering, begin to formulate some strategies and then they have to be tested."

Luis Zambrano is a Watchdog/Cape Coral reporter for The News-Press and the Naples Daily News. You can reach Luis at Lzambrano@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @Lz2official.

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Cape Coral Economic development plan in development