Columbus 2025: Where to from here?

About 30 years ago, a project called Columbus Beyond 2000 was launched at the Ledger-Enquirer to pick the best minds in the community for the best ideas on how to move forward in the new millennium that then lay just ahead.

Although Beyond 2000 began at the L-E, it developed a life of its own (as it was intended to do) as community leaders both public and private, and a broad array of citizens, business owners, educators, professionals, elected officials, and respondents to various polls weighed in on what they wanted this city to be in the coming years. Some of the progress we’ve seen since the late 1980s came from, or was at least influenced by, ideas and suggestions from that diverse group of civically engaged people.

That was then. Columbus 2025 is now.

The community leaders who unveiled it last week hope it’s a vehicle for turning today’s ideas into tomorrow’s vibrant, prosperous community. Introduced Friday during a news conference at the Greater Columbus Chamber of Commerce, Columbus 2025 is designed to “transform this economy for another time,” in the words of retired Synovus chairman Jimmy Yancey.

Columbus 2025 is both a successor to and the product of the Regional Prosperity Initiative, an economic development plan begun in 2014. That project involved the professional input of Market Street Services, an Atlanta-based consulting firm that will also be involved in the Columbus 2025 project.

One of the issues Yancey emphasized at last week’s kickoff was, and will be, critical: the ability of this city to transform itself and its economy when circumstances demand it. He mentioned the shift from an agrarian to a textile economy in the late 19th century, and the growing military influence of what began before the American entry into World War I as Camp Benning. Most significant for the late 20th and early 21st centuries, of course, was the ability to evolve from a textile economy, as the U.S. textile industry was packing up and moving away, to a regional financial, medical and educational center.

Now it’s time to think it forward again: “I think we all know that whatever made us successful is not going to make us successful going forward, that we need to change,” Yancey said.

In particular, he noted, the economic development and recruitment formula has changed dramatically, and indeed it has. It’s no longer about “cheap land and cheap labor” (or sometimes even massive tax incentives that, especially in the South, have sometimes turned out to be too expensive for the benefits they ultimately produced).

The three big-picture goals of Columbus 2025, according to project chair Billy Blanchard, are reducing poverty, increasing prosperity and enhancing overall quality of life for all of is living in the area.

That’s a big and complex mission to take on, and an unarguably worthy one.

This story was originally published January 30, 2017 at 3:28 PM with the headline "Columbus 2025: Where to from here?."