Marketing and information are critical to ensuring that the development community invests in areas consistent with MetroFuture.  Various public agencies, quasi-public organizations, and public/private partnerships provide statewide and national marketing to priority development sites and other designated locations.  Examples include the Massachusetts Office of Business Development, the Massachusetts Alliance for Economic Development, MassDevelopment, and municipal economic development departments.  

These various organizations and practitioners influence the decisions made by developers and firms about where to build or locate.  While marketing professionals must be responsive to the preferences of their target market, they can also act as tastemakers by presenting information that will re-frame location decisions within a smart growth context.  For example, issues of transit access and proximity of workforce will become more important as transportation costs continue to rise.  Marketing materials that simply list the number of on-site parking spaces will increasingly be seen as out-of-touch by companies that recognize that residential and commuting patterns will change rapidly as energy costs rise.  

Effective marketing of MetroFuture-consistent economic development locations requires two things: providing more accessible information about the costs and benefits of individual sites from a sustainability perspective; and fostering attention to sustainability in the profession of regional economic development planning.  

Through the Smart Workplace project, MAPC has already begun to establish a framework for evaluating economic development sites within the context of infrastructure, zoning, sensitive natural resources, parcel data, and other information.  This tool is primarily designed to support the economic development planning efforts of municipal staff and officials, by providing additional, readily available information about constraints or advantages of alternative locations.  This tool should be expanded to include additional criteria relevant to regional sustainability: potential employees within a given commute time via car or transit; transportation-related greenhouse gas emission estimates; wind energy potential; and other factors.  Some of these criteria will need to be developed through modeling, but it is important that the tool should remain based on statistical criteria in order to ensure its credibility.  Objective measures will be more compelling that a subjective “MetroFuture Score.”

Economic development professionals have the capacity to be strong allies in the implementation of MetroFuture.  The Massachusetts Economic Development Council’s Strategic Plan identifies “social responsibility and a dedication to equitably building healthy, just and competitive communities” as one of the organization’s four Core Values.  Similarly, state agencies operate under the Commonwealth’s Sustainable Development Principles which equally consistent with the MetroFuture plan.  Stronger relationships between MAPC and these agencies and professionals are necessary to identify ways that principles of sustainability can be applied to support their economic development mission. 

4.a    MAPC should continue to update the Smart Workplace Project to include more Smart Growth and transportation criteria

4.b    Formalize coordination between MAPC and the Massachusetts Alliance for Economic Development

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