Business leader: High-speed rail vital to region’s competitiveness

MANATEE

Transportation long has been a key issue for the Tampa Bay Partnership, a business consortium that focuses on stimulating economic growth and development in a seven-county region that includes Manatee County.

The group was instrumental in the creation of the Tampa Bay Area Regional Transportation Authority, which has developed a long-range regional master transportation plan. The partnership also recently helped launch a lobbying campaign on behalf of Florida’s application for $2.6 billion in federal stimulus money to develop a high-speed rail line between Tampa and Orlando.

Stuart Rogel, the partnership’s president and chief executive, spoke with the Bradenton Herald about transportation and the high-speed rail proposal’s importance to the region.

Why is transportation so important to Tampa Bay’s business community?

Making sure we have adequate infrastructure in the Tampa Bay region is one of the key drivers of economic development and economic growth, and transportation obviously is one of the most important infrastructure components.

In this economy, with all the uncertainty as to how and when we are going to create the next wave of jobs, it’s really important to focus on a few key things that we can control, one of which is reinvesting in our infrastructure.

It’s a way to create jobs rather quickly, and it’s a way to be able to ensure that we’ve got additional opportunities to create jobs in the future.

Why is the business community so supportive of the high-speed rail proposal?

For many of the same reasons. Look at what’s happening today on Interstate 4. We’ve got a pothole, a depression, on I-4 that’s shut down three lanes of the four lanes of traffic. That is disrupting commerce, disrupting tourism, disrupting our lives.

So, we’ve got to find an alternative for that for a whole lot of reasons. Think if we were in the middle of a hurricane and we needed to evacuate but we couldn’t because I-4 is down.

This really is a system and there is a plan that the state has to ultimately connect activity centers — Tampa-Orlando, Orlando-Miami, Orlando-Jacksonsville and obviously on down the coast here. It’s not inconceivable to think about connecting Bradenton and Sarasota and further on down. This could be a huge game-changer.

These are stimulus dollars that are going to fund this first wave of high-speed rail activity and those stimulus dollars can either go to California or go to Chicago or go somewhere else, so why shouldn’t at least a portion go here in Tampa Bay and in Florida where the unemployment rates and the foreclosure rates are as high, if not higher, than any other part of the country?

Why does the Tampa Bay region need hgh-speed rail?

Our aspiration as a community and as a region are to be a global competitor, and I don’t know of any globally competitive region that doesn’t have a world-class transportation system. There’s a competitiveness issue here. If we want to take ourselves seriously on the global stage, we need to make sure we’ve got those kinds of investments like high-speed rail.