Nearly four months into his new job, Cincinnati Department of Trade & Development Director Oscar Bedolla says that his department is already working to streamline its services to continue to grow confidence that Cincinnati is “open for business.”
His remarks came yesterday afternoon at Horseshoe Casino Cincinnati during a luncheon held by CREW Greater Cincinnati, a professional organization dedicated to providing growth and networking opportunities for people in the commercial real estate industry.
Bedolla came to Cincinnati from New York City, where he served as a vice president in KPMG’s Advisory Practice. In that role, he specialized in project finance and public-private partnerships. He now leads a department with an annual budget of $50 million and approximately 100 employees, who are charged with managing everything from large-scale development projects and housing to human services and the City’s parking assets.
So far his biggest challenge has been rallying the troops and getting everybody on the same page, saying, “People get stuck in a rut and don’t realize that we have to continue to build confidence in the [Cincinnati] market.”
To build that confidence and share it with potential investors, Bedolla said he is building a highly professional staff that understands both the public and private sectors, with a foundation built upon collaboration and innovation sharing.
“The cities I have worked with that have done well are the ones who have implemented things like CitiStat,” Bedolla said, referring to the real-time, data-driven city department performance program developed 15 years ago in Baltimore and soon to be brought here through the City’s new Office of Performance & Data Analytics.
Once that has been accomplished, he says that the real work can begin on the two major areas where he sees opportunity for Cincinnati: capturing and leveraging foreign direct investment, and increasing manufacturing productivity by taking advantage of the City’s legacy infrastructure.
“Cincinnati, with its location, is uniquely placed to be a much larger economy than it is right now,” Bedolla told the group of approximately 75 people who attended the luncheon. “We could see an influx of capital into mature markets [like Cincinnati] if Cincinnati brands itself.”
The next CREW Greater Cincinnati luncheon will once again be held at Horseshoe Casino Cincinnati, and will take place on Tuesday, April 14. Registration is not yet open.