Miami desperately needs top-level community goals-setting

If we wonder why progress is slow in Miami-Dade, history has one answer: top leaders no longer convene yearly in a four-day retreat bearing lists of major aims to enhance and advance Miami.

Without those days of talks, Miami has no neutral forum for altering the future – both near and long term – with major interests present who can commit their teams to spend money and grasp solutions.

June once started with such a conclave, called by the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce. More than 1,000 civic, government, business and education higher-ups met in a goals conference. Calendars were cleared to be there. The meeting became a goals session not for the chamber but for the total community. Decisions in committees at times changed Miami’s future.

Look back exactly a quarter century to a chamber annual conference at the Doral golf resort. Hundreds moved into the resort for days, mingling in meetings. After hours, they discussed the topics of each day, pulling off agreements. No such forum now exists. 

In that June 1997 meeting each of 24 committees set annual goals, the vast majority for the community, not the chamber. It took weeks to whittle down aims to six per committee and then publish all 144 as a chamber program for the year.

“Almost all are projects of importance to this community,” I wrote at the time. With few exceptions, they remain important.

Among goals, members agreed to bring the Miami Museum of Science downtown; improve ethics in local government; develop a new arena, a performing arts center and more positioned to help the economic development of Overtown; develop a multi-county effort to improve race relations and economic development; find a way to get the Free Trade Area of the Americas to locate a secretariat here, craft a strategy to export professional services; and study costs and benefits of increased immigration from abroad.

Some agreements stumbled. The chamber sought a much larger New World School of the Arts, which surprised the school’s chairman, Martin Fine, who told the meeting he didn’t know the school wanted to build anything. Another agreement was to build a large World Trade Center downtown. Miami has always been fascinated with towers as a solution to anything.

Other agreements were vital. One stood out.

Those present in 1997 sought to advance One Community One Goal, which the chamber had created. By then, the effort had more than 40 active support groups seeking high-paying jobs in seven targeted industries as a lever to raise pay throughout a county where wages sat far below national norms. Levels remain well below the nation in data released just last week. Still, One Community was pivotal to add key jobs.

Discussing One Community, county Mayor Alex Penelas, a meeting participant, told others that “It is essential that our diverse communities come together to develop the blueprint for economic success for everyone, or it simply won’t work.”

It did work.

One Community One Goal was a shining economic star until the chamber a decade later lost focus and top-level participants and let One Community decline. Then, at a Miami Today event in 2010, Beacon Council CEO Frank Nero, on a panel with now-interim Beacon CEO Bill Talbert, former FIU President Mark Rosenberg and then-Baptist Health CEO Brian Keeley, suggested reviving the program, which the Beacon Council did until it died this year. It’s worth reviving One Community under the next Beacon leader. 

The goals conference thrived on those kinds of debates: what are the best ways to build the standard of living in Miami-Dade?

Decisions sometimes moved mountains – at least, mountains of buildings. Look at where that first arena rose: the edge of Overtown. Or the arts center: near Overtown. The museum of science: downtown. They followed the goals conference script. 

Of course, some decisions misfired. A secretariat of the Free Trade Area of the Americas never existed. When President Biden this week speaks at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, it will be the first summit in the US since President Bill Clinton spoke at the Biltmore in Coral Gables in 1994.

As important as what the conferences decided was that most community leaders gathered yearly to try to persuade one another of causes and built a consensus that carried well beyond four days in June.

The impact of four days of togetherness and united efforts can’t be overstated. It’s hard to envision today top Miami figures in four days of talks in a public forum to achieve community success. 

Certainly, no government could convene such a forum, the weaker chamber is not a community convener, and a golf resort now owned by Donald Trump does not exude unity. 

In a much larger Miami with newcomers streaming in, many top-level players don’t even know one another, and strangers would have trouble building trust in public.

It’s no wonder local progress is too slow.

So, suggestions please: In what neutral venue could such a top-level community gathering be reborn? And who would call the meeting? It’s still vital.