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By Christine Moore, Orange County District 2 Commissioner
I believe in learning from those doing things well. It is aspirational to visit another successful city. For towns the size of Apopka, it is relatively easy to get vision from nearby cities such as DeLand, Mt. Dora, Winter Garden, Winter Park, St. Cloud, Sanford, and Kissimmee.
I’ve already written extensively about meetings with these city leaders, Main Street Associations, CRA experts, etc.
Last week, however, I visited a city similar in many metrics to Orlando: Charlotte, North Carolina. It has a population of more than 900,000, much larger than District 2 cities. The natives fondly refer to Charlotte as “the Queen City.”
I was blessed to travel with leaders from our metro’s top businesses and political leaders. Our hosts were the Orlando Economic Partnership, Truist Bank, and Duke Energy. Additionally, we met with the Charlotte mayor pro tem and an entrepreneurial restaurant owner along their light rail system in Uptown Charlotte.
Hearing Charlotte leaders’ desire to learn more about our Orange County business (tourism) successes, prompted me to sit in on a discussion one of the Visit Orlando executives—who recently moved here from Nevada—was having. Tourism is off 10% in Nevada. He shared tips for smaller localities desiring to capitalize a bit from tourism while maintaining their home-town feel. I will share his advice with you soon.
Clearly, though, Apopka has nearby examples of this with the cities of Mt. Dora, Winter Garden, and DeLand.
Charlotte, more like Orlando, discussed their biggest challenges as high growth, lack of infrastructure, and affordability. I don’t know about you, but this sounds like Apopka.
However, Charlotte approached these similar challenges as opportunities. They are using innovation, strategic growth, and collaboration to solve their problems. They embrace the growth and believe that if you are not growing you are declining.
More on Charlotte next week…
Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series.
