PORTLAND, Maine — Maine’s largest city continues to have the brains, but does its economy have the brawn?
The Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce is raising that question after releasing its fifth annual economic scorecard for the city, measuring a range of indicators it has aligned with the city’s economic development plan. At five years, chamber officials hope this year’s report, produced by Camoin Associates of Scarborough, will fuel specific action.
“We have five years of data and there’s plenty of economics studies out there to tell us what the problems are,” said Bill Becker, president of the Portland Regional Chamber and a vice president at KeyBank. “You just need to talk to business leaders and business owners who are directly involved with the expansion or growth of their business and they’ll tell you where the barriers lie.”
And that’s what Becker plans to do, in meetings with leaders in specific industries following the release of the report during a breakfast event Tuesday morning.
That’s in part from a belief that not all of the city and region’s economic challenges will be met with changes in public policy.
“Not all of the problems are policy problems,” said Chris Hall, executive director of the Portland Regional Chamber. “In the education area, a lot of the barriers are social and we still have a role to play in the business community to address that.”
The nature and outcome of those discussions are relevant to the rest of the state as well, as the Greater Portland area makes up more than half of the state’s economic output and about one-third of its jobs.
“If the Portland region’s economy is not strong then the state of Maine’s economy is not strong,” Hall said.
As one example, Hall said that economic growth in Portland could boost demand for food production and have statewide benefits for the agricultural sector, an area where the city’s restaurant boom has already made an impact and where the pending addition of a co-op will provide another boost.
As with previous reports, this year’s economic scorecard shows a mixed review: the percentage of people with college degrees in Portland remains higher that than similar cities nationally but total employment growth and job growth in sectors the city identified as desirable has lagged national and regional benchmarks. Property tax rates have risen steadily in recent years, continuing a trend from the housing crisis when cities and towns needed to adjust for sudden drops in property value.
While that mix of metrics is not new to the annual report, the perception of the Portland it describes has changed. The speed and breadth of online media has given the city its 15 minutes of fame many times over, drawing attention to Portland’s restaurants, entertainment and other amenities in the past year.
The metrics monitored in the chamber’s annual report bolster the idea that travel and tourism to the city remains strong and observers expect it will only increase with the addition of more than 500 hotel rooms downtown. Jobs in the tourism industry, however, are lagging benchmarks.
That’s one of the dynamics chamber officials hope to dig into more deeply after this latest report, reaching out to people in specific industries to get their take on what needs to change in the state.
In a press briefing Monday, chamber officials reiterated that they’re bullish on the city’s prospects, but all that good press paints a rosy picture of an economy that could become more diverse as the economy improves and, as a result, be prepared to better weather the next period of hard times.
Hall said he’s seen that boom-bust pattern in Portland since the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“It was ugly right here on Congress Street,” he said. “I watched the same movie with dot-com bubble and a third time with great recession. Portland’s in a unique place right now where we can diversify our economic strength and we don’t have to go through another boom and bust cycle.”