REDI in Retrospect: Where the Conversation Goes

Editor’s Note: This is the final part of during the tenure of former executive director Sally Sternbach. Before her departure, Rockville Patch sat down for an interview with Sternbach and associate director Lynne Benzion, who took over as REDI’s acting executive director this month.

As Sally Sternbach departs as executive director of ., the city is taking a closer look at its economic future.

In October, about the city’s workforce and job opportunities, housing, schools and transportation infrastructure and preserving Rockville’s character.

The summit was successful in getting residents and businesses “talking around fact-based data so that they started not from their deeply-held beliefs, but from somebody else’s well-researched data,” said Sternbach, who is now deputy director of the county’s Department of Economic Development.

Stephen Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at , provided the data with that framed the conversation.

“The question now is where that conversation goes,” Sternbach said.

City staff is proposing forming work groups this spring that would discuss the themes that emerged from the summit in preparation for a Rockville Summit II in November.

City officials convened the first summit with the goal of bridging what often seems to be a divide between the desires of the business community and those of residents.

“The conversation seems to very quickly move to traffic and schools,” Sternbach said. “In order to have a balanced economy and one that is vibrant, it’s not going to be—what’s the idealized, removed town?”

“Mayberry,” said Lynne Benzion, who took over as acting executive director upon Sternbach’s departure last week.

“Mayberry! That’s it!” Sternbach said.

“Mayberry was good for its time, but it isn’t good for now,” Benzion said.

The task, Sternbach said, is “working through this tension of what level of traffic, what level of facilities demand is a reasonable one to accept and still assure that your economy stays vibrant.”

Discussion of “what the economy of a development is like,” is part of that, Sternbach said.

One such recent, “fascinating” and “very seldom heard and very frank” discussion, Sternbach said, was before the city’s Planning Commission as part of its . Developers discussed the demands they must meet in order to get financing for projects at a time when financial institutions have decreased their lending.

“That’s not understood broadly in the general public,” Sternbach said.

“These are the discussions that are so important and are just starting to happen and I hope, desperately, that they continue,” she said.

Does Rockville’s mayor and council and the Planning Commission understand what REDI is all about?

“Yes, I think so, by in large,” Sternbach said. “It hasn’t always been the answer I could’ve given, but I think today it is. Every one of those council members has a good set of ears, God bless ‘em. They’ve been willing to sit down with me. They’ve been willing to sit down with board members. They’ve given us valuable input. I think we’ve helped their understanding of the role we can and should play.

“So I think I leave the structure of this organization in a pretty healthy place from an overall public understanding perspective—especially the public officials.”

Public officials get elected and have “a heck of a learning curve,” Benzion said. “Ours is only one of the things that they need to learn. But it’s our job to make sure that they hear these perspectives and these principles. They’re not rocket science and they are established. So there’s a piece we can give them and we’ve been able to do that very well. They’re receptive to that.”

When it comes to its budget, REDI follows the same guidelines as City Hall, Sternbach said.

If salaries for city staff don’t increase, the salaries for REDI’s three staff members—Benzion; administration, communication and events manager Amanda Wilson, and, until Thursday, Sternbach—don’t increase.

If city departments are held to a 1 percent budget increase, REDI budgets a 1 percent increase, as it did this year.

The city awarded a $541,300 grant to REDI in fiscal 2012. For fiscal 2013, REDI has submitted a request for $546,660.

The nonprofit also raises about $200,000 annually to support its operating budget, through sponsorship of events like the postdocs conference, which relies on no city dollars, Sternbach said.

“I take it as a piece of the opportunity I have as a 501(c)(3) operation—outside of City Hall—and also partly as an obligation that I have, to leverage the city’s investment in us,” Sternbach said. “And we take it very seriously and I think we’ve been relatively successful. So we’re proud of that.”

REDI’s board of directors has formed a committee to lead a national search for a new executive director.

The committee has received applicants from across the country, but as of yet has no date for the board to name a new director. Benzion, who has been with REDI since January 2003, has applied for the job.

With Sternbach now working on economic development for the county, REDI has a new “in” that Benzion said the organization would be sure to use to its advantage.

“If I’ve learned nothing else in eight-and-a-half years of being here, it’s always leverage your partners, your friends,” Benzion said. “Because it’s silly not to. You can do so much more together.”