Drew Wilson
Florida Chamber President and CEO Mark Wilson led off the 2019 Future of Florida Forum with an update on the state of Florida business.
“Florida is at a crossroads. The only way Florida will reach its potential is for business leaders to unite for good,” Wilson said.
Wilson covered some familiar ground for those who’ve read the Chamber’s Florida 2030 research project: the state will grow to 26 million residents over the next decade and the state will need to add 1.5 million jobs and use 20 percent more water to support them.
Getting people into those jobs will take some improvements to the state’s education system. The high school graduation rate is at an all-time high, and 3rd grade reading scores are trending up, but the jobs of the future will likely require more trade and technical school graduates than Florida has today.
That point, particularly boosting apprenticeships with the help of private business, was stressed at Florida Chamber’s Learners to Earners Workforce Summit held in June.
The population boom won’t be an even spread. Miami-Dade county alone will add more people than the total population of the bottom 28 counties combined. The three most populous counties will add more than a third of new Florida residents, Florida Chamber research shows.
Still, that growth will bring more economic power to the peninsula.
Florida is currently the 17th largest economy in the world — about on par with Saudi Arabia. The goal, Wilson said, is break into the top-10 by 2030. That would make the state’s economic might comparable to Mexico’s.
The state’s growth has political ramifications as well.
“There’s already been 647,000 new voter registrations since the last time we met,” Wilson said. “It won’t be too many more years before we have Democrats on top and then NPAs and then Republicans.”
