This week, The Maddy Report program carved out time to feature this year's California Economic Summit fifth annual gathering, taking place in Sacramento on December 13-14.
This episode features CA Fwd's President and CEO James Mayer and Senior Fiscal Policy Advisor Fred Silva, who both highlighted the goals of the Summit which kicks off work to achieve an ambitious set of economic goals involving workforce, housing and infrastructure.
“There's literally hundreds of people involved in the Economic Summit,” Mayer explained. “It's a great event…It's exciting to get to meet people from different regions of the state. But the real heavy work happens the other 364 days of the year.”
Also previewing the Summit are Matt Lege, Research Analyst, SEIU UHW; Cathy Martin, VP of Workforce Policy, California Hospital Association and Cathy Creswell, Housing Policy Specialist, Creswel Consulting (also the Economic Summit's Housing Action Team co-lead).
Check out the 2016 Summit program, list of featured speakers and register to be part of the biggest network of public, private, and civic leaders working to improve California's triple bottom line. REGISTER TODAY
The Summit will sharpen strategies to advance work being done in the regions to train one million more skilled workers, build one million more homes for low- and middle-income Californians, and save and capture one million acre feet of water over the next decade.
The Summit's water challenge is part of California's larger infrastructure problem, which includes a need for an estimated $853 billion invested in transportation, water, and K-12 facilities over the next 10 years — just to preserve and enhance the current system. Cities and regions unfortunately have faced declining state and federal funding for infrastructure.
CA Fwd's Silva explained a financing tool that cities and regions could deploy that would allow them to start funding needed local infrastructure in an innovative, cost-effective way.
“So the state looks at transportation finance as a need to fix it first,” said Silva. “They want to repair roads. But the question is how do we add capacity to our growing economic regions. And for that the summit has had as a priority to have means to do that, creating two years ago something known as a new financing authority known as Enhanced Infrastructure Finance District.”
