Exit Interview: Baltimore economic development leader dives into challenges, accomplishments

Technical.ly

2 days ago

Colin Tarbert has spent almost his entire two-decade career in Baltimore's public sector. Now, he's going south to Florida.
Tarbert announced his departure from the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC) this summer after a six-year stint as president and CEO. During that time, he oversaw the disruption of Covid, strategic changes to the BDC venture Emerging Technology Centers and redevelopment projects across the city.
The new president and CEO of the BDC, Otis Rolley, began work at the end of June. He most recently served as a social impact advisor at investment company Kingdom Capital in Missouri and has held different roles in Baltimore's city government. Rolley is the first Black man to lead the BDC.
Tarbert's stint in that top spot wasn't his first with the city's public-private economic development agency — he held a couple of roles between 2006 and 2010, and, like Rolley, worked directly for the city.
He studied architecture at the University of Maryland and didn't plan to have a career in the public sector. But he's proud of a lot of the work he's done in Baltimore — like providing grants to businesses during Covid and collecting comprehensive data about economic development in the city.
'I was never setting out to have this career in city government,' Tarbert said, 'but [that's] the way it played out.'
Technical.ly spoke with Tarbert about his time at the BDC and what he's looking forward to in his next role at the DownTown Investment Authority in Jacksonville.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Thinking about your most recent stint and your tenure at the BDC, is there anything specific that you're proud of accomplishing?
There was so much, and a lot of it was continuation of work that had been going on in the city for a long time. This type of work, it takes a very long time to make progress.
When I came to BDC, I had the opportunity to focus more on the economic development piece of it. There were a number of accomplishments that I'm really proud of — nothing that happens is singular; this all takes a lot of teamwork, both within BDC and the partners outside of BDC.
One initiative that I started with, I think will continue, is the Baltimore Together initiative. That was really resetting the comprehensive economic development strategy for the city, and putting forth a vision that was new and very intentional about reaching residents and businesses and stakeholders who traditionally felt excluded from economic development — or at least perceived that they were excluded.
The other big piece that happened was Covid. We were then on the front lines of the crisis, helping get businesses the grants and funding that they needed to survive.
While that was certainly mentally and physically taxing, it was also rewarding, because businesses that would come up and be like, 'If we hadn't got that grant from BDC, we would have been out of business,' or, 'We would have lost [the] house,' or what have you.
Let's talk more about Covid. How did it shape or change BDC's strategy?
What was interesting was we started the Baltimore Together strategic plan a few months before Covid hit. We just finished a very intense round of stakeholder engagement at the end of 2019.
That had already started to take form.
It was focused on minorities, small businesses, businesses and disinvested neighbors, etc. So when Covid hit, we already had that lens to look through. Which was super helpful, because we, as a collective team at BDC, were able to have enough of a pause when Covid hit to think through how we were going to distribute the grants.
Virtually [all] other cities, jurisdictions, the state, did all of their grants — for the most part — on a first-come, first-served basis. We did not.
We did it on a need basis, which was 10 times the amount of work, I can tell you, because we went through and evaluated each application. But what it did was, it allowed us to distribute the dollars to the businesses who did not receive a lot of the other funding that was first-come, first-served.
What it showed was the vast majority of our grantees had not received other funding. So those people and those businesses would've been out of business, or much more disproportionately impacted by Covid, if we hadn't taken that approach.
How did specific challenges change how you led the BDC?
There were two big challenges as a CEO during that time. Part of it was Covid, and trying to hold together a team virtually.
Because it was a prolonged public health crisis, we were hiring people that I had never met in person, right? That was kind of an odd situation. I was in the office most of the time, because I was hands-on, and I like working in the office, but it's hard to build those rapport relationships with people that you've never met online.
The other piece of it that was a big challenge, from a leadership standpoint, that was compounded by Covid, was the George Floyd situation and the racial, national discussion that was happening at the same time.
Especially for a white male leader at an organization that's very diverse, in a city that's majority African American, it was just a very intense time. To try to have those conversations virtually was not easy, I would say.
I'd say leaving BDC, I think I left it much better than it was. Certainly, during the Covid period, because we were able to come together and work in person, which I think had a lot of benefits to it.
Emerging Technology Centers, or ETC, went through several changes under your leadership. Looking back, how did you manage the transitions?
I'm really excited about the direction that ETC is headed under Dr. Arti Santhanam. I think she definitely understands the opportunity, and she's done a great job laying the foundation for the new ETC, maybe 4.0, at this point.
It was a 10-year lease [at ETC's Haven Street offices, its third locale ] that was coming to an end. And at the same time, the executive director was retiring, and there were some folks that had left ETC, during the pandemic and working remotely.
[ Note: Tarbert's version of events was disputed in prior Technical.ly reporting by Deb Tillet, ETC's then-outgoing executive director, who said at the time that she was asked to retire.]
We made the decision to engage with the consulting firm HR&A Advisors. We did a really extensive strategic plan, because also during that whole period of time, UpSurge had come on the scene, and so they were doing a lot of work that ETC had traditionally done.
We didn't want to duplicate efforts. We wanted to be additive to the — I'll use the word 'ecosystem.' We did a whole strategic plan, and the decision was made that we should really step back. We don't need to do [a] coworking space, because nobody needed any more office space.
While ETC always had business coaches and accountants and lawyers who would do pro bono services, it didn't have a much higher level of that. So now, it's bringing in funding, and the idea is for Arti to build an investment fund that would also invest in the company and give ETC a more hands-on approach to management, which we hadn't done in the past — and which TEDCO is set up not to do purposefully.
The idea here is for ETC to focus on just a handful of companies within the life science spaces, to try to get them to the next level.
We're going to go very narrow and deep, as opposed to the previous ETC, which was much wider, but not as used in terms of services. I see UpSurge doing that work already.
That's the vision for ETC. I think it's working.
What do you think BDC is better at now than when you started?
There's a lot of talent at BDC, and building that team was [an] accomplishment. It's harder to see it from the outside, but inside, I think we built a lot of skills and leadership beyond just the C-suite.
The blessing and the curse of being CEO is you get the recognition or the blame for things that you might not have anything to do with. In this case, it was very, very positive.
The team had been working for a long time on commercial corridors, and that was actually through Covid, and through a lot of the GIS testing that we were doing for grants.
From that, come up with different strategies for each commercial corridor on what struggles they might be having, whether it's a certain type of retail that they're missing, or a certain building type that seems to be problematic.
That was an example of how the teams came up with their own ideas and solutions and implemented them without a top-down approach. I think a lot of that came from my leadership style.
What are you looking forward to most with your new job in Jacksonville?
For about the last decade, they've been working and have had some great success redeveloping their downtown, revitalizing it, making it an attractive place to live, work, play.
I was drawn to the position because, one, I really enjoy the planning and the real estate development aspect, and the opportunity to build what I hope will be a great, thriving city. I think they're already on their way to doing that without a lot of recent successes.
In a lot of ways, it reminded me of Baltimore and what we've accomplished here along the waterfront development.
For me, I just saw the opportunity, and they were really interested in having an outside perspective, which isn't always the case.
I think it was a perfect match, in a lot of ways, for the work that I've done here, with their interest in where they want to take the city, and especially their downtown.
I think there's going to be a lot happening in Jacksonville, and just excited to play a part of it.