Classes, shopping, income, business retention are among the items on a survey Covington officials are asking community members to fill out.
While it’s billed as an effort to take a temperature check on the city’s business climate it could part of a more ambitious long-term goal for Covington.
The survey, explained Community Relations Manager Karla Slate, is split into different sections to gather information about demographics, employment background, shopping in Covington as well as education particularly higher and continuing education.
“Anybody can do the survey,” Slate said. “It’s really anybody who has come into contact with Covington in some way, whether they live here, shop here, or drive through here and don’t like the traffic.”
Covington’s Economic Development Council, of which MultiCare’s Hugh Kodama is a member, is looking at what the community wants to see how the city can better partner with businesses, area organizations and possibly higher education institutions such as Green River Community College and Renton Technical College.
“We want to find the needs of the community,” Kodama said. “If you don’t find out what the needs are then you’re not going to develop a product that the community wants. It’s important to partner with the city, with the schools, because no one has all of the resources … but together we can develop what’s good for the community and serve a wide variety of needs.”
From the perspective of City Manager Derek Matheson, a significant driving force behind this desire to partner more broadly by bringing in a community or technical college, both on a short term and long term basis.
In the near term, Matheson said, the goal is to bring in some courses offered by a college maybe in City Hall, in Kent school buildings nearby, possibly even in healthcare facilities.
“The city and MultiCare have been working for some time on an effort to recruit higher ed to the community using our substantial healthcare presence as a hook,” Matheson said. “The long term goal … is I’d like to see a higher ed branch campus facility here in Covington and maybe even in the Town Center someday. There are many instances in the region where higher ed has been transformational.”
To begin with city officials met with Renton Technical College in 2010 and have met periodically with RTC officials since then.
In early 2011 representatives from Covington convened a meeting with Green River, Valley Medical Center and MultiCare about 18 months ago.
During the past six months the conversation has reignited with both schools.
It seemed like an important step was to gather community input so Slate met with Tamara Rose, who was formerly with the Covington Chamber of Commerce, and out of that came the survey which tackled both long term economic development as well as the potential advantages of bringing a higher education presence into the city.
This has the potential, Matheson said, to transform how everyone from the city to healthcare to businesses to educators work together.
“Green River has said that they’re interested in continuing education courses and locating them in Covington as soon as fall quarter,” Matheson said. “It’s not just a concept, it’s a first step.”
The survey is also important, Kodama said, because it gives educators at RTC and GRCC the opportunity to direct students toward businesses which have gaps in their workforce.
“What people forget is as they’re developing their programs is to ask the businesses, ‘What is going to fit your needs?” Kodama said. “You can do that with healthcare, you can do that with engineering, you can do that with accounting, whatever the case may be. It could be so unique and meet the needs of so many different people.”
Take the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CovingtonsSurvey
