Jenna Saucedo-Herrera offered an illuminating anecdote to describe how JCB, the Great Britain-based heavy equipment manufacturer, chose San Antonio to locate its latest plant.
Speaking on Robert Rivard’s bigcitysmalltown podcast, Saucedo-Herrera described being interviewed for her current role as president and CEO of Greater:SATX, by a then-top executive at Toyota in San Antonio.
He told her that Toyota wasn’t getting the support it needed on workforce development, Saucedo-Herrera said. To sustain the operation, she said he told her, “we need your help.”
“They are the reason that we have transformed our economic development strategy to lead with workforce development,” she said. Companies like Toyota, USAA, H-E-B and others finally “leaned in” on the issue, but it took “a mind shift” to do so, she said.
And that is what won over JCB, she said. “We did not win on incentives. We won on our workforce.”
Saucedo-Herrera described the multi-pronged effort to create a local workforce that matches employers’ needs in the episode, and acknowledged that effort is far from complete. “We’ve got to stay the course here,” she said.
The bigcitysmalltown episode is a mashup of two previously aired episodes, one featuring Saucedo-Herrera and the other featuring Emily Royall, Smart Cities Administrator for the City of San Antonio.
Saucedo-Herrera talked about the work her team is doing to spur economic development not just in San Antonio and Bexar County, but also in the nascent “megaregion” that includes not just Austin but Mexico.
She ended with some advice for those who want to ensure the Spurs remain in San Antonio, even as the team expands its reach into Austin.
“We need to do absolutely everything and anything that Peter Holt says we need to get done for them, because they are our future, they are our past, they are who we are in San Antonio,” she said.
The second half of the episode features Royall, who described the role of San Antonio’s tiny-but-mighty Smart Cities team: to leverage innovation, data and technology to improve public services.
Royall described the Smart Cities Roadmap the team created based on input from communities across San Antonio. Since her episode aired last July, the Smart Cities team has won two major national awards, the IDC North American Awards and the Tech Connect Smart 20 Award.
The road map, which articulates five priorities residents shared, allows the city to compete for federal grants to invest in innovation and technologies that can solve those challenges, Royall said: “To be competitive, you have to show community buy-in.”
She also noted that “smart cities” at this point is a huge industry, which means companies are pitching any number of new technologies that might not necessarily be of interest to the San Antonio community.
“So this road map is an important signal to vendors and to tech companies as to what really matters to San Antonio,” she said.
Learn more about how innovation is driving both San Antonio’s workforce development and the ways it can enhance city services on the latest episode of bigcitysmalltown.
