Economic development organizations are not short on plans.
Across the country, communities have strategic plans, comprehensive plans, workforce plans, housing studies, Comprehensive Economic Development Strategies (CEDS), downtown plans, and target industry analyses. Most contain good ideas, and many identify the right challenges.
Too many, though, struggle to move from strategy to sustained implementation.
The problem usually isn’t the quality of the plan. It’s the system around the plan.
- Who owns implementation?
- How do organizations with different missions work toward shared priorities?
- How are projects developed and funded?
- Who has the capacity to lead?
- How is progress measured?
- And how does the work continue when leadership, funding, or political priorities change?
These are increasingly the questions we are helping communities answer at TPMA.
Our work with the Huron County Economic Development Corporation in Michigan offers one example.
Huron County is a rural Great Lakes community with an economy rooted in agriculture, tourism, and manufacturing. When the Huron County EDC began developing its first comprehensive economic development strategy in more than two decades, local leaders saw an opportunity to do more than create another list of goals and recommendations.
We asked them a question early on:
What does Huron County need to put in place to consistently turn good ideas into action?
That meant looking beyond traditional economic development activities to the broader system that influences the county’s competitiveness. Workforce, housing, entrepreneurship, infrastructure, community investment, quality of place, leadership, and organizational capacity are all integrated parts that play an important role in community success. It also meant recognizing that no single organization controls all those things.
The Huron County Community Foundation became a critical partner in the process, helping engage stakeholders, align community priorities, elevate local voices, and connect economic development with the values and character residents wanted to preserve.
Build the System, Not Just the Strategy
This is where we believe economic development planning is heading. A strong strategy still matters. Communities need to understand their competitive position, make choices, establish priorities, and determine where limited resources can have the greatest impact. But the plan is only one component.
Increasingly, our work at TPMA is about helping communities build the people, processes, partnerships, and resources required to execute.
In other words, we’re helping communities build operating systems.
Those systems connect priorities with ownership. They create repeatable processes for moving projects forward. They align organizations and funding around common outcomes. And, importantly, they give communities the capacity to respond when new opportunities emerge.
The Proof Is in What Happens Next
Huron County is already showing what that can look like.
The EDC and its partners are advancing a countywide Housing Conditions and Development Readiness Study, the first comprehensive effort of its kind in Huron County, supported by a $40,000 Michigan Rural Readiness Grant. The work will examine housing conditions, supply and demand, affordability, and development barriers while helping communities identify zoning changes and investment opportunities.
The EDC and Community Foundation also launched the Huron County Comeback Internship Program, connecting local students with paid internships at area employers and creating pathways for young people to return to or remain in the county.
Entrepreneurship efforts are expanding through microloan events, small-business training, partnerships with libraries and business incubators, and grant programs. Workforce training is similarly being delivered through community-based partnerships.
And in the Village of Ubly, the Huron County Brownfield Redevelopment Authority secured a $350,000 state grant to tackle a long-challenging downtown brownfield. Over the next three years, environmental investigation and remediation will prepare the property for redevelopment into a new café expected to create six full- and part-time jobs while returning an underutilized property to productive use.
The EDC is also examining EV charging infrastructure, planning for redevelopment of the former DTE site in Harbor Beach, supporting downtown planning, and developing other initiatives that connect economic development with the broader conditions that influence community competitiveness.
None of these projects alone is the operating system.
The system is the capacity to continuously identify opportunities, align partners, secure resources, develop projects, and move them toward implementation.
That is the real objective.
A Conversation for #IEDC2026
As the TPMA team heads to the IEDC Annual Conference, this is one of the conversations we’re most interested in having with our peers:
How do we move economic development planning beyond the plan?
For us, the answer increasingly starts with systems. Plans are easy. Implementation is not.
Our job isn’t simply to help communities decide where they want to go. It’s to help build the people, processes, partnerships, and resources that can get them there and keep the work moving long after the planning process ends.
We look forward to continuing that conversation at #IEDC2026.
Learn more about Huron County, MI:
About the Author
Brett Wiler is TPMA’s Vice President of Economic Development and Strategic Planning.