The Cape Coral City Council voted unanimously Monday night to put up $240,000 to help a 13-year old locally founded and managed company expand without moving "over the bridge."
Insite Managed Solutions, now located on Del Prado Boulevard at Veterans Parkway, intends to increase its current 57-person workforce, with an average salary of $76,000, to about 110 employees in the next two years.
Company CEO Chris Rozum told the council he formed Insite in his living room. The company provides consulting and training to people who run call centers, contact centers and operations departments around the globe.
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Clients range from the big three U.S. automakers to Royal Caribbean and Disney cruise lines to Spirit and Southwest airlines.
Ricardo Nigera, Cape Coral's economic development director, called the expenditure "an excellent opportunity" for the city.
He recommended spending $150,000 to help the company buy a building in the South Cape area that will aid its future development.
A second recommendation provides $91,500 in an employment incentive grant over three years if the company hires 61 new full-time workers making an average salary of $76,000.
Nigera told council members the grants would offset a trend that sees most employers in Cape Coral offering low wage retail or service jobs, and sending many over the bridges to Fort Myers or to the south for better paying jobs.
"This company is invested and would like to remain here," Nigera said.
Insite initially allowed its employees to live where they wanted and they would work partly from home and partly by flying to a customer's location around the world.
The company has since consolidated its workforce in Southwest Florida, with 70 percent of employees, earning an average salary of $76,000, living in Cape Coral. It has also hired two sales representatives away from Gartner Inc., the Fort Myers-based business management consulting firm.
"To make all the options work, I need this. But if not I will have to consider options on the other side of the bridge," Rozum said.
He cautioned council members that Cape Coral the city would also lose out on additional economic benefits if it passed on helping his company stay in town.
"Four million in salary is coming into this community, being ingested at restaurants, buying homes, paying rents," Rozum said. "When we hit that goal 110 (employees), the number magnifies to $8 million."
His company presentation bluntly pointed out that the company was considering a South Cape site, but could also end up in downtown Fort Myers where he said that plenty of office space is available
Rozum added that the company is "poised for even more growth" that will be driven in part by the city contribution.
Council park debate exasperates Williams
In other city business Monday night, members of the Cape Coral city council listened to public comment, questioned the decisions of its staff and tinkered with more technical changes in the design of the smallest of its planned local community parks.
The council had already held two sessions in May and one in December, developing a pattern in which the prior design decisions for Tropicana Park in Northwest Cape were discarded and new final decisions were made.
A third partially written revision of the plan for swimmers, strollers, sunbathers, rowers and kayakers to peacefully co-exist was examined, re-examined and changed.
Ultimately, a clearly exasperated council member Rick Williams erupted.
"I don't know if anybody's noticed, but I have provided no input on this park, the changes and ideas -- there's a basic reason, I'm not a trained planner or an engineer. Fortunately we have seven up here in that area," Williams said gesturing to colleagues on the council dais.
Williams called it "insanity" that council members were suggesting a series of minor changes in the layout of the park, rather than simply proceeding with plans that had been put together by city staff members in conformity with an earlier series of council instructions.
"Why can't we leave this to professionals? Why are we trying to plan this stupid thing? Williams asked. "Why don't we just give this to the professionals ... why are we trying to invent the wheel up here, I just don't understand it."
The original redesign was intended to make sure both rowing and kayaking groups, and residents who wanted to bring their own kayaks and rowboats to the park, could be acommodated in getting boats into the water of the Northern Spreader waterway.
Instead of speeding up the process, the changes led to more debate and discussion, including trying to decide on the fly where in the city budget $500,000 in expenses could be charged.
"Come on guys, this doesn't make sense, how many times are we going to go around in a circle," Williams said.
After more than an hour of discussion the council rolled back the clock and gave approval to a previous plan, setting the stage for consultants to finalize authorization to spend money from a park construction general obligation bond approved by voters in 2018.
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Cape Coral company gets city grant to double local workforce. - News-Press
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