Sep 17

Sep 17 Go Farther, Build Higher

Alsobrooks Tells Business And County Community To Push Beyond Pre-COVID Gains

By Raoul Dennis

Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks brought an empowering message to the county and the county’s business community in her remarks at the Greater Prince George’s Business Roundtable Sept. 11.

Build better than we were before COVID-19.

“We really are excited not only about the way that we are recovering, because we're not trying to get back to where we were, but the goal for us actually is to go further than we were, to really do even better than we were doing prior to the pandemic,” Alsobrooks said. “It's not to get back to where we were, but to move forward.”

The county’s top executive outlined several gains since COVID-19 slowed the economy.

Re-Employment Support Via Employ Prince George’s. “We recently redeployed our re-employment, rapid re-employment plan through with Walter Simmons and Employ Prince George's. We used $5 million of funds that we were able to get from the federal government to support businesses and to provide them $15,000 per employee that they're able to rehire. We want to make sure that we're getting people back to work.”

Mentor Protégé Program. We are also really pleased that through our Office of Central Services, we recently launched our Mentor Protégé Program. I know many participated in that, so that we are now able to encourage some of our larger businesses to mentor and support smaller businesses. [And] there's an incentive involved in the larger firm really catching hold with some of our smaller, local and minority businesses.”

Stand Up & Deliver in A Keeper. “Stand Up & Deliver, the program that allowed us to address the food and security issue in the county. Thank you to Donna and Pepco, and so many others who stepped forward to make sure that we were able to not only feed our community but to keep the doors open on many of our small businesses who came to rely on Stand Up & Deliver to keep people employed during COVID. We're continuing that program. [We] got additional dollars to keep that program going as well and we're moving forward there.

AAA Safe. “Prince George's remains really strong and this is evidenced, of course, by the AAA bond rating that we were able to maintain,” Alsobrooks says.

Blue Line Friendly. “We're very excited about that Blue Line Corridor. I know you've heard all the investments that we intend to continue to make around transit. The Blue Line Corridor project is the one that everyone is talking about, that we think allows us not only to grow, but to grow in a way that is really significant along corridors that have seen very little investment. We are continuing to work with the State of Maryland to get those infrastructure dollars to build around those areas.”

Increasing the Tax Base. “We have a goal set of increasing the number of residents here by 50,000 over the next 9 to 10 years. We're looking to increase also commercial tax revenues by over $100 million in that same time period. We're looking also to get the average salary of residents up to $100,000 per year.