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News
Pringle addresses city’s future
Published in OC Metro
Feburary 14, 2008
Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle wants to take a page from Disneyland – he envisions a monorail as a connector to a burgeoning public transportation system – as well as businesses that do customer-satisfaction surveys to move the 350,000-resident city continually forward.
Pringle, in his sixth year as mayor of one of Orange County’s most dynamic cities, skirted the dismal economic climate, but missed little else in his annual State of the City Address.
“Every year, Anaheim is reborn,” he said, noting the difficult times in 2007 when a divided council wrestled with a proposed residential project within the Anaheim Resort. He talked about the specifics, such as hiring JD Power and Associates to do a customer-satisfaction survey, as well as anecdotally suggesting any city that moves forward must recruit the “creative class” of workers. “We all have a stake (in the) highly skilled workforce that we need here.”
Pringle said he is hopeful that public-private partnerships will continue to pay for expensive projects – the proposed monorail that would be part of a citywide effort to whisk perhaps millions of passengers annually around high-density areas, such as the Platinum Triangle, Convention Center, Disneyland and the sports parks.
“(We want to attract) the innovators, the inventors, the designers and the thinkers who create the big things,” he told the 800-person audience of business leaders, chamber members, government officials and special guests.
The city celebrated its 150th anniversary last October, and Pringle made a point of noting that cities that stand still, decay: “You can think of Anaheim in many ways – tourist destination, job center, growing cultural hub.”