More than 200 business and government representatives discussed plans for speeding the slowly recovering local economy at the South Coast Business Forum’s Economic Vitality Symposium held Wednesday afternoon at Fess Parker’s DoubleTree Resort in Santa Barbara.

Speakers included Mike Manchak, director of the Economic Vitality Corporation of San Luis Obispo, and Bill Campbell, chairman of the Ventura Economic Development Corporation. Jeff Bermant, founder of Goleta-based high-tech corporation Virtual World Computing, Joe Vetrano of Carpinteria manufacturer BEGA-USA and Jeanette Webber, owner of the Santa Barbara Hotel Group, also presented.

Manchak outlined San Luis Obispo County’s strategy and implementation of its Economic Vitality Corporation.

He said it first had to take an outsider’s view of the area’s economy and determine its weaknesses and strengths. So it hired a consulting company and chose a strategy that cost about $100,000.

“Once we picked a strategy, the challenge becomes staff time, and then you need to raise about double that and then figure out the cost of implementation,” Manchak said. “In the end, we needed to raise a few hundred thousand dollars, but you could easily do that in this community.”

He said San Luis Obispo has some weaknesses similar to Santa Barbara, such as high home prices, lack of career opportunity, and companies are challenged to attract employees from an outside region.

“It comes down to the reasons people don’t decide to move to area for instance permitting and taxes … but you need to create a checklist of what work and what doesn’t work,” Manchak said. “If you reduce the fees that are too high and be hyper-competitive, businesses will have all the reasons to come here. It’s an expensive place to live and you can’t change that, but make the other aspects of their lives easy.”

San Luis Obispo County focused its strategy on the areas that produced 90 percent of its job growth since 1995, such as green energy, tourism, wine and agriculture.

“There are sectors of the economy who are doing well but are below the radar,” and Santa Barbara can find similar results, Manchak said.

But doing so requires an aggregation and analysis of data which Michael Holliday, chairman of the Santa Barbara Region Chamber of Commerce, will provide with a web portal set to launch in about a month designed to attract entrepreneurs.

Two things Santa Barbara needs to focus on are growing their own companies and utilizing UCSB, Bermant said.

“One of things we do best is internally grow our companies, and that means the capital needs to be here and businesses that want to fund companies here,” he said. “We have a huge wealth of resource just in the university alone.”

Holliday also pointed to Boulder, Colo., as a growing city that Santa Barbara could learn from. It offers free airfare to entrepreneurs who qualify and want to start a business there. If quality of life means anything to entrepreneurs, they will consider Santa Barbara, he said.

“We have an opportunity to go after companies and industries that fit here,” Holliday said. “There are some industries that do not fit here, like major manufacturing and assembly productions, but we need to foster high technology, clean technology and green technology industries, because they really fit here.”

Santa Barbara needs to work within the county’s environmental and construction limitations so the area doesn’t turn into Orange County or Los Angeles, Holliday said.

“There is a legacy of environmental concerns, and we need to embrace those constraints” by using the 1 million square feet of space the area has available, he said. “We need to bring in high technology, clean technology and green technology that complement our lifestyle.”

The speaker panels were moderated by Henry Dubroff, owner and editor of the Pacific Coast Business Times, and Janet Garufis, president of Montecito Bank & Trust.

The South Coast Business Symposium has held two previous meetings, one of which rallied the support of local government. The other focused on the efforts of local business leaders.

But Manchak said it’s the business community that must lead the effort, and it must do it now.

“I recommend you not take so much time to do this,” he said. “You have a window of opportunity, and the recession is that window.”

— Noozhawk business writer Alex Kacik can be reached at akacik@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Become a fan of Noozhawk on Facebook.