During our February 16 webinar "Cross-Border Business Development; Palm Beach & Bahrain" we were honored to have so many diplomats and professionals speak about the evolving relationship between the business and educational communities of Palm Beach and Bahrain, including Troy M. McLellan, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Boca Raton Chamber of Commerce.
Thank you, Al. Congratulations for putting on this amazing event today. Hello, and welcome to all on the phone, on Zoom and all the dignitaries. It's a pleasure to be here this morning. Al talked about being parochial. When you get down to me in the program, I get really parochial because Kelly represents the entire county of Palm Beach with those 39 municipalities, I represent three, the Southern part of Palm Beach County, which happens to be the most dense in population. And I would say, of course, it happens to probably be the more robust when it comes to the business community, if not for the simple reason that more than half of all the corporate headquarters in all of Palm Beach County are in Boca Raton specifically.
So I won't ask Kelly to say what her favorite city is of those 39. It's really our job as the CEO of the Boca Chamber representing the Southern part of the county. It's our job to make sure that we have all of the economic development tools in the toolbox so that when Kelly is entertaining prospects that are interested in Palm Beach County, that she can count on us as her critical partner to make sure that we have all those tools sharp and ready to go.
And of course, that has everything to do with incentives. She talked about that. So both Mayor Weinroth and Kelly gave you some statistics, very impressive statistics about our county and about our region. But when you get down to Boca Raton specifically, I think that the symmetry as Al teaches me — and as we learn more about this great country of Bahrain, there's a lot of similarities here to Boca Raton specifically, to the quality of life that was mentioned, to the financial opportunities that were mentioned that I won't repeat. But I'll add a little bit to that – and when we think about Boca Raton, there's a great education system tied into Script and Max Planck, as Kelly mentioned.
Right here in our community – within five miles of one another, we have three very successful educational institutions, a state University called Florida Atlantic University, with all those partnerships to Scripts and Max Planck in the business community, one of the fastest growing state universities. We have a state College system called Palm Beach State College. We have a campus in Boca Raton as well as in other parts of Palm Beach County – and they operate a little bit differently than the state and University system, and they really help in creating a workforce that can get to the market a little bit quicker at times. They've got a little bit more nimbleness in their infrastructure.
Then we have a private, small University called Lynn University which is very international. A lot of international students right here in our community. So when we think simply about the educational system at that level a whole bunch of opportunities and working with the business community constantly to try to create the right workforce and get it up to speed as soon as possible. We also have a tremendous amount of private schools so that when we do have corporate relocations coming into our community certainly the C suite level of that organization has a lot of opportunity to educate their children if that's what they choose and can afford. And on top of that in Boca Raton, specifically all of our public schools, K- twelve are A rated and so that again gives us another opportunity to sell our community and tell Kelly we're doing our job in Boca town in the education space at all levels K- twelve to secondary and beyond.
Thank you.
— Troy M. McLellan
President and Chief Executive Officer of the Boca Raton Chamber of Commerce
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