‘True leadership.’ Harvard student, City Hall intern revamps Pines proposal
Imani Sanchez spends most of her days in Cambridge, Massachusetts — 1,500 miles from southwest Broward — but her hometown, Pembroke Pines, is never far from her mind.
Before her fall semester ended, the Harvard University graduate student was emailing City Hall about using her two-month winter break for a public policy internship with District 3 Commissioner Maria Rodriguez.
“It’s really important to me,” Sanchez, 22, told the Pembroke Pines News. “Everything that I do with public policy, it always comes back to my background, and Pembroke Pines is a really big part of that.”
Raised in west Pines and an alumni of four city schools, Sanchez is through and through Pembroke Pines, despite her higher education departure to the University of Florida in Gainesville and later the Ivy League.
That’s why when Sanchez returned from school — where she specializes in economic development — her first priority was to scope out the city’s “Economic Development Strategic Plan,” last updated in 2023.
After realizing the consulting-firm commissioned proposal didn’t “necessarily mention Pembroke Pines all too much,” she got to work brainstorming suggestions she says are “more geared” toward the city.
Her proposals, shared with city officials during the commission meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 21, were lauded as “impressive.”
“What’s even more impressive is that you took your time that was for you to do something for others,” District 1 Comissioner Thomas Good said during the meeting. “That’s a true sign of leadership.”
‘Family friendly’ city branding
Key to the city living up to its standing as Broward County’s second-most populous city — home to roughly 179,000 residents, just behind Fort Lauderdale — is a “clearly defined Pembroke Pines identity,” Sanchez’s proposal details.
That’s described as “health and wellness” in the city’s 2023 economic development plan and was thought up by Pompano Beach’s Redevelopment Management Associates (RMA), which authored the plan in 2014.
RMA proposed the branding concept due to 34% of local businesses having “a concentration on a segment of the wellness industry” — what Rodriguez mostly attributes to the city’s parks and hospital systems — per the 2014 plan and its 2023 update.
But Sanchez’s childhood in Pines, as well as that of her boss’, points to a different slogan: “family friendly.”
“The city has changed a lot, but the foundational understanding of what Pembroke Pines is as a city has always been this family-friendly place,” Sanchez said. “(Pembroke Pines) was a place where I found community, and with the continued growth of the city, we have a lot more people than we did 20 years ago.”
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Before hiring a communications agency to draft up a marketing pitch, the commissioner-intern duo says input from residents is in order.
“The (city’s) image can’t come from what we assume the city’s image to be, because we all have different perspectives, but instead what the larger city thinks about it,” Rodriguez told the Pembroke Pines News. “Let’s do a good investigation of what everybody thinks throughout and then somebody else can form that into a concept of a brand.”
To do that, Sanchez proposes circulating a citywide resident survey that rakes in a minimum 10% response rate and upping resident awareness and participation in Pembroke Pines’ economic development efforts.
“When we think about economic development in Pembroke Pines, I think the the biggest thing we should be thinking about is community engagement and really getting our residents and citizens involved in that as well,” she told commissioners.
Stronger ties to Broward initiatives, new liaison position
Also tacked onto Sanchez’s proposal is strengthening relationships at the county level, which Rodriguez explains as Pembroke Pines going beyond “work(ing) really well in a silo.”
According to the commissioner, Pembroke Pines is often left “out of the larger conversation” when it comes to county-wide economic development due to the city’s unwilligness to “come out of our shell.”
Her prime example? Transportation access.
Broward County’s Premium Mobility Program (PREMO) — high-priority transit projects adopted in 2023 to improve county transportation services — is two years underway, but still largely disregards southwest Broward.
“Most of the PREMO plan is infrastructure improvements on the north and on the east side of Broward, and it doesn’t really take into account too much of the southwest side,” Rodriguez said.
Other cities’ tourist attractions — Sanchez references Fort Lauderdale’s nightlife and Sunrise’s Sawgrass Mills and NHL’s Florida Panthers — also keep Pembroke Pines out of the limelight.
To combat this, the Harvard student proposes opening a new position at City Hall: a full-time economic development and intermunicipal director.
“(Pembroke Pines’) economic development and planning departments are one and the same, and there’s not a lot of people who work in the department,” she said.
For context, Sanchez added that the University of Florida’s county — Alachua — is home to about 100,000 more residents than Pembroke Pines but has separate economic development and planning departments with a “wide, large, big team.”
Adding a Broward County liaison to City Hall’s team, she says, would help cover more ground when searching for collaboration opportunities and give the city a more prominent presence in the right rooms.
“With how small the department is and also how it’s together, there’s only so much that those people can focus on and do,” Sanchez said.
Proposal’s next steps, future internships
Though Sanchez’s suggestions were well-received by the commission — Mayor Angelo Castillo dubbed them “fresh and different” — if and when they’d be absorbed into the existing plan is unknown.
City officials stalled on adopting the 2023 update of the economic development plan due to conflicting priorities, according to Rodriguez, including the City of Pembroke Pines Strategic Plan and the 2024 mayoral election.
One thing the commissioner is sure about? This won’t be her last intern.
“I think it’s really important to notice that young people should have a voice in a commission, and whenever I can give access to that, I’m more than happy to,” she said.
