- College of Medicine UCF
Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer took his State of the City address on the road this week, holding the annual event at the UCF College of Medicine. The mayor chose the college to highlight Lake Nona’s medical city as a model of public-private partnerships that create economic development.
The mayor noted that once completed, medical city will create more than 30,000 jobs and provide an annual economic impact of $7.8 billion.
UCF President John Hitt welcomed the crowd of more than 300 – including elected officials, neighborhood leaders and clergy – to the College of Medicine, or as he called it, with a chuckle, “The house that Deb built.” He thanked City of Orlando leaders and other community supporters for creating the college and medical city as a “beacon of hope, pride and prosperity for all of Central Florida.”
Mayor Dyer described medical city’s creation out of pastureland, comparing the development to how Walt Disney World grew out of once open Orange County fields. “Today we’re standing on that once vacant land” at Lake Nona, he said. “Just like Disney a half century before, medical city is going to change Orlando for the better forever.”
Medical city is a model of public-private partnerships, Mayor Dyer said. He added that under President Hitt, “the region has no better partner than UCF.”