Greetings and welcome to Friday! Looks like we have a potentially beautiful weekend and next week to look forward to! Go out there and play!

Here’s our EDALC update for the week –

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Cindy’s week:

* Learned more about local orgs, what they do and how we’re all connected

* Worked with Paul to organize shared folders and projects

* Assisted in moving the Enterprise Zone project from the white board to Trello, defining action items and timelines

* Assisted in planning the April newsletter and took responsibility for two sections

* Continued learning basic office procedures and record-keeping duties

* Narrowed down potential member management software options

* Became admin for FB page to assist in keeping it up to date and meaningful

FYI: Cindy’s email is cinday@businesslincolncounty.com

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Paul’s week:

Getting the Word Out – I was honored to give a presentation this morning to the Newport Chamber’s Ambassadors at their monthly meeting. I discussed upcoming trends in our local economy over the next year as well as efforts already underway. I wrapped up by talking about EDALC and our current and upcoming work. We had a great back and forth Q&A period as well. Later this morning, the Chamber emailed to invite me to present at one of their larger Chamber luncheon events – cool!

Our target is to have our next newsletter go out on April 20, with a content deadline of April 16. If you have anything you’d like to see in the newsletter, please let us know.

BoD Matrix and New Member Application – I made the new member application live this week. If you all get a moment, can you load up the page and fill out the form? That info will help us fully and properly fill out our Board matrix. Many thanks! Here’s the link: https://businesslincolncounty.com/board-of-directors-application/

New Connection – Mayor Vaaler of Yachats introduced me to Jacqueline Danos, a relatively new Yachats resident and former urban planner. We connected this week and she shared with me her association with the Local First Arizona Foundation (https://www.localfirstazfoundation.org/), an interesting grassroots organization building community around locally-owned businesses. We’re going to reach out together and connect with some of the senior staff there to see if there are any lessons or best practices to learn and bring back to Lincoln County.

Vaccine Roundtable – I was asked by Sarah Means of the Regional Solutions Team to get her contact information on several area businesses that were strongly affected by the pandemic. The Governor is putting together a business roundtable on vaccine distribution and challenges faced by businesses getting eerie employees vaccinated.

ART Toledo – A dedicated team (I even roped my wife Susan into it!) showed up in downtown Toledo to set up the inaugural four locations for the Phantom Gallery project this afternoon. It’s wonderful to see the banners running down Main Street and the huge banners on the signs into town. We had a solid team of folks cleaning windows, setting up the VAC-donated art panels, setting up the lighting plus the artists themselves hanging the art – what a great way to energize empty storefronts!

CW EDD – This week was our monthly meeting of economic development practitioners in the Cascades West Economic Development District – it’s always an energized working-lunch meeting sharing best practices, opportunities and challenges in the region. We also learned of some work done at the COGs-level on interfacing with the state business registry at a local level to give us more accurate information and contact data for local businesses – an important topic made even more vital as a result of the pandemic.

Project Management – Since I started at EDALC, I’ve been using Trello to track my own multiple to-do lists and projects, but this week, Cindy and I took the first major step forward to implementing that tool (trello.com) as our collaborative project planning and management tool.

Enterprise Zone – After we pulled together our sub-projects for the re-designation process, I reached out to BusinessOregon several times this week with questions on our EZ boundaries. Cindy searched through out records and found many, many different documents related to tax lots and other ways to describe property in the LC EZ. I was able to get a tax lot list from the state, but some of the data is unclear and there are several large chunks of the cities of Waldport, Toledo and Newport that aren’t described in any meaningful way to the state – so we’ll need to do a little work to make sure we report the zone properties more carefully to the state during the re-up process.

Strat Planning – I spent a few hours on Monday revisiting my document exploring a new process to develop a strategic plan and was able to refine the process steps a little further. I also spent some time with the local water planning partnership plan (both as prep for this week’s coordinating committee meeting and looking at what I can glean from the format) and came away with some solid ideas on next steps. I’m hopeful that we’ll receive a “blessing” from the county commissioners in the coming months to dive full-on into this vital county-wide economic development strategic planning process.

Upcoming – I’ll be attending a two-day virtual workshop next week (Thursday and Friday) from the Oregon Economic Developers Association on setting up a Business Retention and Expansion program – one of our key strategic priorities. Looking forward to it!

Thanks for ALL that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all. Have a wonderful weekend!

Cheers,

-Paul 🙂