Greetings and welcome to Friday. Had to believe we’re more than halfway through February already!
Here’s the EDALC update for the week –
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The first item to share is that this week was Suzan Brewer’s last week as EDALC Office Manager. She served our organization professionally and with great skill, and I wish her the best in her future professional endeavors.
As we work on our plans for the future, it is clear that the needs of our organization have changed considerably over the past year. There are considerable new challenges ahead and a new strategy is required to maximize the impact and effectiveness of the Economic Development Alliance of Lincoln County.
After reviewing our options (and working for several months with Suzan on some potential compromise approaches), I have concluded (with the support of our Executive Committee) that we must move in a different direction for our support staffing needs.
The bottom line is that we no longer need an office manager in the traditional sense – those tasks have been automated and optimized so they only take a few hours a week (if that). What we need is support staffing that can help push forward our organizational goals and projects – a strong, digitally-literate extrovert communicator who loves to get things done. So next week, the search will begin – I have a few leads already and would welcome any suggestions.
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Paul’s week:
Newsletter – Our February newsletter went out this week and we had some great feedback. I also pulled together an up-to-date list of all the new elected officials in the county and made sure they were on the mailing list (that was partially done for the last newsletter, but not all municipalities had their info current then).
Getting the Word Out – I’m scheduled to be on Casey Miller’s radio show (he’s the Public Information Officer for the county) on March 18th to talk about EDALC and what we’re working on. I’ll also be presenting to the Lincoln City Council on March 22nd. I’m seeing this as the first of several steps of getting out there and getting the newly-elected folks up to speed with our organization and how we can help and support their efforts.
Enterprise Zone – I had our official consultation with the State today, walking through the zone re-designation process. According to the American Community Survey data, the county still qualifies to re-designate the zone, based on median household income and unemployment numbers. Next steps are informal conversations with the zone sponsors and then potentially more detailed work if changes are needed (I’ll be talking with the new Yachats mayor on Monday about potentially extending the zone into Yachats – we’ve got a few extra square miles to play with that I wasn’t aware of). So the process is now moving from a few tasks here and there to a full project that will take us through the next four months.
Toledo ART – As you saw from our newsletter, applications are now live for the Toledo Phantom Gallery projects and submissions are indeed coming in. I wrote up a press release and sent it out to local and regional media contacts on Wednesday. I also continued to work with Rachael Wallace on her WordPress ninja skills so she can best direct her digital media CTE class on the Toledo ART website. Jesse Dolin was able to reallocate some OCVA funds and secure $10,000 to seed a mural program for Toledo as well – and as luck has it, a Russian-born mural painter with some serious skills just moved to Toledo from Washington State.
Blue Economy – I attended the first of two online events to introduce Laura Furgurson as the new Blue Economy catalyst and to introduce their approach to fertilizing marine innovation. They did quite a good job of pulling together some info-rich slides that succinctly explained the Blue Economy and also entrepreneurial ecosystems (something near and dear to my heart). In closely-related news, “the MIC” now has a new, better name going forward: the Oregon Ocean Innovation Hub (to be abbreviated at O2IH with a superscript “2”). Thumbs up to the new name and the creative brainstorming process that yielded it.
Broadband Action Team – Work is still ongoing with EDA to finalize the agreement for the feasibility grant. The BAT will continue meeting in the coming months to share initiatives and connections – state-wide, our local BAT looks to be several chess-moves ahead of other regional BATs, so there are also opportunities to share best practices across the growing network.
North County Economic Development – We had a lunch meeting this week of the north county economic development discussion group and were joined by Senator Anderson. Most of our conversation focused on how often and who we should communicate with, both locally in the county, regionally in the county and across our boarder region – we had some great ideas that we’ll flesh out shortly.
Office Management – Early next week, I’ll tackle closing out office manager accounts and such (email, QuickBooks, online banking and such) and also notify Bryan’s team of hours of remaining compensation and comparing notes on outstanding paid-time off. On the other side of that, I’ll be crafting a job posting for indeed and also scheduling regular office tasks and check-ins so we don’t get behind.
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 🙂