Greetings and welcome to a wet Friday and a wet weekend! For history buffs (or wine and whisky buffs), Prohibition was repealed on December 5th, 1933, 92 years ago. Time for a toast?

 

All in all, we had 27 grant submissions for this year’s Community and Economic Development Grant Program – a record number (by far!). We will be setting up the grant applications on our website on Monday and sending out the scoring matrix as well.

 

If you are a Director and haven’t yet filled in the Doodle poll for the grant review meeting (via Zoom), here’s the link:

 

https://doodle.com/group-poll/participate/dPJ3zQAa

 

Here’s our weekly team update:

 

    • Partner Support/Community Support 
      • City of Newport – Paul will be traveling to El Paso, TX with Nina Vetter and Newport’s new Economic Mobility Program Manager for the ICMA’s Economic Mobility and Opportunity kickoff convening and training program next week (late Tuesday through Friday).
  • CWEDD – Sarah edited and completed the CWEDD video and sent it to OCWCOG for their approval. The final version should be ready for distribution early next week! (Paul here – Sarah did an AMAZING job on this video project!!)
  • Business Oregon – Paul had an update meeting with our Regional Development Officer Heather Stevens. We’ll be coming together in a few weeks with Courtney Flathers (Regional Solutions) and Paula (when she returns from New Zealand) to discuss Rogue’s facilities.
    • Blue Economy/O2IH
      • Maritime Leadership – Paul attended the revamped Maritime Leadership meeting – mostly about coastal workforce efforts in maritime career development utilizing funding from the legislature. Paul also learned that Business Oregon has also designated a Blue Economy sector strategist for the state (which has been a long time coming!).
      • Hatfield – At Thursday’s YBEF meeting, the program was interim Hatfield Director Dr. Lisa Ballance. She gave a unique perspective, focusing on the “distinctions” of Hatfield (in the economic development world, we’d call them USPs – Unique Selling Propositions – or Paul would just call them “superpowers”) in a global context. She also stated that the Hatfield campus (OSU and partner agencies) has research and operations spending of over $93 million annually.
    • Entrepreneurship
      • CWIH – After meeting with Paul and Sarah on Monday, Stacie created the project tracker, program spreadsheet, reserved space at OCCC, and wrote the save the date newsletter blurb for a coastal CWIH hub event on January 27th. The target audience for the event is Lincoln County business support/service providers and full details are coming soon! On Friday, the core Innovation Hub team met to discuss the upcoming CWIH website, new logo and branding guidelines, technical assistance metric tracking and upcoming events.
      • EDA Disaster Supplemental – Paul met with the grant writing team from Rural Prosperity Partners to nail down the specifics on the grant narrative (to begin the planning process for a Lincoln County business incubator) and walk through the checklist on needed supporting documentation. Paul also set up an EDALC account on the EDA’s grant management web portal. The goal is to submit the application before the Christmas holiday.
      • Rural Opportunity Initiative – Paul and Stacie worked on determining anticipated impact metrics/goals and our scope of work for the upcoming ROI contract from Business Oregon. Paul revised the project budget to reflect the award of $140,000 (the original ask was for $150,000). All documents were sent off to ROI statewide director Brian Plinski on Friday.
    • Core Economic Development Services
  • Community & Economic Development Grant Program – Sarah verified the chief executive of the applying organisations gave their approval for the application. Stacie took the first pass at pre-scoring the bonus categories, ensured all applications were accounted for, and added some lessons learned to the project plan for reference moving forward.
    • Community Connecting
      • Newport’s 10-Year Sustainable Destination Management Plan Advisory Team – ACTION ITEM FOR PARTNERS: Newport Tourism Stakeholder Survey, from Willow Ryon, City of Newport Tourism Beautification and Tourism Program Coordinator:
  • “I’m pleased to share that the Future of Tourism Survey: Newport, Oregon is now finalized and ready for distribution! This survey is for local tourism industry stakeholders only – think businesses selling products or providing services to tourist (small business owners, lodging, restaurants, museums, cultural centers, charters, aquarium, PAC/VAC),  those providing services or products that help support visitor (and local) experience or infrastructure (fishermen, trail stewards, festival/event operators, transportation, park rangers/managers, EDALC, OCVA, Sea Grant, Hatfield, visitor center, DMO, friends of Yaquina lighthouse, Oregon Boating Foundation). This is by no means a comprehensive list but just wanted to highlight this is NOT FOR VISITORS. The survey will close on December 19, 2025, at 11:59 PM. I will be following up towards the end of next week or the beginning of the following week with the survey that will be going out to visitors.”

This week, Leslie gave feedback on the Visitor Survey draft and completed the Stakeholder survey. If you, or anyone in your networks, fit the “tourism industry stakeholder” criteria Willow detailed above, please fill out the survey via the link above, and/or share, print, and/or post this flier about the survey.

    • Organizational Management
  • Marketing & Communication – Stacie shared the wide range of Lincoln county holiday activities to FB and IG stories.
  • Admin – The team met in the office on Thursday to share updates and our priorities for the rest of 2025.

 

That’s it for this week, thanks for ALL that you are doing out there. Keep us posted if you have anything you want us to share – we love hearing from you! Have a wonderful weekend!

 

Cheers,

 

-The EDALC Team (Paul, Sarah, Leslie and Stacie)