Greetings and welcome to Friday and welcome to Spring! It sure feels like it, doesn’t it?

 

Last week was our third annual Lincoln County Economic Summit, and it was clearly the best one to-date! We sold out completely and even had some extras show up on the day of, pushing us to around 100 attendees. Thanks to the board members who attended with special high-fives going out to Marshall and Gregory for their excellent work behind the mic!

 

In a funny aside, Representative Gomberg put together a wonderful video welcome for the event, shot in the house chambers in Salem – the only problem was his staff forgot to send it to us (we did get it this Tuesday)! Rep. Gomberg was not amused.

 

Here’s our weekly team update:

 

    • Partner Support/Community Support 
  • CCFW – Sarah attended a Central Coast Food Web executive committee meeting and later in the week met with the staff to work through a cost analysis of their facilities and processing for fishing boats.
      • LCHAB – Paul attended the Lincoln County Homeless Advisory Board committee (policy and funding) meeting this week. Right now, there is no new policy work that can be done until federal actions become more clear and stabilized.
      • LCSD – Paul filed a letter of endorsement from EDALC at the county courthouse today – for the voter information pamphlet for the May election, supporting the LCSD bond measure (Paul also filed an endorsement letter from YBEF).
      • Lincoln County – Paul met with Commissioner Miller this morning to discuss multiple topics, from continued EDALC support funding to potential Enterprise Zone updates to the C-PACE incentive program for commercial development.
  • OEDA – Paul and Sarah met with Caitlin Q from the Oregon Economic Development Association to begin initial planning and coordination of their annual economic developers conference that will take place at Salishan this October (26-28th). Paul reached out to Representative Gomberg today to get the OEDA event on his schedule. 
  • Blue Economy/O2IH
      • Stacie worked on website content and met with Shawn Livegood to go over content additions and site edits. We will be working on completing phase 1 content over the next two weeks. Sarah is working on tagging resources to allow for easy filtering on the site.
      • Paul met with Rural Prosperity Partners today to explore the possibility of doing a joint NOAA Young Fisherman’s Career grant application with the Tillamook County Visitors Association – they’ll be doing a followup meeting on Monday.
  • Entrepreneurship
  • CWIH – Stacie reviewed OEN recommendations and leadership interest survey and met with Paul and Sarah to review the status of current framework research and identified the initial 8 Advisory Team members for this phase of work. The team will meet with Susan Patterson (CWCOG) on Monday for a check-in. Paul met with RAIN and the Willamette Innovators Network to discuss an upcoming BioTech innovation event in Lebanon in mid April.
  • Broadband
      • BAT – Paul participated in the monthly Broadband Action Team meeting this week. The BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment) program is the nationwide big money infrastructure program (though each state manages their own applications, rules and such). As of now, only four states have presented their statewide plans and have been approved (Oregon is not one of them). Odds are, the feds will pause the program to make some changes, before it will start back up again. It looks like some of the changes may be shifting away from a fiber mandate to allow more low Earth orbit satellite connections (Starlink and Amazon) and potentially removing the mandate to have a low cost option if an ISP gets BEAD money – we’ll keep you posted.
  • Core Economic Development Services
  • Lincoln County Economic Summit – Team is working on uploading and sorting photos and videos, Sarah is writing thank you cards and sent a survey reminder via email. Stacie worked on post event social media content. The team also participated in a post-event retrospective. Sarah and Stacie also worked on uploading presentations and resources onto the summit webpage, if you are interested in any of the event resources or videos please check out the page here: tinyurl.com/25LCSummit
  • Community Connecting
  • Reports and Planning – As she mentioned at this month’s board meeting, Leslie’s gathering feedback about her Community Connector work for a grant wrap-up report and to help seek future funding. You can help! Leslie’s created a variety of questions to inspire thoughts on the impacts and ripple effects of her work over time. No need to answer everything, you’re invited to select a few questions that resonate with you. Your insight will be much appreciated: https://tinyurl.com/CCfeedbackEDALC2025  A big thanks to Marshall, who has already shared his feedback! Our board now has a competitor to keep up with.
  • Organizational Management
  • Marketing & Communication
  • Stacie posted Friday community roundup and shared relevant partner/regional posts on various social media channels.
  • Admin
  • Next fiscal year funding – Paul is mapping out specific new and recurring funding asks and setting up initial and followup appointments – his office whiteboard is going to get quite busy!
  • Bookkeeping – Paul met with two of Bryan’s team to sort out several long term issues with QuickBooks, and it looks like the solutions are (finally!) close at hand!

 

Upcoming: our next Board of Directors meeting will be on Thursday, April 3rd, via Zoom. This meeting will be a shortened meeting, starting at 4:15pm (the plan is to still go until 5pm). Oregon Public Broadcasting’s new statewide director will be in Lincoln County that day and will be holding a listening session from 2-4pm, and I know several Directors will be attending – hence the later start time.

 

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, and don’t be stingy with your ideas – we love hearing from you!

 

Cheers,

 

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