Greetings and welcome to Friday and to the first day of May!

 

This week, Local Ocean was featured on David Byrne’s (yes, THAT David – from the Talking Heads) Reasons to Be Cheerful global website: https://reasonstobecheerful.world/local-ocean-oregon-coast-seafood

 

This weekend is Loyalty Days in Newport (enjoy the parade or take alternate travel routes!). Next Tuesday, the Oregon Coast SBDC will receive their award for the Region 10 Center for Excellence & Innovation at the OCCC central campus at 1p.m. On the 13th, the Youth Entrepreneurship Program will host their Pitch Event Finale at 5pm at the Hatfield Gladys Valley Auditorium. Sarah and Stacie will help run the show (and do some video taping) and Paul will once again serve as emcee. So much going on!

 

Also, Sunday is Kentucky Derby day – prep those mint juleps! The current line is Renegade at 4-1 with Much Ado and Commandant at 6-1.

 

Here’s our weekly team update:

 

    • Partner Support/Community Support 
      • Business Oregon/IEC TC – Paul was invited to present (about Lincoln County’s economy and local and regional economic development efforts) to the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Technical Committee (TC) 114’s Plenary Session at Hatfield. The IEC TC 114 is developing and maintaining international standards for marine energy conversion systems, e.g., wave, tidal, ocean current, and other water energy conversion systems. The attendees represented a mix of companies, research institutions, governmental, and non-governmental entities from nine countries.
  • Strengthening Rural Families – Sarah attended a Strengthening Rural Families board meeting Monday evening.
      • Art, Oysters & Brews – Stacie updated the budget and sent a follow up request for the Toledo Chamber to share the save the date in their next newsletter.
  • Blue Economy/O2IH
      • Demonstration Project – If you’ve been following these updates, you’ll remember that EDALC has been working with Hatfield (Mark Farley) and Challenger Biosciences to help Mango Materials move a demonstration project for microbial seawater nitrogen removal (the testing to be done in Newport) forward to funding by Schmidt Marine Technology Partners (SMTP). That invited proposal was refined by all parties this week and submitted today. We’ll keep you posted.
  • Economic Mobility
      • Update Meeting – Paul met with Allyson and Nina on Wednesday to review Allyson’s progress on multiple Newport Economic Mobility project efforts. Impressive planning and foundational work so far!
  • Entrepreneurship
      • CWIH – This morning, Paul attended the monthly core partners meeting for the Cascades West Innovation Hub. Topics included an updated statewide innovation resource website, and the addition of the Willamette Innovators Network to the core group (who will be leading an innovators and entrepreneurs advisory group). On Tuesday, Paul met with Adrian Alupoaei, a junior at OSU, who has created an online, web-based multiplayer fighting and adventure game (which currently has about 3K regular players). He’s interested in improving it and setting it up as the foundation of a post-graduation startup company. Paul shared several resources with him on how to think through and improve the game’s design and “stickiness.” Stacie and Paul put together a last-minute supplemental report for Q1 hub work on Thursday.
      • EDA Disaster Supplemental Grant – EDALC finally heard back with notes on our proposal narrative from the EDA’s Wes Cochran (not many notes at all!). We’re working with Sequoia Consulting on the final tweaks and then will submit the grant for a feasibility study on creating a Lincoln County business incubator.
  • Youth Entrepreneurship Program Pitch (YEP) Event – Stacie and Sarah met with Kelliane to coordinate planning details for the YEP pitch competition and worked on the press release. Sarah sent out the press release for the event.
  • ROI – Stacie created the first quarterly report for ROI. Stacie and Paul had a check-in call with the ROI program director on Thursday.
  • Core Economic Development Services
      • Economic Vitality Report Card/County Profile – Sarah finished updating the Economic Vitality Report card and updated the County Profile on the website. She also put the data from the new and old versions of the report and county profile together for a comparison from 2024 to 2026.
      • Opportunity Zones 2.0 – Paul did a deep dive into the Fed’s new Opportunity Zone 2.0 program – ostensibly, a program to allow wealthy investors to shield capital gains taxes by investing in projects in specified regions. The first iteration was next to useless for rural areas, but maybe not so this go-round. There are five census tracts in Lincoln County that are eligible – Paul sent out queries to the local government units in those tracts and will be attending an online “office hours” by Business Oregon next week to dial in some understanding and determine if any applications should come from Lincoln County (the region).
  • Oregon Prospector – Sarah added new property listings on Oregon Prospector. 
  • Community Connecting
  • Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) Community Listening Sessions – Sarah, Paul, and Leslie attended two sessions with OPB representatives on Monday, a year after last year’s gathering introduced new-at-the-time OPB CEO Rachel Smolkin to our one-of-a-kind community. Leslie’s networks also helped connect youth from Oregon Coast Aquarium’s bilingual intern program and Cape Perpetua Collaborative’s Young Wavemaker program to their session focused on young voices. Leslie was honored, and a bit verklempt to learn that her Community Connector work and Expedition Lens insight shared last year, alongside the aligned stories the OPB team heard in following rural community visits, catalyzed a new OPB Community Connections department, as described here. After meeting and discussing future collaborations, Leslie will be following up with VP of that department, Shayna Schlosberg, who is interested in connecting with the RCBC network and aligned Community Connecting concepts. This statewide organizational shift story comes at an ideal time to include in EDALC’s grant report to TFFF.
  • Organizational Management
  • Marketing & Communication
        • Stacie managed social media, including creating a recap post about her and Leslie’s experience at the Regards to Rural conference.
  • Project Work
        • Stacie put the annual meeting next steps on pause while Paul works on getting  consensus on a new meeting date due to a scheduling conflict with the Newport Chamber on 6/24. Once a date is found (looking like July 1 so far) we will confirm whether Myril can accommodate us for that event.
  • Admin
      • The team met on Wednesday and discussed next steps for the annual meeting, ideas for the Cascades West Economic Development District meeting in June, and tested Sarah’s YEP poll. 

 

Reminder: EDALC’s May Board of Directors meeting will be next Thursday, May 7th at 3:30pm, via Zoom. Agenda and packet to go out next week. Here is the Zoom link:

 

Topic: May EDALC BoD Meeting

Time: May 7, 2026 03:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/9178104987?pwd=bVJDN0VlUEM3aG9EaFhJQUZjcDJHUT09&omn=89714415175

 

Meeting ID: 917 810 4987

Passcode: 0NyksK

 

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)