Greetings and welcome to Friday and what looks to be a lovely weekend!

 

In business news today, SpaceX had the largest IPO in history and that act transformed Elon Musk into humankind’s first trillionaire. Just to get a sense of how much money that is… if you were to spend $1 million every hour of every day, it would take more than a century to spend $1 trillion. You could buy ALL the property in Houston, Texas (residential and commercial), with a cool $121 billion left in the bank. Or, you could buy professional sports teams – all of them – across the entire globe.

 

Tonight is the Oregon Coast Community College Commencement Ceremony at the PAC, starting at 6pm. Go graduates!

 

Here’s our weekly team update:

 

    • Partner Support/Community Support 
      • AOB – Paul, Stacie and Sarah led an Art, Oysters & Brews planning meeting on Wednesday. Sarah did some additional reach outs to potential vendors, worked on the press release, and submitted the permits to the City of Toledo. Stacie created the meeting agenda, followed up on action items, updated the project plan, reached out to the Homie House about tabling and/or volunteering, and worked on social media graphics.
      • CWEDD – On Thursday, EDALC hosted the quarterly Cascades West Economic Development District Board of Directors meeting (Paul, Stacie and Leslie in attendance). New to the Board from Lincoln County are our own Gregory Price, Newport Mayor Jan Kaplan and NOW Executive Director Heather DeSart. We held the meeting at the Pacific Maritime Heritage Center – and after the meeting, we had a custom Shop the Dock presentation from Angee Doerr, and then descended on Clearwater for lunch.
      • Central Lincoln PUD – Paul met with Eric Chambers from the PUD. Eric had been talking to his boss after our Economic Summit about a way they could fiscally support us beyond just being a member. He’s thinking of it as being a “Super Sponsor” (his words) – Paul will be working up a proposal for them.
      • GP Community Advisory Panel – On Tuesday, GP’s CAP (Paul is part of that panel) met in Sitetz for the ribbon cutting for a new large-scale generator that can power Siletz’s wastewater plant in the event of an outage. The $100k-ish generator project was funded by GP based on a DEQ fine. DEQ allows the fine to be paid out as a grant for community benefit and the CAP selected the Siletz project back in 2025.
  • Jury Duty – Sarah had Grand Jury duty all day on Thursday, which included a tour of the Lincoln County Jail. The tour was very interesting and she got to try their famous “Super Muffins” they give for breakfast – 1,500 calories in one muffin!
  • Blue Economy/O2IH
      • Mango Materials – Paul and Mark Farley met with Carrie and some senior Aquarium staff to give them an update on the year-long demonstration project focusing on nitrogen removal. They will be having a project kick-off meeting with Mango on June 22nd.
  • Entrepreneurship
      • CWIH – Paul attended and helped with a Cascades West Innovation Hub event in Florence last night focusing on angel investing. It was a packed house and the event featured networking (Paul was pitched three business ideas during networking time) and a panel discussion led by OEN’s Cara Turano and featured an Oregon angel investor plus the owners of Riptide Sports – a high performance skateboard bushing manufacturer from Florence. Stacie began working on the next Regional Lead interim report so that we can submit early (before Paul’s vacation).
      • Fail Fest 10/29/26 – Stacie compiled quotes from potential venues for the team to review next week.
  • Core Economic Development Services
  • Enterprise Zone – Sarah attended a Business Oregon presentation on the new changes to the Enterprise Zone program from HB 4084.
  • Major Employers Report – Sarah continued to reach out to businesses for their employment numbers.
  • Oregon Prospector – Sarah updated Oregon Prospector listings and added new ones.
  • Community Connecting
  • Café Aquarium 2026 Planning – This week included emails, meetings, and scheduling with multiple lead partners and potential sponsors for this year’s event. Leslie meets with the Aquarium’s catering lead, Lauren Fritz, this afternoon to narrow down options and costs to set the budget and cost priorities for the first round of tabling partner invitations. Stay tuned for more details, and if you’d like to support or get involved with this year’s event, please email Leslie: leslie@businesslincolncounty.com. Funding for catering is the greatest need; donations for the passport incentive raffle are also needed. As a recap of last year’s Café Aquarium successes, see how event supporters are recognized alongside event data and feedback in this report and in OSU Extension’s recent article. 
  • Organizational Management
  • Marketing & Communication
  • Stacie managed social media and updated the media tracker.
  • Project Work
  • Annual Meeting – Stacie followed up on the contract with Myril. The current headcount is 41.
  • Admin
      • The team used this week’s team meeting to review concepts and topics for an ROI-funded video series for aspiring entrepreneurs (led by Sarah) and brainstormed activity ideas for the CWEDD fall convening.

 

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)