Greetings and welcome to 2022! What a damp week – we’ve been wrestling with our sump pump all week to keep a lake out of our crawl space – this week, the lake was winning, but I think with a few clear days this weekend, we can gain the upper hand!
Here’s our EDALC update for the week:
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End of Year Wrap Up – I worked this week to wrap up end of the year bills, the final financial report and am working on pulling all minutes and agendas and printing them for our historical EDALC notebook (it’s always good to have a hard copy backup). Looks like we’ve got a pretty clean slate to enter 2022.
Project Associate Search – After doing some number crunching, as well as realizing how much work we have to do in Q1, I revised our Project Associate position description and posted it on Indeed. So far, we’ve received two applicants. You can see the posting here:
https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?t=project+associate&jk=4ccee1994643b625&_ga=2.121054280.1300776879.1641495318-1624741918.1641323293
Rural Opportunity Initiative – I sent off all the documents to the State to get our finds direct transferred into our account. In the next few weeks, the new ROI communities will have their virtual kick-off meeting. I continued work in Monday.com to plan out our initial projects and efforts and have another week or two of meetings with local stakeholders before we’re at “full go.” I’m also looking at ways we might synergize our work with a National Restaurant Association (the other NRA) EDA Good Jobs grant application for the Washington and Oregon coasts. I’ll also be meeting with Brad Attig next week to see if there is any synergy between our ROI goals and their CO.STARTERS start up training.
Organizational Funding – I had a long conversation this week with Lincoln City folks on the best way to bring in direct funding support to EDALC (as part of ROI and beyond), and it looks like our best approach would be to set up an economic development partnership that could be ongoing if we deliver (and we’ll deliver) and then potentially look at adding one or more Local Program Support grants in 2023 and beyond. I’ll be working with them on a scope/ask/agreement over the coming weeks.
O2IH – Commissioner Jacobson did some great work on the Blue Economy Sector Survey project, and it looks like we can get quality work done from EconNorthwest for a more affordable cost, so that we can sidestep some of the more problematic funding agencies (problematic in the sense that their funds could not be transferred away from the county – which is one of the goals). Going forward, it looks like EDALC should be able to take on the mantle and manage the admin on that project so we can bring home some quality results to inform future decisions and efforts. We’ll also be meeting next week with COPAC and NW Oregon Works to come to a decision on “good fit or not?” for some our our EDA Blue Economy work and the EDA’s Good Jobs Challenge.
County Community and Economic Development Grants – I had a call this week with Casey and Asia at the county to talk through grant rejection and award letters (and I reviewed those letters for the county team). Next Monday, we’ll meet at the courthouse to discuss reporting, the technology behind the applications and other grant program touchpoints.
Other Miscellaneous Connections – I had a great introductory meeting today with Erin Borla of the Roadhouse Foundation. We discussed ways that some of their programatic support grants could enhance some efforts we’re already engaged in (in both the creative economies and in our Blue Economy work). I also connected with Aaron Fox, president of OMEP (the Oregon Manufacturing Extension Partnership) and Lori Brown of AUVSI (the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International). There might be an opportunity to help AUVSI bring their Fall conference to Newport.
As a reminder – your Board of Directors resource page is here:
REMINDER: Our next BoD meeting will be Thursday, February 3rd at 3:30pm.
Here are the dates for our 2022 meetings:
January: no meeting
February: Feb. 3
March: Mar. 3
April: Apr. 7
May: May 5
June: June 2
July: no meeting
August: Aug. 4
September: Sept. 1
November: Nov. 6
December: Dec. 3 (grant review)
Thanks for ALL that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all.
Cheers,
-Paul 🙂