Greetings and Happy New Year! Well, we had a relatively calm five days of the new year before it went off the rails! Let’s all hope these are after-tremors of the craziness of 2020.

Here’s our update for the week –

====
Suzan’s week:

* No update this week – Suzan was out sick most of the week – we all wish her well!

 

====
Paul’s week:

Digital Marketing Test – Just a quick update on the campaign – as of this afternoon, we’ve had just over 7,500 impressions with just over 200 clickthroughs to the landing page – a pretty good tally for just under three weeks!

Business Support – I continued working with several businesses this week on their expansion plans, and hopefully, fingers crossed, we may have connected Lucinda Whitacre with a location for her new business expansion. I also created a business technical assistance tracker tool in Excel to help keep track the businesses we work with and how many interactions and hours of work we put in on that front.

Toledo Downtown Revitalization – I trekked over to the VAC in Newport to check out their gallery panels – just perfect for the Phantom Gallery project! A team of folks (me included) will be moving those to Toledo on Monday or Tuesday. All in all, the generous donation from the Arts Center is worth well over $1,000! We had a Toledo downtown revitalization team meeting at City Hall on Thursday as met with high school students who will be helping on the digital marketing see of the project (social media, web, etc.). I’ll be setting up a “reseller” hosting account for the website (as well as future web-based projects on the horizon). We also discussed a USDA RDGB grant application that will be submitted as well as a very exciting art festival partnership idea with GP. Rachael Maddock-Hughes and I had a working lunch in Newport to discuss those and other projects – and we also ran into Mark Farley and Kaety Jacobson at Pacific Kitchen and had a nice conversation. There are times when I LOVE small towns!

CWEDD CEDS – The Cascades West Economic Development District has posted their draft Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy document online. It’s a much leaner, meaner and more useful planning document than the previous plan. I was honored to play a small part in the update process. They are taking public comments until February 2. You can see (and comment) on the plan here: http://www.ocwcog.org/economic-development/cascades-west-economic-development-district/ceds/

Office – Nothing too exciting, but while I was working in Excel this week, I created a much easier to manage, track and approve expense and mileage reporting system. I’ll have Suzan look it over next week to see what I missed, and then it’s off to the races!

County Community and Economic Development Grant – A quick update – Doug Hunt gave me a quick call yesterday – the County Commissioners took our board recommendations for the grant awardees, but took the middle ten grants (based on scoring) and reduced the awards by $100 each to get them within the $130,000 budget. Looking forward to seeing those project come to fruition!

Blue Economy – First, the Blue Economy Catalyst position (as part of the Hatfield/OregonRAIN EDA grant) is going to be filled by Laura Furgurson, who is currently serving as the Chamber Director for both Depoe Bay and Waldport. She’s super-capable and whip-smart – I’ll look forward to working with her closely in the coming years. Also, in today’s Maritime Innovation Center meeting we got to hear about a number of project briefs that will be presented to potential funders in mid February. Some awesome projects from workforce development to STEM education to drones over the water. I had the privilege to work on three aquaculture briefs and a forth brief on a sensor-net project. I’m also working on a fifth project brief that I hope to have out to folks next week.

Thanks for all that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all. Have a wonderful weekend!

Cheers,

-Paul 🙂