Greetings and welcome to Friday and welcome to July! A bit shorter update this week, because we were pretty intently focused on our Enterprise Zone re-designation application.
Here’s our EDALC update for the week:
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Cindy’s week:
* Assisted in finishing EZ re-designation application
* Finished Major Employers fact sheet
* Finished Board Welcome Packet
* Designed and sent Annual Member Renewal email
* Began building a process for managing invoices, payments, thank yous and contact updates regarding member renewals
* Started planning for record retention project: purging and organizing
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Paul’s week:
Enterprise Zone Re-Designation – This week, we completed and submitted our Lincoln County Enterprise Zone re-designation application. We started that project in earnest in mid-march and have been working on it nearly every day since then. Our county is one of three in the state that has a very complex, multi-governmental zone and it required us to draft, present and have eight resolutions voted on. Im pleased to say all were approved unanimously. We also held a public meeting for all of the other taxing districts in the county.
A huge thank you goes out to Brad Balk and Kristin Yuille at the county, Spencer Nebel and Derrick Tokos at the City of Newport, Judy Richter with the City of Toledo, Alison Robertson, Sungman Kim and Sandy Gruber with Lincoln City, Dann Cutter with the City of Waldport, Paula Miranda with the Port of Newport, Lorna Davis with the Port of Toledo and Roxie Cuellar with the Port of Alsea and Art Fish with Business Oregon – we couldn’t have pulled it all together without their help.
COGs (Council of Governments)/ CWEDD (Cascades West Economic Development District Grant Program – We were informed yesterday that both of our grant applications were funded at the full requested level. One is for doing a commercial property inventory for the county (both sale and lease) through OregonProspector. It’s in partnership with the City of Toledo. The other was to have a custom WordPress plugin developed to allow multiple organizations to create online versions of their strategic plans and have them searchable and sortable by keywords. It will be a way to share and showcase the planning and efforts going on across the county. This is in partnership with the City of Newport (and their Vision 2040 plan). Woo hoo!
Member Renewals – As you can see from Cindy’s update, we officially kicked off the member renewal process (to sync up with our fiscal year). Cindy’s pulling together all the digital tools (MailChimp, Hubspot, PayPal and such) so we can manage this better than ever before. The cool thing is that we had our first online renewal and payment come in within five minutes of the announcement going out. Also, a gentle reminder that all EDALC directors should be members, per our by-laws 🙂
ART Toledo – Two quick things – first, ART Toledo also received a CWEDD grant award for their mural project, so they’ve now brought in $20,000 for mural work on Main Street (Way to go Rachael!). Also, the second Art, Oysters and Brews event will be tomorrow from noon-5 on Main Street – artists, beer tastings, wine tastings, oyster shooters, BBQ oysters and live music – I’ll be playing my old-school blues from noon until 1pm. Also, the Rotary Club of Toledo will unveil the newly renovated Veteran Appreciation Plaza on Main Street at 1pm.
Port Dock 5 – I attended the Port Dock 5 ribbon cutting ceremony yesterday – so awesome seeing that multi-year $2 million dollar project come to fruition! I was also the inadvertent photographer for the Newport News-Times – I guess they got the time wrong so I got a frantic text just a moment before the actual ribbon cutting to snap some pics for the paper – it was my “Jimmy Olson” moment!
Newport Industrial Property – I met with David Gomberg this week to talk about the Lawson property – a 30 acre industrial site in north Newport across from the PUD. We were able to add it to the enterprise zone, and the owner wanted a little help from Representative Gomberg to see if the ODOT/Forest Service maintenance project is dead or alive (the purchase option expired during the pandemic, after ODOT spent $350,000 on purchase options, site studies and engineering) on that project – or if it’s time to start marketing that property again.
End of the Fiscal Year – I wrapped up our end of year financial reports, and the bottom line is better than expected. The Board approved dipping into cash reserves to the tune of $77,000 for the 2020-21 fiscal year, and we ended up only needing $22,000 of the cash reserves. I’m still working on the 2021-22 budget, since so much is still in the air in regard to future sustainable funding. Next week, I start pulling together the paperwork for forgiveness on our PPP funds.
Future Funding – I’ll end this update with a little more serious and somber subject. On Monday, Tracy was informed by Commissioner Hunt that the commissioners had reached a consensus and that they will be moving in another direction with county-wide economic development. Specifically, they will be putting out an RFP for a bid on housing development, using economic development funds, and not funding EDALC. Obviously, this was not what we wanted to hear after our past year of excellent, impactful work.
Several board members (Bob, Carrie, Karen and Lesley) met with Commissioner Jacobson yesterday to gain a little clarity, and I conversed with them this morning. There do seem to be some options, and we will be pulling together a short emergency BoD meeting within the next two weeks to discuss. This really isn’t about me or even EDALC, but it’s about delivering essential economic development planning and impactful work to support the economic vitality of our communities. We’ve delivered on that promise over the last twelve months and don’t plan to go down quietly – it’s that important. I’ll keep you all posted as we look towards a date for the meeting.
As a reminder – your Board of Directors resource page is here:
Have a wonderful long holiday weekend, enjoy the 4th and keep those grills hot and those mint juleps ice cold (I know that’s a Memorial Day drink, but we like to buck tradition), and we’ll see you all back at it on Tuesday! Also, don’t forget that it’s the fair this weekend!
Thanks for ALL that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all.
Cheers,
-Paul 🙂