Greetings and welcome to Thursday! I’ll be off tomorrow (BFF and freshman high school roommate and his wife, also a college pal, are flying in from Madison, Wisconsin for a long weekend with us on the coast), so here’s a slightly shorter weekly update.
Our EDALC update for the week:
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Cindy’s week:
Cindy was off this week – her daughter (who currently lives in India while finishing a graduate degree) is in town – the first time Cindy’s been able to see her since the pandemic. So she’s busy enjoying family this week!
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Paul’s week:
Enterprise Zone Re-Designation – Brad Balk (GIS with Lincoln County) and I hammered out the last issues with the 2021 revised Enterprise Zone boundaries, and I was able to put together a revised narrative description to accompany the shape files and tax lot IDs list and those were submitted to Business Oregon early this week, so we should be good to go.
Regional Opportunity Initiative – I met with Melissa Murphy and Brian Plinski of Business Oregon on Monday morning to discuss the Rural Opportunity Initiative program. It looks like it could be a great opportunity for EDALC funding, and opportunity to dive a little deeper into one of our strategic priorities (entrepreneurial ecosystem development – also one of my passions) and a way to laser-focus some much-needed professional economic development shrives to our constituent communities. Melissa is looking to pull together a virtual stakeholder meeting in the coming weeks (the invite went out yesterday) to get folks up to speed on the program and how it works.
Meets, Greets and Meetings – This week, I gave a short presentation to the BizNet business networking group. I also had a chance to attend the Lincoln City Chamber luncheon and was able to network with Dave Price, Senator Anderson and Lori Arce-Torres. I also had a great face-to-face meeting with Dr. Gray to discuss the importance of county-wide economic development, not only to our business community, but to the school district. She had a great analogy for our organization and our work – we’re the “connective tissue” that can help to facilitate communication and collaboration between out communities. In a few weeks, I’ll be doing a presentation to the Newport Rotary Club on “22nd Century Economic Development – What Next Generation Economic Development Needs to Look like” – I hope that work will become the foundation of an ongoing presentation of our innovative efforts in the region.
EDA Grant Opportunity – Rachael Maddock-Hughes and I will be meeting in Corvallis next week to discuss a new EDA grant opportunity. The Travel, Tourism & Outdoor Recreation program is focused on accelerating the recovery of communities that rely on the travel, tourism and outdoor recreation sectors, and is funded by $750million dollars of ARPA funding. Several weeks back, we had a preliminary meeting with local stakeholders to gauge interest (and there was quite a bit). I’ll keep you posted on that.
Community and Economic Development Grant – I had a meeting early this week with Commissioner Jacobson, Kristi Peter and Asia Richardson to discuss this upcoming round of the county’s grant program. The application (and probably even the reporting process) will be moving over to some new web based software, and will take into account many of the suggestions our Board had last year. The Commissioners are going to be discussing splitting the grant pool into a “traditional” pool and another pool (roughly 50-50) to focus on a single, large and impactful economic development grant. This will be discussed at the August 9th BoC meeting. We also discussed doing a short workshop in early September (when the grant application window opens) to assist potential applicants in preparing for this opportunity.
ART Toledo – In this week’s ART Toledo meeting, we selected the new round of six regional artists to go into the Phantom Galleries on Main Street. Mayor Cross is very happy with the project because it had directly influenced the renting of several locations on Main Street (one a Phantom Gallery location) for new businesses – the exact goal of the project. The entire ART Toledo project is also driving enhanced commerce, both to event artists and the Toledo galleries. We also discussed the official kick-off of the downtown mural program and what the most impactful first projects would be.
CWEDD Grant Projects – I met with Judy Richter (city manager of Toledo) to discuss the funding logistics of the Oregon Prospector commercial property project. We also had an in-office meeting with Leslie Palotas (Newport Vision 2040), Laura Kimberly (Newport Public Library) and Rachel Cotton on Monday evening to hash out the next steps in the strategic plan website project. I was able to revise and nail down the final functional specification for the software development aspect of the project, and I’ll be selecting one of the top two bidders in the days to come.
Upcoming meeting reminders:
Our August Board of Directors meeting will be our first meeting in person! We’ll be meeting at the Port of Newport conference room in Thursday, August 5th at 3:30pm. Details coming soon. Please let me know if there’s something you’d like to see on the agenda.
As a reminder – your Board of Directors resource page is here:
Also, please don’t forget to Like our Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/EconDevLincolnCounty
Thanks for ALL that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all.
Cheers,
-Paul 🙂