Greetings and happy Friday! I am literally stunned at how fast time is flying by – I wish I could somehow do a little time-warp to get about two more days in a week. That should do it!

Here’s our update from this week –

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Suzan’s week:

* Messages (staff, former director’s email & phone)
* Clean/disinfect office
* Post office/sort mail
* Staff meeting
* Processed memberships
* Updated database & xls
* Thank-you cards
* Tasks for Paul
* Called bank again to stop charging $25 fee. Got call back from treasury management dept explaining that w/out direct deposit fee we were put in a medium client category but can choose to be in basic category w/no fee.
* Tried to fix loss of internet and Outlook
* Updated board member report
* Typed agenda
* Called Spectrum re: their statement
* Sent out member invoice
* Cut checks
* Bank deposits
* Posted payroll, gusto and deposits in QBooks
* Did financial report & distributed
* Fixed board contacts in Outlook
* Completed, scanned and distributed board packet w/toc, agenda and notice.
* Friday list

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Paul’s week:

Sarah Means – I had a great call this week with Sarah Means, the governor’s “boots on the ground” representative for this region of the state. She did a great job walking me through interagency coordination and collaboration. She suggested that within four to six weeks, the Regional Solutions Team’s role will move from COVID reaction to crafting a two-year plan for economic recovery and she told me that my name is “already on the list” to be tapped to help with that effort.

Our Website/Branding – This week, I solidified the color palette for the site and continued building page elements. I also started building some of the actual pages, focusing much time today (and this upcoming Monday as well) on our county profile/snapshot page. I hope to be able to share some sample pages with you all during next week’s BoD meeting.

As you saw from our BoD handout, we’ve got a number of excellent logo options to consider. Sherry at Smies Design worked through three revisions for me and did a great job hitting on what I wanted to emphasize – specifically the phrase “Economic Development Alliance” and using a stylized doughnut chart as a graphical element that also nods towards the concept of business – I’m very pleased with what we have to work with.

Visualizing – I refined and added to the Economic Support Ecosystem “mind map” I’ve been working on (thanks for the feedback last week!) and shot the latest version off to Melissa Murphy at BusinessOregon and Dave at the SBDC for their take on what I’m still missing or not yet seeing.

Economic Development Planning – I had a great long Zoom meeting today with Greg Wolf from the Association of Oregon Counties. He got me up to speed a several exciting regional (as in our region) projects they are working on, but we spent most of our time talking through how we pull together economic development stakeholders in the different geographic regions of the county as a first step in the larger planning (and then implementation) process – these were some conversations he had with Commissioner Hunt earlier. I’m going to pull together a first draft of a plan for the commissioners to convene some initial meetings (virtually) and get that off to Greg next week – really looking forward to collaborating with Greg on this!

Office/QB – I spoke with Keri at Bryan’s office to get the process rolling on moving to QuickBooks online. This will free up a computer and a desk at the office, so Suzan and I started talking about some office rearrangement to make it a more functional, professional and fun space.

Traffic Counts – With the help of Sarah Means, I connected with ODOT folks who shared with me their GIS tool that allows me to deep dive into Lincoln County traffic counts. This data will be part of our county profile as well as part of market area profiles we’ll be developing in the near future.

Lincoln City Urban Renewal – On Monday, I attended the virtual City Council meeting to hear the proposal for the new Urban Renewal area (Cascade Head/Road’s End) which passed unanimously. I’ve got to say I’m impressed with the Lincoln City planning department (yowza where they well prepared) and the entire concept of an Urban Renewal area here in Oregon – it marries a TIF district with tools to really precisely plan on the anticipated funds. In my past work in Illinois, I managed a TIF district, but Illinois had none of the planning tools, so we would have to basically make educated guesses on anticipated income and create our own financing instruments to make things work. Yesterday, I took a drive up to Lincoln City to explore and visualize the new UR area.

Business Oregon Incentives – I attended the first of what looks to be four webinars by Art Fish of BusinessOregon exploring the underpinnings, usage and process for Oregon’s statewide business incentives. Great info to be sure.

Oregon Business Plan – On Tuesday, I attended the first Virtual Summit for the statewide Oregon Business Plan project to look at putting together an actionable statewide plan focused on business and job growth (with a special focus on inclusion and diversity). Governor Brown was the keynote for this summit. The public/private organization looks to hold several more virtual summits this year.

Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) – Continuing on the theme of large scale regional planning, I attended the Cascades West meeting on the upcoming update to the region’s CEDS. These regional plans are requirements to access certain channels of EDA funding and are also great tools to serve as scaffolding for more localized planning and coordination. Unfortunately, many CEDS exist solely to earn the right to apply for EDA grants and otherwise just gather dust on the shelf – looks like the Cascades West group is looking for a more useful and action-oriented update.

RAINmaker Accelerator – This week was my first session with an active role as a business mentor (we all run four mentor sessions during the course and otherwise act as a resource to the team and attendees) and I got to help folks walk through analyzing market size drill downs for preliminary customer base and income predictions. Upcoming will be a focus on email communication and marketing and I’ll be using that as our “excuse” (or just kick in the tail) to get our MailChimp account up and ready with a few initial reach-out and introduction emails.

Interesting Read – Once again, from Bloomberg’s CityLab, exploring zoning changes to allow more dense and affordable housing (Oregon is mentioned), but as only part of a larger solution:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-29/to-add-housing-zoning-code-reform-is-just-a-start?srnd=citylab

Reminder – We will have our August BoD meeting next Thursday, August 6th. The meeting will be at 3:30pm and handled via Zoom. Here are the meeting details (I’ll send out again next week):

Topic: EDALC August Board of Directors Meeting
Time: Aug 6, 2020 03:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/99554059875?pwd=TkkydVdVWGc2VTBzWFB0TDh5Q2JFQT09

Meeting ID: 995 5405 9875
Passcode: 592806

Dial in:
+1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma)
+1 669 900 9128 US (San Jose)

Meeting ID: 995 5405 9875
Passcode: 592806

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Have a great weekend, stay safe and wear those masks!

Cheers,

-Paul 🙂