Greetings and welcome to Friday! And happy St. Patrick’s Day! Enjoy the Guinness, the corned beef and cabbage and your search for that pot of gold!
Thanks to everyone who came out to our EDALC celebration last night at the Barge Inn Tav3rn! We had a full house and the last of us left at 10 pm! What a wonderful packed crowd of board members, staff, spouses and friends of EDALC! A huge “Huzzah!” to the staff of the Barge Inn – their service was amazing and the crab boil was off the charts (just how many crabs DID we devour?). Also a shout-out to our staff who helped to pull this event together and make it feel effortless.
For board members who couldn’t make it last night – we presented our board with some wonderful “Thank you for serving EDALC!” gifts – 17×30 limited edition photo prints from Jeremy Burke (he was on hand to describe each of the photos and where it was taken). If you couldn’t make it, I have your print in my office – I’ll reach out to get them to you (or it’s also a great excuse to come check out our new digs in Waldport!).
Thanks to all for making last night a wonderful, joyful (and fun) celebration!!
Here’s our weekly staff update:
Blue Economy::
Yesterday morning, Business Oregon officially released the first part of their five Emerging Industries market analysis reports. This release consists of consolidated reports for each of the sectors, plus a short two-page summary. Full reports are coming soon. The consolidated reports will be distributed to the State Legislature and the Governor’s Office. If you check out the Blue Economy consolidated reports (they are all pulled together into a single PDF), you can read the afterward (about page 153) – that’s What Mark Farley and I wrote for the Steering Committee – and it’s pretty cool that three of the eight signatories are from Lincoln County! Here’s the link:
https://www.oregon.gov/biz/reports/Pages/emerging_industries.aspx
Broadband:
This week, we had our monthly Broadband Action Team meeting (Benton , Lane, Lincoln and Linn counties). Lane county submitted FCC “fabric” challenges on behalf of all four counties (with each doing their own GIS data analysis). In that submission, about 100 addresses were challenged in Lincoln County (each accepted address challenge mean a little over $4,000 of ARPA/Infrastructure funds coming into the state). The Oregon Broadband Office also submitted a block challenge for about 20 counties in the state – about 6,000 challenged addresses in all. We also had a regional meeting for our EDA planning grant, being facilitated by Solarity. Our small regional team reviewed and edited two Internet surveys (one for residents and one for businesses) that will be going out in the next week or two. – Paul
Communication/Marketing::
I continued to work on the Spring newsletter throughout the week. I posted on the EDALC Facebook page about the town hall with Representatives Anderson and Gomberg, SBDC day, and about our board event. – Sarah
Community and Economic Development Grant Program::
On Wednesday morning, the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners officially took the funding recommendations from our EDALC Board of Directors to approve the 2022-23 Community and Economic Development Grant Program awards. The only tweak was to the Depoe Bay Chamber of Commerce application (the one providing CO.STARTERS start-up training for Depoe Bay and Toledo) – instead of funds going to either chamber, the county will directly pay the Foundry Collective/Reinventing Rural (who will provide that programming). High fives to all for your hard work on this year’s grant cycle – some great projects got funded! – Paul
Community Connecting::
Excerpt from Leslie’s update:
Hats off to Paul, Sarah, our Board, and all the guests who made last night’s Crab Crack so much fun! My reign as the slowest crab opener continues – though I think my customers at Local Ocean believe I tell them I’m a slow crab eater just to make them feel better. Even first-time Dungeness Crab-in-shell eaters, Matt & Melissa Batchelor, finished theirs in about half the time I spent enjoying every morsel (while sharing stories, of course). It’s wonderful to get to know folks more in person, and I’m looking forward to more fun gatherings ahead!
Here’s a link to Leslie’s (always fascinating and informative) full report:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z9utZUb4xdhDbK_WQFgbv-I8YOwz7_B2NjwFCIBjC3U/edit?usp=sharing
Creative Economies::
This week I worked on building the new ART Toledo website, added the mural application to the current website, and sent out a newsletter to more potential artists asking them to be vendors at the Art, Oysters & Brews events. I also started writing a new page about ART Toledo’s new fundraising model. – Sarah
Organizational Development::
This week, we processed our first payroll through our new bank, 1st Security (formerly Columbia/Newport). All went smoothly! The next hurdle is how easy it’ll be when it’s time to pull down data for the end of month financials. – Paul
Paul, Leslie and I had our EDALC team meeting Tuesday morning! Afterwards I added some new tasks to Monday.com for our upcoming entrepreneur event. – Sarah
Project Work::
On Monday I updated the opportunities for entrepreneurs slider on the EDALC website. I updated the average rent for commercial buildings in Lincoln County on Friday. I updated Oregon Prospector on Monday and Friday. – Sarah
Supporting and Connecting with Partners::
Cascades West Economic Development District (CWEDD) – On Monday, I trekked to Albany for the day. I was part of an external team (there was also an internal team) to interview final candidates for the Cascades West Council of Governments Community and Economic Development Director position. The external team focused mostly on regional economic development, and we had some very lively, in-depth interviews. I just found out from the COG that they decided to re-open the search for this key position – while the candidates we interviewed were strong, there were definitely some gaps in the needed skills. I applaud them for taking their time to get the right rock-star in place. – Paul
OCCC – With a kind request from Birgitte (and a very productive face-to-face meeting discussing why it was needed and how things align with our EDALC priorities), yesterday, I submitted my SEL 190 to the county clerk to officially run for the open Zone 3 position on the OCCC Board of Education in the May election. As Birgitte showed me last night on her iPhone, the application to run was accepted before the deadline, and it looks like I’ll be running unopposed. – Paul
I watched the first part of the County Commissioner meeting Wednesday morning and attended the Lincoln County Economic Resiliency Team meeting. – Sarah
As a reminder – your Board of Directors resource page is here:
Also, the 27th-31st is Spring Break. Susan has that week off, so I’ll be taking it off as well. We were going to fly back to Illinois to visit Susan’s Mom, but airfare is just prohibitively expense. We’ll probably do a hybrid home-project staycation with a few escapes to explore and enjoy.
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 🙂