Greetings and welcome to Friday!
Thanks to all who attended our November Board meeting yesterday. We had some great dialog about standing up a new tiered investment approach to bringing in private sector financial support for our economic development work. Thanks for all the feedback!
Here’s our EDALC update for the week:
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Rural Opportunity Initiative – Brian Plinksi, the ROI program coordinator, shot out a “getting started” email this afternoon. We’re still waiting on the paperwork from Business Oregon, but Brian expects that from their contract team next week. He indicated that 50% of the funds will be dispersed to awardees at contract execution, which is a little sooner than I was anticipating. I’ll also be pulling together a press release next week on our acceptance into the ROI program and our growing local coalition.
O2IH – We had our bi-weekly partner update this week, plus a planning meeting with Rachael, Sherry, Mark and myself. We’re going to be pulling together a small set of working teams to be ready to respond when we receive word on the EDA BBB Phase One application. These teams will include the main project areas (Pathways to Blue Careers, the Blue Hub and Blue BRE and Attraction), plus several other sub-teams to more concentrate like efforts, such as a data group, and industry partners group and a seafood incubator group to name a few. I’ve got some homework I need to do next week, and we’ll look to convene these groups in early December.
Community Photo Assessment Project – I attended an interesting report-out Zoom this week from OSU Extension. They put together a program where members of the Lincoln City LatinX community shared photos they took that represented barriers to being physically active and eating healthy in Lincoln City. It was fascinating to see those quality of life issues through a different lens.
Water Planning Partnership – I had a meeting with Alexandria Scott of the Water Planning Partnership to talk with her about inviting Lincoln County businesses to a phase two community survey through the Oregon Kitchen Table project. They are looking for perspectives on water usage from a number of community sectors, and I’ll be helping the partnership put together the business water user list for this survey.
Newport Vision 2040 Update – I submitted an update of the work that we’ve been doing that dovetails with the Newport Vision 2040 projects and Leslie Palotas shared that with the Vision Workgroup at their Wednesday meeting – and their report will go to the Newport City Council soon. It’s pretty darn cool to see how much of our work aligns with the vision that so many community members have for a vibrant local community and ecosystem.
Community and Economic Development Grant – We ended up receiving twelve total submitted grants, with four of the applicants applying for the larger single award (2 for broadband, 1 for childcare and 1 for housing). I’ll be wrapping up eligibility vetting early next week and getting the applications off to Curt for him to do his scoring spreadsheet magic, and then he’ll post those out to the Board. The Board will discuss and review at our December 2nd meeting.
As a reminder – your Board of Directors resource page is here:
Just a reminder: Susan and I will be off on vacation from 11/15 – 11/23 (Costa Rica here we come!).
Have a wonderful weekend! Thanks for ALL that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all.
Cheers,
-Paul 🙂