Greetings – and welcome to a damp weekend – a good time to transition into some long-form Fall slow cooking! Chili, perhaps?

Here’s our update for this week –

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Suzan’s week:

* Daily/ weekly routine tasks
* Update emails
* Research, calls to treasury mgmt., complete bill pay form for bank
* Completed Columbia Bank online statement access registration process
* Membership invoice
* Staff Meeting w/Paul & Keri to convert QuickBooks to online
* Download Chrome and register in QBO
* Review some QBO tutorials
* FDIC data worksheet
* Updated Gusto & Liscio accounts

 

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Paul’s week:

Housing – Michael invited me to attend the Northwest Coastal Housing board meeting on Monday night, and I got to give an introduction and learn about the organization. I have a follow-up meeting with Executive Director Shiela Stiley next week. I also have a Zoom meeting next week scheduled with several top-tier developers operating out of Portland – we’re going to explore some possible future affordable and workforce housing projects in Lincoln County.

Workforce Development – I had several calls this week on workforce opportunities, from potential Department of Labor funds for salaries to help during the wildfire cleanup to exploring pathways to work in the skilled trades.

Lincoln City – I’m working on an exciting test project with Lincoln City (specifically Ed Dreistadt and Alison Robertson). We’re collaboratively working together to create a “sizzle sheet” for existing and new businesses in the Taft District. We’ll be creating a hybrid print and web piece to inspire current and potential business and property owners in the Taft District to align their ventures with the district’s planned goals. The Taft District is just a couple businesses shy of a true positive tipping point and some properties have changed hands in recent weeks, adding some urgency to this work. The future plans will be to use this as a model for the other districts in Lincoln City.

Professional Development: Regards to Rural – This week, I attended a number of sessions in the Regards to Rural virtual conference, put on by Rural Development Initiatives. They did a solid job hosting compelling virtual panel discussions in Zoom with good feedback from the attendees. The plenary sessions had well over 150 participants and the individual sessions were close to 50 each. Like all such conferences, a good chunk of the bandwidth was stuff I’d heard before, but I did gleam some useful and actionable tidbits.

MailChimp – This week, I was able to finish our initial member import into MailChimp and also learned about their tagging system to segment an email “audience” into smaller sub groups, which should allow for more targeted communication once we have that system fully online.

Potential Opportunities – I was able to start assisting on several opportunities this week, from a potential Enterprise Zone application to a search for some commercial property for new construction north of Toledo to *hopefully* a new opportunity for the folks over at Rogue. I’ll keep you posted!

Stakeholder Listening Sessions – Working with Kristi Peter and Commissioner Hunt, we were able to nail down November 12th and 13th as the dates for the four virtual economic development listening sessions that Commissioner Hunt will convene. I’ve got a little more work to do to finish up the invite spreadsheet and put together a short context document and then those invites can go out.

Economic Vitality Report Card – One longer-term project we’re working on is developing an Economic Vitality Report Card for Lincoln County – a set of metrics that are more local in nature that we can use to assess the state of our local economy. This week, Suzan finished research on the first part fo the data – pulling together the money on deposit in our local banks over the last five years (from FDIC reports). I’ll use this to generate a trend graph that will be part of this larger report.

QuickBooks Online – Keri from Bryan’s office was her on Wednesday and got all of our data moved over to QuickBooks Online, which should streamline our financial management work, organization wide and ultimately save us some money. We’re also at the tail end of the final applications and forms to allow us to (finally!) pay our bills online.

Office Update – We got our new large shelf unit in this week, and I put it together and relocated the remaining file boxes from the floor to the new unit. Wow, I love getting things organized! The next steps are getting the data off the old desktop Mac and decommissioning it (it’s a 2011 Mac – any ideas or suggestions what we should do with it?). Suzan has a few things to move out of the way in the back of the office and then we can get her new (new to her, at least!) desk back there and set up out meeting area – we’re getting there!

Have a great weekend! Thanks for all that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all. Susan and I are trying a new (to us) restaurant tonight – Restaurant Beck at the Whale Cove Inn in Depoe Bay – looking forward to it!

Cheers,

-Paul 🙂