Recording in progress. I'm pleased to call to order this August 13 meeting and introduce the supervisors who are present. Anne Malick from the Whitehall District, Ned Galloway from the Rio District, Viva Pisco Kirkley from the Rovanna District, and myself, Dianetha McKeel from the Chua District. A quorum is present. Supervisor Mike Pruitt is unable to join us today, and supervisor Jim Andrews has requested to participate remotely in accordance with applicable board rules
of procedure rule number eight point b point one point d, Enacted pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. So, with that, I'm gonna see if we there is Jim there? He's looking for Jim. Right? That's right. Yeah. There is Jim. We found you. Jim, would you please share your reason for remote participation and your location? Well, we miss you, but we're glad we see you in the corner of the screen. I need then a call, for a motion and a second so that we can admit Jim. So I'll call for a motion.
So I heard Anne first. So a motion from Anne and a second from B. Claudette, would you call for the vote? Mr. Galloway? Yes. Ms. Lakisto Curley? Aye. Ms. Mallett? Yep. Ms. McKeel? Yes. Joining us also today at the, for her, at the table, Jeff Richardson, County Executive. Andy Herrick. There you are. I was looking for you, Andy. Andy Herrick, County Attorney. And, Claudette, of course, Borgensen is our Board Clerk. I also wanna take your time to interact. I'm sorry. Anne Wall. Anne Wall.
I don't see Anne, but she's back. Thank you, Dean Wall. Anne Wall. I also wanna take the time to recognize Doctor. Jean Runyon and Helen Cauffrin. And Ron McGinnis is back there somewhere. I saw him and I thought, there you go. You're hidden as well. Those three folks are joining us today, but they were part of the stakeholder committee that worked with our, our group on the, on the strategic plan. And others at the table will be introduced as a, present. I'd also like to welcome today two Alamar County police officers,
Angela Jamerson and Joshua Wright. We thank you for your service today and for the work you and your fellow police officers do every day to provide our community with safety and security. And, with that, I'm gonna turn it to Don for his part. Alright. So, so I will call the, Economic Development Authority meeting to order. Present today with us are, Nate, and, Jeff Morrill, our vice chair, David Storm, Phil Mecknick, did I do that right?
And Steve Hood. And our liaison who has already been introduced, the Lucas Till Kurt. And then staff from the economic development office, Emily Gilroy and David Topspin, are helping us today. So we have two members who are participating remotely, Frank Friedman and Daniel Johnson. So, if each of them could state their their reason and their location. Frank, you wanna go first? Yes. Hello. Frank Friedman from the Rio District. We're on a family vacation in New Jersey. Alright. And Andy?
Yeah. Andrea Johnson from the Jack Jewett District, and my schedule wouldn't allow me to get all the way to the, to the meeting place in time for this meeting, so I'm doing it remotely. Weird. Just Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. I'm in I'm not done. Okay. Great. So is there a motion to allow them to participate remotely? Is there a second? Second. Alright. All in favor? Alright. Alright. So we the EDA is now in session. I'll turn it back over to you. We're both in session. That's lovely. It's just really wonderful to welcome everyone in the audience and everyone at the table
today. The last time we convened was August 2024. And the momentum we built around three topics has given us forward in meaningful ways since we received we at that meeting, first, we received an exciting update on the Rivanna Futures project. Since that time, Alamo County has been awarded a $9,700,000 grant for site readiness work. An investment that will extend utilities and support clearing and grading of the,
of, the portion of the property. This substantial award builds on the $600,000 in funding we previously received from Go Virginia, and together these resources position us to begin unlocking the potential potential of this site. Second, at the meeting, we agreed to participate in a work session to adopt a memorandum of other statements. That would formalize our collaboration and shared goals, and that memorandum of understanding was adopted in December 2024,
making a significant milestone in our partnership. And third, we began an initial discussion to launch an economic development strategic plan. That plan process would include engaging with the planning commission, stakeholders, and community members. Those conversations lay the groundwork for what brings us together today, to consider and hopefully adopt a strategic framework that will guide our efforts in the months and years ahead. This is a pivotal moment. The decisions we make today will shape the trajectory of economic growth,
opportunity, and resilience in Albemarle County. And I'm really grateful for the dedication and vision each of you bring to the table, and I look forward to a productive and forward looking discussion. Thank you so much for being here. Doctor. Thanks. Yeah. Well I, I know, I speak for myself on the board, that we really appreciate the opportunity to get together. I think our meeting last year was very productive. I've been really impressed by the communication, between as we've really worked to build that communication between the two boards. I had the, as as the prior liaison with the EDA and now B,
I think we really get good communication and hopefully that, the board feels that as well. I really appreciate all the efforts that that the economic development office staff has put into getting us to this point. Organizing meetings, working with Steven, and it's it's been very impressive what's happened, and I look forward to our discussion today. So with that, I'm gonna hand it off to Emily to start the presentation. And let me just make one note for the Board of Supervisors.
Just as we did last year, we're not gonna use our call, our, speaking order. We're just gonna have a free flow of conversation, which is what we did last year, just because of the format of this meeting. So with that being said, thank you. Excellent. Thank you so much, and and welcome to the joint meeting of the four supervisors and the economic development authority. It's, it's fun for staff, to be together again just about a year later, than the last time we did this, and to be able to reflect back on some of the work that's been done over the past year. And really excited to have, Stephen Pedigo, vice president for economic development with presidents,
who's been really instrumental in, in working through with with the team, sort of managing, deep data analysis alongside a lot of community visioning, community conversations, stakeholder engagement to bring us, the draft document that was part of your packet today. And he'll he'll step through the details of that. I'll spend just a couple of minutes sort of setting, the stage for how we'll spend the next, just under two hours at this point, and and a little bit of process of how we got here. So our time today, again, I'll just take a couple minutes to to tee up really Steven's presentation of the
plan. And there's a lot of data analysis that, that went that went alongside the plan. There's a technical appendices that's a couple 100 pages long, that was the subject of work sessions with the board of supervisors and the EDA this past spring. Because we've presented that information before, we'll kinda go straight to the the goals and strategies. And, and really our goal is to leave a substantial amount of time in the meeting for discussion, between the EDA and the board, where you'll be able to obviously ask any questions that you want and then hopefully engage in some good, conversations about the contents of the plan.
And then, for the board of supervisors, this is an action item, today for approval. And so there's a resolution also part of the packet, that, if so desired, we can, look at that, as before we adjourn the meeting. So before we dive into the plan, sort of just a quick where we've been. So Project Enable is the county's first economic development strategic plan. It was adopted, in late twenty eighteen after a multiyear process to work through, sort of identifying the the first, the the county's first formal approach on economic development. There were seven target sectors identified in that plan and then seven goals sort of
adjacent to those sectors. And so a a lot of there was a a a robust amount of ground and cover in that plan. And you can see what those target sectors were on the screen. Part of the data analysis, that went into this next second economic development strategic plan really started with those sectors and then looked at what's changed based on some of the work that's been done regionally through the comprehensive economic development strategy, the SEDS work that, that was led by Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission that wrapped last year, as well as, information from the state, the state strategy, to see sort of current a current look at both the data and some of
the opportunities in the future, might might, might work for Albemarle. Where we are, this is not totally meant to be read, but just a you know, a lot has changed since the first economic development strategic plan was adopted, in 2018. This is just a a couple of of private sector, regional efforts, private investments, future future facing opportunities, things that we think will really set, sort of establish some momentum and and set some direction that, this economic development strategic plan was really mindful of and trying to plan around how could we leverage some of those some of these opportunities,
and really, meet the moment, meet the momentum, and and really, build, you know, an economy that diversifies the tax base, more than its present state. And, you know, so that really led to the plan that's before you today. It has five goals that includes in those goals three the three target sectors that we're, looking to focus on. Again, Steven will go into a little bit more detail about those, but you can see the first three goals here are really, around the target three different target sectors. And then, across the board, focus on talent, and competing for investment,
which is really sort of the policy framework in which the county can, create an environment where businesses can thrive. How we got to that draft document was a lot of conversations, a lot of listening, a lot of data analysis that again, was reviewed, with the EDA and the board in the spring. But just sort of an inclusive look at the public engagement that went into, this process to date. We did, we had over 2,400 people involved. The communications and public engagement office put this together for us, so we can see the economic development strategic plan is the fourth most engaged,
public engagement project that the county has worked on over, the past, roughly six month period. The three Notch Trail, shared Geese Path Master Plan, in the lead, and then you can see the comp plan, data center regulations, and Resilient Together, which is a part of the climate, it's a part of the climate action strategy of the county. We've had a lot of reach organically and also through some paid ads on social media. 18,000 people have opened a newsletter that had the economic development strategic plan included in it, just to get a sense of where this project stacks in relation to some other
projects that the county has worked on. We also focused really heavily on stakeholder engagement. So the names, and and, organizations identified on this slide are who've served on the stakeholder committee. We had 21 stakeholders participating in the process. We had four formal meetings with them, a lot of conversations between meetings. They had opportunities to review materials ahead of sharing them with the EDA and the board, for us to refine, some of the work that had been done. We also, asked the stakeholder committee to help us convene roundtables as part of the sort of
listening portion of the project. And so we were able to organize six roundtables that were co hosted by another organization or or more, where, where we were able to have some really focused conversations, around target sectors. And we had over 70, local people participate in those, which was really, really valuable time together. So really just wanted to thank the stakeholder committee, for their work and their thoughts. And then, one question that we've received several different times. We had a lunch and learn, for the community in early June. This question came up.
There have been some emails as well about, how does the economic development strategic plan fit in with other county policy documents. And so this slide is attempting to to lay that out. And I I know our Zoom is blocking one of the labels on here, so I'll walk through it. On the left is time horizon, in the center is the governing document, and then on the right is the intent of that document. So the the comprehensive plan is a twenty year has a twenty year time horizon and really sets a vision for the county. Strategic plans have a tighter time horizon of five years.
They they help set the strategy. So what what will we work on? How will we try to attack achieving the vision over the next five year period? And then, the one that we talk about a lot in the winter is the annual budget process, and that's really how we assign resources to to be able to get those done. So the strategic plans, fit sort of in the middle. They try to look at what's achievable over a sort of a short term time period, and then having, obviously, to be prioritized, against all the other strategic plans, that the county has in the annual budget process,
looking at what resources are available to support those. And those are both, financial resources, and also, you know, our largest, revenue expenditure in the county is staff. So resources is also very much staff time. And so where do we where do we program folks to to, spend time? And so the economic development strategic plan is a strategic plan. It sits alongside, a really wonderful body of other strategic plans that the board of supervisors and others really wrestle with how does an individual policy item coming before them address or not address all of these.
They're always having to balance, the economy versus or housing affordability versus climate action. And, and so we're proud to have the economic development strategic plan sitting alongside some of these other plans. So some some questions that we've received are, you know, why doesn't this plan address this particular other issue? And really it's because, generally speaking, the county has another strategic plan that focuses the work that that plan and and the staff assigned to those work areas are doing, and and this one is, you know, much more tailored towards the economy. That is my last slide, and I wanted to formally introduce Steven Pedego,
again VP, for economic development for Resonance, also assistant dean of the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin, a really wonderful resource in the economic development world. He's worked, around the Commonwealth and the country, doing these types of planning efforts as well as implementation. So he's not just planning, but he's also gets a lot of exposure to the doing side as well. And we've learned a lot from him and are grateful for the work that he and his team have done. With that, I will turn Thank you. Emily. Emily just reminded me my summer is over as of next week. I go back I go back to school,
summer camp is over for me. So it's good to be with you all. Thanks to the Board of Supervisors here at EDA for having me here. What I thought we would do today is talk a little bit about the overview of the plan. This plan should not be foreign to anyone. We've spent a lot of time together through this. I've had work sessions both with, the board of supervisors. We've engaged both in the kind of beginning of the process and the middle of the process, and also had some time with EDA and out of the EDA's done a session on this as well. So what I thought we would do is, really run through this plan pretty quickly, just to provide an overview for folks that are gonna be out with us for
the first time, and, and I'll then do the best I can do to answer your questions, which is, I think, the most engaging part of today's conversation. 2,400 people engaged, that's pretty amazing. That reminds me that my I tell my husband tells me all the time I work to be boring. Maybe it's not, actually. That meant many people reading about, the plan. I will say that you've got this document here. This is actually, the formal strategic plan document. There are two other documents with this work as well. Emily's gonna hold those up for you right now so you can see.
If you are very interested in all the data analytics that went behind the work, there is two appendixes that have got analytics. Both kind of competitive assessment work where we did a lot of benchmarking work with the county to his peers. But then in addition to that, it's a really detailed analytics around, the industry sector work where we landed on the on the cluster work. You can follow-up all of that. And if you wanna have access to that, Emily will provide it to you and I'm happy to answer any additional questions. So out of this plan, one of the things that we really worked with Emily and team on to us
just will was to start to establish a mission statement for, the Department of Economic Development. I think one of the things that's interesting is y'all met last year, and it is it is true that economic development has went through a little bit of, a reimagining process, right, and under Emily's leadership in terms of what the department will do. And I think if you read that statement, one of the things that I would say about that mission statement is in my line of work, economic development can be a one trick pony where you're just doing, you know, business investment or attraction or invest or business expansion efforts.
But I think if you read this work, this mission statement, I think it gets to this idea of the concept of which we believe is what's called complete community building. And that's really the emphasis of this plan is that complete community building says to do economic development right, you have to do lots of different things. You can't just do one thing. You can't just pull the lever of business investment and business attraction. You really have to think comprehensively about your community. That's business investment, that's expansion, that's small business work, that's also workforce and then some place making work as well. And so you'll see that both reflected in the mission statement of the county,
as well as the plan as we go forward. And why don't we do it really all to be driven by the idea of trying to drive prosperity for our residents and for our businesses that live and work here in Clondaga County. Our mission statement for this plan is, pretty broad. It was really built on this idea of the county being open for investment in innovation. This has been a county, I think I can say this, that has for a while, not been the most open place for business investment. Let's just call spade a spade, say the quiet part out loud a little bit.
This is an opportunity for us to kind of reposition ourselves, to think about how we are, wanting to be in a place for, you know, looking at folks that are looking to make investment, but also supporting a lot of the businesses that are here doing some entrepreneurship work and really center that around this idea of innovation. You're a highly educated community. You've got one of the leading anchor institutions in the country, and you've all made big bets on big, anchor institutional investments around innovation. So why not build a plan that's really centered around innovation? And you can see that in our mission statement saying,
rooted innovation, open for investment, ideas are gonna, take root, business to scale, partnerships to thrive. We kinda wanna be that place that's gonna be on on the innovation based economy. To do that, the plan is really built around, five key goals. And I'll go through the presentation and then open it up for questions and discussion. As Emily mentioned, the first goal is really around, you all have made a put a flag in the in the ground, so to speak, around national intel intelligence and national security, particularly with the work around a station, we wanna execute on that and think robustly, not just about that investment,
but how do you build around the ecosystem around that? The second goal is really, going all in on life sciences, particularly, medical devices, biotechnology, a lot of opportunity here both with, Civo Bio, which is a really amazing group that's done a lot of work to support startup technology enterprises in that space, but also again, your home today, the University of Virginia, Health Sciences Center here. So that makes another reason to think about that. Third is really thinking about the agribusiness, economy. So obviously a place that is really rooted.
It's a beautiful landscape. It's a wonderful place to it's always a beautiful place to fly into. It's a beautiful place in terms of the agricultural legacy of our community, and we wanna think about how we are supporting those small businesses. We spend a lot of time engaging, with, entrepreneurs and business owners in that space about what are the needs that those businesses need to really activate all that. And so goal three is really centered around, the agribusiness economy. Goal four is our people goal. It's it's this idea that you don't just invest in enterprises and economic development, you invest in people and you wanna make it a place where people who are,
talented and entrepreneurs can can, stay and scale and succeed. You know, one of the interesting things that we found in the in, the research work, particularly the benchmarking work, is your greatest export outside of the county are really smart college students. But you're college town. That's not unsurprising. The question for us is how do you keep some of that talent here to really help grow your enterprises? And that's really what goals goal four is centered on. And then as Emily mentioned in her opening remarks, goal five is really centered around a policy framework. What's needed to make sure that we can do this from our permitting process to
a regulatory environment, all those things that really are necessary to make sure that we could attract that investment as needed. So those are the four, excuse me, the five goals of the plan. In the plan, you'll see one of the things that we've outlined goal by goal are some KPI metrics, and outlined some, some metrics that make sense to follow and track as you are building towards the execution of this plan. But one of the questions that I think came up, our county executive asked me, how do we know if we're winning in this plan and what are the things that we should be thinking about broadly speaking? And so out of that,
if you had to say, what are the three things that we would that we really want to put on our scorecard, so to speak? First and foremost is really thinking about business expansion efforts. Again, those are the jobs, the companies, and the people. That's not just attracting of investment, that's also the helping of companies that are already here. This isn't about a fishing expedition a lot, but we do wanna be some frontward facing, but it is about supporting, the companies that are here. Goal two, metric two, pardon me, is really around, talent, people that are here, 25 to 44, 44 year olds, that kinda mid career, individually call that that prime talent age.
In fact, I think when we looked at, the metric for that, the county is about has a population that's 25 to 44, that's about 10% smaller than it in its in its, than what its share should be for its size. So what it says is that you're pushing people, you know, you're getting a lot of folks here when when it's time to make that stickiness or come back, we're we're we're not able to to hold on to them. So really thinking about how we can move that metric forward in terms of 25 to 44 year olds. That kind of prime working age, that's our talent goal. And then obviously, there's some skill metrics and skill identification needs that are around for that.
Let's just be really frank. Today's economic development space is really about workforce development as well, and you'll see that in the in the plan, particularly around that goal. And then goal three, the goal that we heard a lot from, both the directors but also our board of supervisors was, let's start to really under, start to figure out if we can see the growth in our commercial share of our property tax base and really track that over time. And that's where we play in terms of, the much our third metric. So those are the three, ideas of metrics that will help us understand if we're having success as we're studying
equipment this over the next, five to seven years. So goal one, really around the national intelligence space. You know, lots of you know, it's interesting to me that as the federal government is pulling back on R and D efforts across the country, particularly in life sciences, One of the areas that we see real investment continue to happen if you track R and D dollars from the federal government is the intelligence and national security space. This is not a space that has seen a lot of big significant pullback. And so this makes, sense for us to think about this as a sector.
We've obviously made a big effort and a big investment around, the, Ravenna Futures experiment, but also the Innovation Corridor. One of the things I think that's great that Emily and the team and I saw that our regional partners here as well is our university partners, a lot of efforts are going into thinking about how we act as a, not just as a county, but as a region in this space and region and really driving a re a regional approach to this so that that's a a real win and something that we wanna continue on moving forward. So what do we do? How do we activate on these? Activate Riana features as a,
an innovation hub. You're already doing that, through the a lot of the site planning that you're getting and the business attraction efforts. I wrote a $9,700,000 grant in first year. That's not a bad way to come out of the gate. So really, really awesome job there. We talked about the work around the innovation corridor. I know the innovation corridor is just some really interesting work. I think you guys are also doing a really interesting study that's being supported from a Go Virginia grant, looking at how that's connecting around the ecosystem, both not just in life sciences, excuse me, in natural security, but life sciences. Those are sectors that we see a lot of,
opportunity for overlap. Thinking about career pathways is really what strategy 1.3 is around, particularly with UBA, but also the PDC. There's a really strong community college here. Right? And so we wanna lean into that community college. One of the things we heard over and over about, the engagement process was that, yeah, we wanna build an economy and we're building an economy for, folks that have, you know, higher levels of educational attainment. How do we do that for some of our other residents that are going through technical programs? And this is a really great opportunity to do that in terms of making that connection. Launching sector partnership,
sector partnership being the vehicle to drive a lot of that work. We bring all of the employers together, educational providers together to advance those efforts. And then five 1.5 is really centered around, the, telling the story for the county as it relates to the innovation brand in the space. Economic development, frankly, is storytelling, and it's a really important part, to economic development. So then we go to goal two. Goal two is around life sciences. Oh, and by the way, in the plan, you'll notice there's a lot of next steps in here. There's an implementation metrics. There's lots of steps on do this, do that. We've we've actually scaled that into some some planning,
for Emily and team to take a look at as well. But goal two is really around, continuing to promote us as a life sciences destination. The thing I love about this goal is that it's a continuation of a lot of things that you were already in your regional strategic plan efforts. It's not new. You've got a strong, group in, Seaville Bio that's here. You know, if we look at the strength of this sector, geeks like me measure economy through what we call location quotients. One is one point zero is a, equivalent to what anyone in the national average would have. Here it's about a 1.76, so significantly higher.
And so there's a real strength in these companies. The opportunity in this space, if you read the report, is that there's a lot of opportunity to scale. So you get a lot of firms that get into the gate, they're smaller, but they need they need room, they need space, they need capacity, they need to grow the capital to scale, and this is really centered on this, the county working with its partners to do that, to achieve that goal. So how do we do that? Expanding the, infrastructure to support scale ups. So, thinking about lab space, multi, small scale manufacturing facilities maybe. We're not talking large scale, we're talking small scale space to allow these companies to to scale.
Interesting enough, when you, there's been a lot of workforce studies across the country that has said that have looked at life sciences and life sciences being a way to connect, innovation based economy to mid career or missing middle jobs, because they don't require some of the missing middle jobs don't require four year degree institutions. You can get a technical degree program at a community college, etcetera. So there's a lot of opportunity in that space here, as well. Two point two is continuing the innovation corridor. Two point three is working with,
Civo Bio, a group that does amazing work already acting as a Civo, a sector partnership. It's one that I talked about a lot in my actually work after learning a lot about what they do. And, really, they are a really great best practice in that space. 2.4 is, about the attraction efforts. So giving Emily and, team some runway to think about how to go to doing some attraction efforts outside. So that's why, you know, one of the great things about a sector partnership is you talk to a lot of the companies in the ecosystem and say, what well, what are you or what are you missing? What types of companies are we missing in our ecosystem?
And that helps to drive what our attraction efforts should be. And then 2.5 is is is thinking about the access to capital in this space and what's needed to to to do that particularly in the growth stage, to help these companies scale. Goal three, this goal's changed a bit since we've spent some time together because we we got a lot of feedback on this goal. We just got a lot of feedback on this goal, both from you all and as well as other folks. And so, this this goal has changed a bit, in terms of just adding adding some things and and tweaking some of the language. The intent here is still pretty pretty much it's it's very much the same,
which is we have a robust, agricultural legacy group of businesses here, enterprises here that just need some support to scale, and some opportunity to do that with infrastructure, as well as just support programs around that. And so this is really helping them to do that. Again, going back to the way that we think about the metrics of of of industry sectors, if one point o is The US average, the agriculture based economy here is 2.3. Right? So it's 2.3. It's significantly concentrated. It's just the question here about how we make these businesses scale and also think
about support services, particularly as these businesses transition and needs some succession planning and and other things around that as well. So how do we do that? So 3.1 is just kind of exploring some policies around, can we create flexible opportunities around what's needed there around value, value added production. Also thinking about how do we diversify our revenue streams. I know we heard a lot of that from our board of supervisors around some of our businesses needing access to different types of, diverse revenue streams around, the lodging and hospitality sectors.
So we've got that in there. Three point two is is really around around the modern kind of infrastructure. Agricultural businesses today are extremely innovative. They require technology as well. Expansion of, do we need to expand that, add additional cold storage in spaces in terms of shared cold storage? Do we need expanded broadband? I think I think many of you have heard me talk about Turkey farming and the need of that, and I, I talk about that. I'm gonna talk about that with my class actually in open day this year. But the idea of how you have to have the the technology to support these
these businesses as well. Three point three is about programming around, the succession planning and business support. Three point four is about supporting, wholesaling in the space. So we've done a lot around supporting small scale, consumer product to buy local. We wanna think with Emily and the team about what what are some wholesale or scalable market pathways. Three point five is making sure that we continue to engage those businesses together through our partnership. Engagement is a really key to economic development. It becomes, you know, a lot of times in economic development, we engage one on one with businesses, but there's real value in being very,
in being smart about how you bring businesses together because you can create that synergy, but not only between your economic development staff and the businesses, but also businesses between each other as well. And so we're gonna continue to do that. Three point six is supporting, the wine economy here. That's quite robust and continue to be, a real star. And three point seven is about ensuring that we are thinking about the connection that we're doing around our visitation economy. So our our visit our visitor bureau, a lot of the efforts in supporting support some of that agrotourism based economy that's
really important. So then we're on to goal four, which is about talent. Again, ensuring that we've got people that can, to to support here and stay here. We wanna make sure that we're able to hang on to our talent, not just our talent at UVA, but just also our our our work first that's coming out of the community college at Piedmont and others. So how do we do that? We wanna align with, career pathways. As Emily mentioned, we did, several round table discussions and I think we did one of the most robust discussion we had was around workforce. And I think there were 24,
25 workforce providers around the table. So there's a lot of interest here. The question just comes back to being creating systems in that space and, having a system, approach there. So doing that and having an opportunity to do that. Same around entrepreneurial ecosystem. A lot of this is not about creating new, it's about mapping and connecting. You'll see that that play out throughout the report, and through the plan. Four point two is just about mapping and making the connection of a unified brand around that unified platform. Four point three is about supporting kind of the bit the students who are here. There's a lot of really great initiatives across the country that have done this where
you try to close that town gown initiative, right, where people come, students come to campus and they kinda hang out on campus, and that's all they do is hang out on campus. And so when they leave their community, they have no affiliation with the community. One of the successful, examples of, of a place that's done that really successfully is actually, the city of Philadelphia, believe it or not. So Philadelphia, through, an initiative called Campus Philadelphia, He's brought all their colleges and universities together to attack this idea that why are they losing their students. And they've actually closed their gap around kind of that loss around that early stage
career, from from the Boston into the, Washington DC, quarter spaces. Really some really good examples. Other small cities are doing this too. Greenville's doing this. Asheville's doing some of this as well. So a lot of other examples that we don't want to share. Four point four is leaning into our young professional network that is here, just making sure it's robust. Social capitalism is an important part of economic development, connecting to people, and so that's really what this is. Four point five is, making sure that Emily can find the next Chili's or the next salad bar. Not just joking. That was good. Oh, sorry. Not again. It's really not.
But four point five is around destination development, and four point six is, as Emily mentioned, there's a lot of other plans in place, so we just wanna continue to support the work that's happening in the housing plan, connects back, but, childcare's become a front and center issue as we know, as we wanna, make sure that's included in our plan as well. One more goal, and we'll be able to take your questions. Goal five is really around investment, so ensure that we're ready to, lead, compete, and build. So go back and just scope, one point 5.1 is giving the county an opportunity, and a to really go back and think about its development process,
and its zoning code processes. I will say, the most pent up demand of conversation we had or the most the most vocal group that we talked to, was the development community here. We had multiple we actually had multiple convenings in the development community, and there was real conversation about is there a way to make the county I'll think about how we can think about its zoning process, zoning and permitting processes better. By the way, this is I've heard this in every community I work in. This is nothing strange. Like, this is not just y'all. This is every community from, I I just did the plan in Burlington,
Vermont. Burlington, Vermont got, that that city staff got raked over the calls about this as well. All the way out of doing work in in Cedar Valley, Iowa. It's the same thing. But it is this opportunity developers are asking us to think about how we can better cut serve them as customers. And so it was we've had an opportunity to kind of explore that. To that end, just as we're committing our businesses, committing our developers in a partnership, 5.3 is about our VRE program, continuing to do that. I don't know if most of you know, but Emily and team visit about 50 to 75 businesses a year, continuing to do that in a formal way using that to inform policy.
Five point four is leveraging the EDA to help drive investment. Five point five is, Emily and team are gonna start keeping a pipeline of all the sites and things that are necessary so that we're ready to have all of those materials together when we're ready to, to position ourselves for investment. Five point six is just about infrastructure, continue to work with our infrastructure partners, as well as our airports. You guys are really lucky to have an airport like you do. Everyone wants to just be really honest about that. You punch above your weight in terms of the airport that you have here. So utilizing that, to to really support your economic development efforts are really important.
And then finally, 5.7 is around marketing, making sure that we've got the marketing efforts to support economic development. As mentioned before, it's a real key piece, economic development storytelling. So with that, the goals, I'll leave them up there on the on the board, but look forward to your questions and, discussion. Thanks for having me. Thank you very much. That was a great synopsis. I really appreciate it. And we will just open it up for questions, as you all have the questions. And Don will help me identify folks that, because we don't want to miss anybody,
especially the folks that are on the screen. So make sure, Frank, you all raise your hands as you all have questions up there as well. Can first? Sure. Not so much a question, but I I did wanna, mention something to the board of supervisors, which was, you know, we had, a special session with the EDA, a couple weeks ago, specifically to talk about the plan. And I know the members of the EDA will want to share their individual thoughts, but I thought it was useful to just kind of give an overview of what we talked about. We did have a public comment period, we had one person who spoke and one email comment that came in for that
meeting. And I think that, a lot of the discussion was about the vision and mission and sort of the high level, And those discussions were a lot about quality of life and how do we match up quality of life with the economic development plan, and what Emily did, which was very helpful, was she also brought up the county's overall vision and mission, which include a lot of those concepts. So so we had, I think, a very good discussion and understanding as Frank actually said,
you know, quality of life also means different things to different people. So a lot of this discussion was how do we line up the economic development plan with those other things and how much should they reference each other. And, yeah. And they do show up, I mean I know, one of the things that just showed up in terms of the, I think it was the Empower Talent section was housed. Yeah. So I mean, you know, they all you can pull bigger pieces back and forth and so I'll let people share their individual thoughts, but I just wanted to kind of give them more of a concept.
And then the other thing was a little more specific and that was related to the agribusiness and the wineries and looking at how, food service happens there and what we can do to help, facilitate those. Because I think there's a sense that that those are, you know, having more comprehensive rules for how how food service happens at at wineries would be beneficial, and I think most of the the EEA was in support. So I just wanted to share that before we got going, so the Alright. So with that,
we'll open it up for comments or questions. First one out of the day, don't be shy. Alright, city council. Yeah. One of the things that as I was reading to the poem that I was hoping to find, and I found many things I was hoping to find in the poem, but the one thing that was missing for me was the balancing act that a county, as special as ours, has to undertake with respect to environment and quality of life. I think it's important that we recognize that these things are inefficient.
If we bring in a lot of people, that will affect traffic, it will affect the number of homes we need, It will affect the number of services that we have to provide. We know, from a recent relevant future study that residential taxation is not the way to get there. So commercial tax base is what we want to focus on. But that's, those are dangerous shoals to navigate, is the way I see it. And, all gas pedal is not the solution. I'm not saying that the plan is all gas pedal, but I was hoping to find just a little more steering in terms of focus
on the things that keep all the moral the all the moral of the people who are already here really love. And the feedback I get from my neighbors when I talk about it, some of the communications I got from citizens I didn't even know, it was focused on those things. Like, they understand that residential tax rates are going up, and we need to find some solutions from there, because gonna it's gonna push so many people who are already living here. It's gonna push them out. But at the same time, they they also love Baltimore very much the way it is.
And and so how do we preserve the things that we like and support rural farmers, for instance, in a sustainable ecological way, and increase their ability to earn a living without paving over any more of the county that we need to pay. So, I don't know how that gets reconciled. One of the things we talked about in our session, our special session, was adding some language in the mission and or the vision, with a caveat at the end that we're pursuing these goals while protecting our environment and exceptional quality of life.
And I was hoping for some language like that just to keep us all focused on, on the goal of all this effort is human flourishing in the end. GRP and commercial tax base, county services, all these things are very relevant. But in the end we want people to do really well. And And have that quality of life, and we want to protect the environment we all depend on. So that's really, for the supervisors at this point, to, I guess it's, I'm interested in hearing, after hearing the perspectives on, from the directors on the authority, I'm interested in how the supervisors and if there's not a consensus there that this
is important, then, then, I get it. I hope there is. And even if it doesn't get reflected in the plan, I hope that it gets, considered, as we make these decisions in the couple of years. Would you go back and read just one more time Jeff was what you're Sure. So, to start, I have revised the mission slightly. So my proposed mission is going to read in this way: Deliver lasting prosperity for all the moral residents by expanding employment opportunities, strengthening and diversifying our task force,
and supporting local businesses and redeveloping, while protecting our environment with exceptional quality. Thank you. That's okay. And I think the move, because ANU had something you wanted to say. I did, and I didn't write that all down fast enough, so I'm going to come back to that another time. Emily's going to help us keep track of that. Very much so. I definitely, as someone who's been in that sort of clean, dirty, large space for a long, long time, I think that it, it, this kind of inclusion in some fashion will help to build support for the entire plan across the county residents.
And so that to me is a pretty step forward to build that support. So there are many, many things. I am an absolute diaphragm about, economic development, learned as much as I could since 02/2008. A lot of themes are flying through still. Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, you have to be ready is one of the things that people talked about. All the various consultants who have come ever since 2008 have talked about how you have to be ready, but we don't really know quite what to be ready for. So I'm glad that the work that you all have done,
the staff has done within the last year or so has made tremendous, careful, thoughtful steps forward to do the things that you've done, which is very well received and and very successful. So I appreciate that. In the egg space let me just jump right up here and maybe write some things down because it is my very small business space. And that is I guess I'm I'm not clear on where this is going. And so I would love to at some point, see the notes and catch up via the notes on what the stakeholder people were
really talking about. I will share some things since I did talk to Ellie Hill, who back in 2010 was part of the, Java local food process. Built on instead of doing that too. And there was a lot of research done on the need for processing space and the need for shared cannery space. And I spoke with her this time just to say, is your Cannery still going? And yes, it is. But it's tremendously supported by Prince Edward County local government. They consider it as a public service and part of a park environment,
but it is busy and doing great. She also mentioned that soon, or just barely open, is, the vegan kitchen, which is I think she thinks will very much meet the needs for the value added people, the strawberry jam people, those kinds of things, who might not have enough product to want to drive. It's only an hour to, the cannery, but that certainly is more suitable for people doing hundreds of jars as opposed to 25 to 50 to get ready for the full apple butter season or something like
that. And her main concern was that, do we have, and this is for future information gathering, the sustainable process production in the truck gardening space, for example, for that business enterprise that we were referring to, I think, in some of these statements, to succeed. For thirty five years or more, various ag groups have researched, do we have enough animals to be able to have a processing site here? And we have found that we don't have enough sustained production throughout the year for
something to go. There are now, in the last five years, two very small ones, ones, one in Green and one in, Barbersville, which is helpful because that reduces that time for people to travel and sustains the meat sector very well. But those are the kinds of things rolling around in my brain that I would love to be given homework assignments to read and study and catch up on what the work is that has already happened that, I don't want anybody to read that as a wheel, but I would like to know. And and the metrics, are they also to include local farmers markets and what the connections are between producers
and consumers? Those were the focuses of the Java study many years ago. We used to have 15 farmers markets. I don't know if any of them all of them still alive, but that was a pretty big deal in 2015 because the only county with more was Fairhats with nearly half people, so we felt pretty proud about that. So measuring the job increases in working on ways to empower, get good agriculture training into our high schools in order to get more you know, it's wonderful background for people who wanna be a mechanical engineer is to go and
build things with your hands and learn how to weld and all of those things too. So I'm probably going down a giant sized rabbit hole, I'm sorry. But I will just think about that. The, So, Anne, you make some really good points. And while you're looking for that, I just wanna say that as we go through this and people have comments and even questions, I wanna make sure that Steve and Emily and Trevor, Jeff, if you have something you want to add or answer, I think this is the time, right, rather than pushing it down the road. So I'm just going to open it up and then we'll come back to your others. And I have just one other point totally different,
which is the recreational economy. Is that when you look at Roanoke, they created about ten years ago, took off on themselves as outdoor capital of whatever. And they have that 15,000 acre reserve there that they use for that as the main focus. But there's interest in people who have reached out to me to say, we should be grabbing some of this as well. At a minimum, we should be quantifying the multiplier facts so that that I'll get back to go on from there. Thank you very much. And I don't wanna reduce the time that that our board members have to talk,
but I think it'd be great Steve or Emily or Trevor or even Jeff would like to respond. I'll just try to react to all of the comments. So first and foremost, the comment about I mean, the mission statement is the mission statement that can be edited. The reality is is that as Emily mentioned, this is this is an economic development plan that that sits in concert with lots of other plans. Right? And so in terms of environmental protection, in terms of the way that we think about balancing quality of place, all of that, My argument to you is that you have a comprehensive county plan, right, that really speaks to that. This plan is part of that.
And, yes, we can we can, finagle the language language on a mission statement and we can indicate that this that, that this sits within that. But the reality is is that your comp plan is doing that work. The the idea of this, right, if we're doing this in the right way and having the right hierarchy, and push back on this if you don't, this is the case, from the staff, for staff is that your comp plan should be doing that work for you. Your comp plan is set up to do that. And in fact, if let's you all, by the way, as a county had very stringent, development, development constraints. Right? Right? So Oh, yes. Right. So you've got development constraints.
And so what I would say to you is that the plan this plan is trying to is trying to operate within those is operating within the constraints of those of the development, development limitations that you put forth. So we can you know, so just saying Can I ask a question based on what you what you just said? Yeah. The limitations. In your past experience, when you have done something akin to this where it succeeded, let's just say Asheville because you cited that, but a city comparable or an area comparable to Albemarle, right, what was the level of land that was developed?
Because as I understand it, only 5% of the land in Outmar County is open for development at all, 3% has already been developed. So what we're really talking about, I think, I could be wrong, we're really talking about 2% of the land in our county that can be developed. And so how do we get there from here? We're Yeah, unless you as a governing unless you as a governing body decide to activate that. What's the norm? What have you seen succeeding in your, in your past? I mean, what is is there I mean,
that just seems kinda small to me. That just I'm astounded by it. But I mean I'm new to local government. You are constr I mean, I don't think this is, this is, you are constrained by the amount of developable land that you have. But What would you think would be prudent? Not gonna answer that question. Although, like, what I do think Think we said about this historically? What have you seen succeed? Look, I think that communities again, I think a lot of it depends on what are the values that you're looking for in a community.
So, you guys Right. Tax base. You are you there are constraints that work. There are there are big hurdles that we're dealing with here. Right? Let me I mean, you are going to you're kinda going to the shopping mall and say, you know what? I want everything at the shopping mall, but I only have this small of a budget. Right? Let me give you let me explain to that. And that's where chart choices come into this. So you have 5% of land that you wanna develop on. You wanna be highly protect your environment. You wanna be an innovative capital, and you want to create missing middle jobs.
Oh, and by the way, everybody wants to have a single family house here, that's affordable. Good luck to the economic developer who has to deliver that, right? Put it down there. Right? You can and so so that is to say is that there are trade offs here. Right? I mean, so the idea of saying we wanna protect quality place, we wanna be a place that's that's open and support our natural I totally get that. But as you were saying that as well, part of the argument for that a lot of times, I hear that argument in communities, I'm not saying that's what you're saying. I hear that to say, we don't want development and we wanna kinda just keep it the same way we
are. And then if you talk to a lot of, you know, a lot of your other stakeholders who aren't the most active people that come to your stakeholder committee meetings, your residents here, they can't afford to live here y'all. They need better jobs. They need the housing. And so it's a trade off and it's a balance, right? And so I think one of the things that we try to do in this plan is try to say, well, we're operating in a and you'll see that in this plan, we're saying a lot of things like explore. So your point around the agricultural goals, we've all taken. Do you need a food processing plant? I'm not sure. I'm not an expert in that space.
Do you need better broadband in that space? Most likely, you probably do need better rural broadband. Do you need, a better activation of your farmers markets and a protection of yes. You probably do. What the plan does here and what the goals in this plan do is it outlines you as an opportunity to go out and do those deeper dives. You're not gonna solve all of the details of this in a five year strategic plan. The strategic plan is trying to, and in fact, I would submit to you that this strategic plan is actually of the strategic planning processes that I have led over the 125 of them I've done across the country,
this is a lot more detailed, frankly, than we would normally do. Because you all were wanting some some of those details. And so we tried to we tried to we tried to get to that level of detail around some of these some of these goals. One of the things that, you know, that we could imagine if we're looking at a agricultural kind of what is needed to support here, Well, the reason we're saying that you've got to think about engaging small businesses in this space and looking at the, the toolkit is because if you want to advance economic development and space in that, you gotta kind of give yourself the opportunity to go out and explore that.
And that's really what this plan does. This plan says to Emily and team, one of the things that we think you need that we know that you need that that we know that needs to happen is that you need to bring your small businesses together. You do need to do some exploration around around infrastructure in this space. These are from the businesses that we heard from in terms of the site visit saying, we need to think about some of these issues if we wanna scale and we need to support services around that. So, the the plan is trying to give you a level of specificity, that I think you're all desiring to have in terms of your shopping everything in
your shopping cart. But it's also saying we're not gonna solve everything in a strategic plan, and this is the opportunity for the economic development staff to go ahead and have an opportunity to to explore those, those efforts. I will say, you know, if you look at this plan outside of all of the business investment pieces of the business investment pieces of this is relatively small footprint, right, outside of Ravenna Futures. But you already made the big bet on Ravenna Futures. Right? That was something that we but, like, when we look at, you'll notice there's a lot of small support around life sciences, business here,
tech support program. Those are all small enterprises. We're not I'm not arguing for you guys to go out and get the next largest, Eli Lilly manufacturing facility. What I'm just suggesting is I'll tell you what we heard in the roundtable discussions as the wake up call was all of your mid sized small scale life sciences companies sit here that we can incubate at the university, we can get enough space to grow and scale, but if we wanna test our ideas and get into that mid scale, where do they lead? They lead you. They go. They go away. They go to Boston.
They go to Philadelphia. They go down to, down to the Research triangle. And so all we're saying in the plan is that if you want to hold on to a piece of that, then maybe you've got to kind of scale and think about what are the other parts of the ecosystem to do to support that. Right? And all that happening with the constraints that we are operating in a 55%, development land. But a lot of that opportunity to do some redevelopment in that space as well. If you think about that space, and you'll see that this is what this is giving you a scale to do is to say, let's go back and redevelop some of these things. You've got an industrial quarter that can be rethought of a little bit.
Right? There's lots of opportunities. Yeah. And the the only thing that I would add to that just quickly is that, that, you know, that was probably the first conversation that that, Steven Pedego and I had about, you know, the the comprehensive plan is very clear about ninety five five. And so our our, you know, the plan needs to be developed with that in mind. I also wanted to just note that Mr. Andrews had his hand up recently. Thank you. We can't see that. We only see Frank right now, so. So So the reality of the market so thank you for that comment. I will say the reality of the market is you're never getting warehousing jobs here.
Right? You're too expensive. You don't have space for it. Right? So, you know, the markets of the markets of investment is that other place they're gonna other, you know, companies will look other places, investment investors will look other places. Happy to I think the idea of of tying the jobs back to the sector, it it I will say that as we're defining jobs broadly in the, it is defined to be jobs within the sectors that we're working towards. So we're working towards life science jobs, we're working towards jobs in national security, we're working towards, the job investment in the agricultural space.
All of that is to say, completely agree with you. Never thought you know, when I look at as an economic developer, when I look at this plan, I have never thought this is a plan for growth for growth's sake. This is a in fact, the the critique of this plan could be that it leads too much in the idea of being innovative and really picky in the types of jobs that you're trying to create. Right? It's being it's being it's a bit too curated probably in the sense that we're saying we're focusing all of our efforts on these three sectors. Other communities would not play in that in that space, but it makes sense with the values of who we are as a community to
say, we're gonna we're gonna play in quality job creation. So that's a really easy addition to do is just to make sure that we change the metrics because in, in reality, as we define the metrics here, I can promise you wasn't thinking about job for job sites where we're thinking about quality jobs. And you're right, As a community that is doing environmental work, you you you have a point of view about the types of jobs that you wanna create in the community. Right? You don't wanna just grow up and grow six. Places that are just adding jobs to add jobs, there are headaches that come with that. Right? And there are externalities that come with that that have input.
So so this this is really centered about kind of making sure that we're kind of creating the next level of jobs and how to create career pathways and career ladders. You see that, hopefully, you can see we've even connect that in through goal four, which is around the the people piece, which is saying, let's be sure that we're we're thinking about how we connect the the job career pathways to that space as well. So I'm gonna oh, that was really very helpful. I just want to make sure Emily and Jeff and Trevor don't have anything else they want to add. So I'll open it up for other comments or questions. Well,
I have pages of stuff that I'd like to go through. I've got to react to the most recent conversation. I just wanna say as a sitting supervisor that I appreciate people's fear that somehow this is going to change who we are. I get that economic development is the reason why it hasn't been a strategy for the last eight years. When we first put our plan in place, my economic development was considered evil. In fact, we just got called evil or ignorant in an email the other day because of our data center conversation. So, you know, I appreciate the points and the concerns,
but if we really think that either supervisors or economic development staff are up here conniving through the economic development strategic plan to change who Albemarle is, that's an unfounded fear. We have to find ways to pay for this. And those who want us to protect what we have in Albemarle and has come to exist costs money. And we, I wish we would have had this realization twenty or thirty years ago. But economic development is about trying to get that revenue to allow us to continue
to have what is defined as out of our own way we do things. And if we don't embrace that, then your taxes are going to go up every single week. And there probably are some in this county who would say great. Because higher taxes would probably mean less people. And you have to start wondering what that boxes out, when costs get that high. That's the alternative argument. You know, I also have to push back against that redundancy somehow brings power or commitment or something to every single plan does not need to speak to that.
The point has been made. I agree with it. I look to our school division. When you look at the school division, the mission, the vision, all the statements in there, there's nothing in there that really specifies a commitment to concern about climate change and climate action and being environmentally responsible. Does that mean our school system isn't? No. In fact, they've been a leader in this state for many years in doing the things that would be best practices to help achieve our climate action plan. But just because it's not mentioned in the mission vision of our schools doesn't mean it's not there.
Redundancy doesn't make it so or make it more powerful. So I got, I walked into, I did it, I didn't do it very well at one of our first comp plan meetings. Because the cold comprehensive plan was going to be looked at through two lenses: climate action and equity. And at the time, the same argument was being made that we needed an additional statement in the comp plan to bring home the importance of climate action while we were looking at the whole review through a lens of climate action.
And I pushed back on that and you would have thought that I be I became a climate denier, climate change denier overnight. You should have seen the emails. Right? And I had, I met with the Green Grannies, they sent the Green Grannies in on me to explain my thinking on it. No votes had I ever taken in public could have suggested that. But because I didn't support yet another redundant statement in a document. That's what happened. So the only thing I can say is that's fear based. You have to trust that the comp plan, to the point made by, Steven, is true.
Now the last thing I'll say in this kind of context is that like it was mentioned in your presentation that we put a flag in the ground around national security and intelligence. Well that's not true, Elmer County didn't do that. The military So we have to remember that sometimes you don't get to pick your industries. Right? Did we go out in and beg for them to come set up shop here? No, but keeping them is our job. Job. Oh, oh. But we didn't stake the flag in for them to show up here. It was an industry that developed here based on their own choice, probably because they liked how Attleboro was defined,
what existed here, and they're like, that's not a bad spot. So So we're still trying But my point is that in the private but not me. The biotech and all that, it's not that Albemarle went out and said we're gonna create this industry. Industry decides where it's going to go. It's up to the county to say, well do we want that or not want that, I guess, or support it or not support it? To your point about not having warehouses in Albemarle County. Hell no! The place would go bonkers if we tried to put up a big warehousing district here, not even getting to the points that you made about why it wouldn't happen. So industry is going to and they don't want to come here.
I can't imagine there's a warehousing place out there that says, you know what, Albemar County is a hell of a place to open up a distribution center. Right? So that says that Albemarle is defined, what exists, what's created, why people value it, why everybody loves it, has a staying power that has some positive ramifications, that also has some negative ramifications. But when we start talking about staking or putting flags in the ground, it's not so much that we did that. If an industry starts to develop because there's a university and all this innovation and entrepreneurship creates it,
then the county government can say do we want to support that or not? And then that's where we go. So really it's about seeing what's happening and going wait, that is fitting within the definition of Albemarle County. If some sort of entrepreneurial innovative warehousing situation is set up that was going to need, oh I don't know, a million square feet in Albemarle County, I can't imagine we'd be coming up with incentives to help them do that here. We'd probably, to your point, say we'll let that one go. That's right. So we'll allow these other things to be there. I to bring it all home at the end of the day,
and this wasn't even in my notes of six pages, we while understanding the fears and appreciating that we that any word with development in it can be scary. You have to trust you have to trust what we've set up in the plan and how we're going to follow it and what we say is important is important. And if you're going to redo an entire comprehensive plan through the lenses of climate, action, and equity, then if we say anything outside of those two things, then we're we're not doing our job. That everything must be looked at through those two lenses.
I'll stop there. I've taken up a lot of time and I have a lot more time I could take up, but I'll let everyone know. But I think you made some really valid points because at the end of the day, whether it's a mega data center or a storage warehouse, this community is not going to be going there, number one. The land is so expensive that it would never happen anyway. But having said that, thank you then. I appreciate it. And I want to open it back up for these comments. Well, I I agree with probably everything you said.
So, which is which is good. I like the idea of I've always kind of pushed on this of being open to new ideas. The fact that we're being innovative. I know we have, the set guidelines. I know we have the, you know, the bioscience, Wybanda futures, etcetera, etcetera. But I really do like the idea of, at this point, keeping our minds open. Because we don't know what's gonna happen in the next twenty years. We don't know what's gonna happen in the next five years. Frankly, the next two years, something could come up that,
that doesn't, quote, may not fit in our plan now because we don't even know what it is. But something could be developed. I think we have to be open to that. And regarding your point about the 5% versus, 95%, we don't know if that's always gonna remain. You get a new board of supervisors and then, you know, I don't know. It may change in five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years. We don't know what's gonna happen. That all depends on, the board at that time. But I do believe in keeping an open mind and keeping strength and flexibility,
because we don't know what's gonna happen. But I'd like to see what is available. I like what we have. I like what's been planned out. I think this is, this is great. You have there are a lot of openings for great things to happen. And the fact that if we improve our modernize our our systems and make sure that permits don't take eighteen to twenty four months and encourage people, That will also bring innovation. I personally and and maybe I'm being Pollyanna ish about this, but I think we I think we can do it.
I think we can have protect the rural area and yet have, businesses and everything. And also some types of businesses in the rural area. I'll give you one example. In my area, we have, Stony Point Market. Okay? That was just sold, and now it's being renovated, so to speak. That's the only place to get something to eat in that whole area without going into Charlottesville. Okay? They are restrained by some of our, regulations. They can't add. They wanted to buy across the street and build a new Stony Point market.
They can't do that because of our regulations. I mean, there's gotta be a way of and people want that. They they want that show there. Like I said, there's nothing else around. And and we want community, not activity centers, but, you know, community places like Gancy and things like that. We if the people want something there, for example, some place to to shop, some place to eat, I'm not talking McDonald's and things like that. Okay. That'll be. But, you know, mom and pop type restaurant, you know, we should be able to support that.
We should be open to what comes before us. We can decide, oh, yeah. You wanna put in a Wawa right in the middle of, you know, prime farmland? It's not gonna go anywhere. But we can decide those things, and I think this plan lays it out, perfectly what we can do. I just wanna see, like I said, in innovation of flexibility in what we do and to let people know. We're open to new ideas. Bring it forward. But yet, they will know our constraints because we do have some constraints, and I think we wanna,
protect those too. You know, we don't want just anything. Any other comments from folks? I just wanna say one of the things that Yeah. That's great. Thanks. And I just wanna reiterate. I think you all have said this. There you there are already guardrails about the type of development that you would like to have, right? The the plan kind of outlines and says, we'd like to think we'd like to really grow our our life sciences sector. We want to support the investments around national security, so on and so on. But there there are definitely guardrails in place in this plan. So for instance,
some of you have mentioned earlier, you have a development, portion of the county that can only be developed in. That's that's a guardrail. Right? That's a very big guardrail, by the way. Indeed. Any incentive deals, that would be done, if the county decides to advance an incentive policy and think about the tools that would be needed to be kept, Board of Supervisors would have an opportunity to set that that plan. In addition to that, every year, the Board of Supervisors and, through the County Executive and the Department approves an annual work plan and an annual budget. And that's another time to do it, that you get an opportunity to check-in on the types of investment and the types
of things that are happening with your staff and your planning. So all that is to say there are there are guardrails in place that, you know, as you're talking about wanting to be who you are represent the values of the county, there are those, those those those expectations that make sure that we're sort of coloring in the lines, so to speak, all in place. And, could be said in this plan, but necessarily don't really necessarily I don't believe need to be said explicitly in this plan. I think a lot of times, by the way, folks look at, businesses or investment opportunities,
they will those individuals will look site selectors particularly, will look at these plans just to understand how committed is a community open to really wanting the type of investment that's there. And so, you know, I think this plan signals that you are, you know, you are open for a type of investment, and I think it explicitly says here, but it also signals to us in my mind that it's not just investment for investments. Like, there there is real, expectations about the type of investment. So so all that is the same. And I think that our guard knows the place.
I'm sorry. What's the I just wanna make one comment regarding what he said is that we have to remember also, unless we have more commercial, like, industrial in our county, property taxes, real estate taxes will go up. And if you want a fast way not to be able affordable affordable housing not to have affordable housing, then let your tax rate go up. So that's I don't think that's something we want, but we have to be aware of. Well, I I just want to say I'm I like my plan has has come out
and and one of the things early on in this session, you know, Steven asked me what did I want out of the plan. And and from an EDA's perspective, I think what's important about it is it does give us a framework where we can look at opportunities as they come in and say, okay, what do we wanna do? And if somebody comes to us with something, we can say, okay, does it fit within the framework? You know, maybe it doesn't hit one of the exact goals, but, you know, is it a life science? Is it national security? Example that I've used is,
you know, if somebody says I wanna build an amusement park in Crozet, does that fit within the plan? No. That doesn't fit within the plan. And, so I think that's what's helpful for me. I know this is gonna seem strange as lawyers up here, but I tend to not worry about the exact wording in these things. It's really more of a superior or more focus because you don't know what opportunities are going to come up. You don't know what things are going to be presented. And it's more about, okay, what are what are our goals? Where do we want to focus when we review not? Is this particular word here or there?
And one of the things I'd like to, you know, to not just plan is really to focus on that implementation section and say, you know, Frank has talked about, well, if we just create this plan and then no one looks at it, if we've all just wasted the last year, I think we've gotta keep it forefront and say, okay, what can the EDA do? Which of these things should we be focusing on? How do we how do we get to the next steps? And I think that's really one of the important things that we need to do about this. Yeah. That was just the Terrell, Texas. We did the plan for Terrell,
Texas. It's a different very different community than y'all, different set of community values. But but we worked with their one of the things that we did just this past week, last week, was spend time with their EDA thinking about, now that the plan was in place, what are the investments that the EDA wanted to make and how to business plan around that plan. Right? Choose strategic plan can only take you so far in the implementation. You've got to then move to an implementation. And a lot of times that goes back to your professional staff or an implementation planning process to do that. And that And then you've got Emily, by the way, that Google is,
I I just wanna go back to a very basic question. Why should we want economic development? The only reason I've heard so far during this discussion is that we need to increase the revenue on the commercial side to keep the residential taxes low or lower. That is clearly one reason. And for most of us on this call, that is the reason we focus on because we already have good jobs
or we already have significant retirement nest eggs. And therefore, that's the only thing we're focusing on when we talk about economic development. And I think there's another side that has not been mentioned. If you all recall the OrangeDot report that Rich Schuyler did, I don't remember the exact number, but something like 15 to 20% of all Almora County residents are struggling to be self sufficient due to the cost of housing, the cost of child care,
the cost of living, and the fact that they are in low wage jobs. We must recognize that hospitality, tourism, and retail is the lowest paying economic sector, and many of our residents are working in those areas. I think we want economic development to create middle wage, middle skill jobs that many of those folks can aspire to and move up to. That will give them more money, which will make the county more affordable.
So I think we need to recognize that for many people, economic development is not to to will not serve their interests unless it lowers their taxes. But as leaders of a community, we have an obligation to that other 20% who need to make more money to have a higher quality of life. And I think that has been missing from our discussion so far. That's a very good point, Frank. I mean, I think the idea that you the reason you do economic development is not just
about investment, but it's about creating career pathways, creating better jobs, doing quality of place efforts, all of the things that you wanna do to build that complete community. One of the things I would say to all of you, and maybe to give you a homework assignment, because I'm a professor, is, you know, what the hell? To to Frank's point is, when you're out talking to residents and talking out to stakeholders about this plan, I'd be curious to know how you're pitching the plan. Right? Because I think everyone should have a pitch statement about this. Right? There's a value about who we are as an organization, as a county, and why we are doing the work we're doing.
But we should all have value statements to come back to pitching to the idea of the reason that we do this work. And Frank's Frank's point is is well taken. It doesn't have to be the same around it doesn't have to be the same around the community, but it should be much more than just talking about investment. You know? So, you know, perhaps you're pitching because you wanna support entrepreneurs or you're doing it because you wanna support agriculture or you wanna do it because you wanna think about the connection between climate and and economic development. But we should all be having a really clear pitch about that. And that's a great assignment for, you know, as a board of supervisors working session,
even the EDA, to think about how do you how do you communicate this, because that becomes a real important part to storytelling. For sure. What you Yeah. Alright. I think what you kinda gave us a clue to how to brand that discussion. Use the term complete community building. Right? That's right. So that sums it up to me and basically everything that we've been talking Yeah. As a board for the reasons for this plan, and what we've been we've been stating, you know, are our own reasons for wanting to support this are based on building a complete and supporting a complete community.
So I mean, the reason that people the reason their residents fear I mean, so economic development has become a boogeyman. Right? We have literally talked about it around this table enough. Right? It it becomes the thing that communities are scared about. And a lot of that is because residents see economic development happening to them rather than with them. Right? And so the reason that you wanna kinda talk about this in a way that not just talks about we're just bringing investment for investment's sake, but we're doing it. So, you know, the mom that dropped me off in the Uber today whose kid's gonna be in HVAC can stay in the county. Right? Or the kid that is at Virginia Tech and launch a company here,
etcetera, etcetera, or if you're a small business, you can succession plan. The narratives around economic development is really important. And so to advance the plan to get to the values you want to, the values you want to do, you start to tell those stories and folks can say, This isn't as scary as it sounds. It actually talks about why we want to be here and how we connect that back to the people that are living in work. When you get to that point, I would just love to have a quick discussion about what I see happening is that our children are graduating from high school and having
to leave here because there's no jobs. We're frustrated about the fact that we've lost that middle, the middle piece, right? And we have right in our own backyard, we have PVCC and we have the University of Virginia, but we also have a public school system right now that is focusing on career exploration and career pathways. And I would love to hear exploration and career pathways. And I would love in this document to somehow or another get it back because these are kids that are graduating from high school. They need to figure out what they're going to do and maybe it often doesn't
have to mean a degree right away. Or it can mean a degree from PVCC as opposed to just going in to direct the college and then dropping out of college the first or second year because he didn't work for that part. It was too expensive. So I would love to elevate in this document, Almore County Public Schools, public education somehow or to get that along with PVCC and, UVA because I think it's an important piece that we're leaving on the table that we're not actually,
utilizing to the best possible, mixed debt. Yeah. And I think if you, the, you know, the largest announcement that we had last year, the Appian Scientific expansion, I think speaks directly to that. Two thirds of the the jobs that they're seeking to create would be manufacturing jobs, that that they have said do not require, a in order to be qualified for. And many of the jobs you the the kids can take these jobs and then work into another job if they want further education. And so I would really love, the only thing I could change in this document is to elevate that public education piece however we want to word it, right,
along with PVCC and the University of Virginia. I mean, it was? Mentioned. It's mentioned, but it's mentioned in the footnotes and they are about this thick thin. I mean, I it just needs to be elevated so that when people look at this document, public education is mentioned in here, and K-twelve is mentioned, but I'd like to see it's elevated in the document so that when you see it, you're really thinking about it. It's mentioned all through the document because I went through and circled it, but it's often in these little small, what I call the footnotes at the bottom, which is great,
but I just think it needs to be elevated in a little different way. And I'm sure Emily can figure out how to do that. Because you understand what I'm saying. Yeah. Yes. Alright. I'd just like to echo that a little bit because when you talk about a 25 to 44 population, those people are going to have school age children as well. We are seeing families later in life, but you're gonna have people in their thirties and forties who are gonna be looking to these schools as well. And we want them to have that great public education opportunity. Right?
We know that there are tremendous schools locally, but the public schools here can be a crown jewel for them. I am and I think you're mentioning that and I am certain because I serve on the school's long range planning committee, that when we come to the school board, in a couple months and then and they come to you with our our bid. And it and it'll be bid, right, the capital, request. But but we will I'll be sure that we tie that back in to to economic development and this week's and and just being able to tie it all together because the schools produce the first generation of workers,
then they become that next generation of workers that we wanna keep working. And I remember when I was the liaison on the EDA, we had several conversations around public education and what could the EDA do to support the public education work, you know, that they were doing to help educate the kids to go these jobs. So, I just think it would be a great addition to the document. Just one follow-up comment, because That is a crisis in this situation. And so much has been done over the last fifteen years by the state and
the specific approach of the community colleges. And I really appreciate watching the high school graduation, how many of those students already have certificates. So I your comment about having it also is good for the schools to see that this is an expectation. And it helps them to boost them on their side as well because it is really important that all hands on deck is what we have to be doing and all the different it's impossible to do all the different classes, but partnerships and things can help with some of those skill sets that are sort
of outside the purview of a high school, but could really benefit students in one of those skills. So other comments? I'm your official timekeeper, and we're still okay. Emily, on time, I think. So, just to make sure. So other comments? Well, I have a question. I guess, my comments were all taken care of by everybody else, which is great. I know we benchmark various communities, but I don't know if there was a plan already. There's a plan. I'll excuse if I'm ignorant of it. There was to benchmark the implementation part of this and interview and talk to folks
who've done this successfully. Yes. So during the, the version that, that we looked at in the spring that, that that residents prepared, there was a for each goal, there was, at least three localities even beyond just that comparative benchmark list, but three localities that kind of illustrate in real life what success could look like Yeah. For that. I yeah. I saw that. I'm more interested in the nitty gritty dirty stuff of how we actually implement this and talking to their planning and zoning department and people like Michael.
People like Michael, but you specifically. But, yeah, Yeah. But, yeah, like, as to what were their challenges, you know, where where folks, you know, actually did streamline things a little bit. What were their strategies, how how long do I you know, all the all the metrics. I mean, obviously, I know, Frank is interested in this too, but we have work to do, right, to basically metricize, that's a word, this plan and to align it with our community metrics, thresholds, capacities, infrastructure, and all that, and then to just, you know, implement it in a way that's aligned with our our values.
But anyway, there's a lot of work to be done. That's my point, and it gets down to some of that, you know, nitty gritty. But how how is it actually done? So I have ideas, but I'm interested in in learning more from folks who've actually done it, accomplished some of these goals and how exactly they did it and what were the lessons learned. Let's react to that. You don't wanna react to that at all. Just just that, that we've kinda put together, we've kinda mapped the case study locations and said, you know, is there an opportunity in the future when the plan is adopted to say,
man, if we went up, there's a couple clusters. And so whether it would be a trip or, just some Zoom lunch and learns It'd be very easy. To to engage the the staff that would be, that would have worked on some of these initiatives to hear from them, you know, what would you this looks like a great idea, you know, what were your lessons learned? Right. What were the challenges? It seems like we have a fairly obvious path to implementation. There's a lot of details, and there's a lot of fears and concerns that are based on unknowns that we can I know between very skilled people in this community,
planners and planning department and whatnot can figure out, and put in contact? So I'm not worried about that and that'll I'm confident that this can be aligned with our values. I see some hands up and I think Jim has a hand up and Frank. So, I don't know who was first. But, how about Jim? Why don't you speak and then Frank can go next. Okay. I'm looking at sort of the picture here and I thought this was sort of the spurious time I'm going for. I I it's a it's a wonderful question and and,
marketing and branding shows up in in the different goals several different times. And and it's it's we know a lot of that is just around this idea that we know a lot of the assets that we have here. We know what a lot of the opportunities here are. But if you talk about, you know, Charlottesville Albemarle, at a national conference, in any of these sectors, most of the time, they're not very familiar with our region. And when you start talking to them about our region, they go, I had no idea. Or, oh, I didn't I, you know, I genuinely didn't even realize that's where the University of Virginia is,
where that you have or I've never heard of Ravenna Station. I've heard of Port Belvoir in Northern Virginia. Urbana Station is a sub installation of Fort Belvoir, but had no idea that there are there's a substantial intelligence national security footprint in the Charlottesville area. And, and so so really that's what that it's it's not coming up with, like, a pithy slogan and a cool billboard, but it's very much about, how do we tell that story and build that recognition where, you know, ten years ago, people may have struggled to identify what Huntsville, Alabama is good at, and now they know that it's aerospace.
And so how do we elevate the profile of our community where we can sort of be a place that's synonymous with, some of this innovation economy work that we're hoping to do with the plan. Steven, I don't know if you would add. No. Yeah. It's just making sure that when folks mention the sectors, they can align your your region with those sectors. You know, which most people would know that this county is the second largest place for GC investment for medical devices for early stage companies, for instance. You can put that in your talking points when you go to a cocktail party tomorrow. But,
you know, things like that. It's just the idea of being able to make sure that as you are communicating to the target audience that would care about that particular sector, just being able to align that with a, a a story and or a points of evidence that could dictate that why this would make sense for why why why is this a place where we start to see defense investment or national intelligence investment? I think there is a question and not there is a larger question about, does the county need a a larger, broader story around economic development,
in terms of how it's communicating its messages? It's in the plan. It's something to explore over the course of the next five years. It may be time to think about an investment brand. Your competitors already are, by the way, in the Commonwealth. You mentioned Roanoke earlier. Roanoke is currently working with, working with residents this year around an investment an investment brand for their economic development efforts. Lynchburg did this last year. Richmond has done this. So, you know, you you need something to be able to have some way to say, we're open to economic development and here's our story and here's our story platform.
And again, it is as important you know, that is part of economic development that is just as important as thinking about incentives or the land use or all those types of things that economic development is. It's frankly storytelling. And with that, I'm conscious of time, I want to move on to Frank if I can. Frank? When I when I look at the report, there are the five goals, and each one has about seven sub goals. So that's about 35 total. With limited staff, you can't pursue 35 things at once. So my question for our consultant is, did you give any thoughts to what is the priority or what are the top
priorities? Where do we get the most bang for our effort and our bucks? For instance, if we were going for a budget amendment from the state or a vote Virginia proposal, where should we concentrate? What is our highest, return on investment priority? So there is there is, so I will say there is a five year implementation matrix that we provided, Emily, where we outlined, what are the things that you should be thinking about in year one, year two, year three, year four, year five. Okay. That has been provided. Though there there's still some work to do with that, for instance. I mean, I think when you think about,
implementation, a lot of communities, once they go through strategic planning process, will then spend, you know, the next sort of twelve to eight six to eighteen months saying, let's think about the business plan for this. Whatever the what are, looking at how we had matrix out what we think that, you know, three to five years would look like. What are those things that we want to invest in first? I think those are conversations that, frankly, the EDA should have a conversation around and saying, what are you gonna invest in? It's also a conversation with Emily about how she's gonna deploy her staff, but we we did take a stab at that in terms of outlining and starting
to do that work. So we're not starting a greenfield. There is a there is a matrix in place. So I think you can probably share it with with Frank. Other comments or questions? Ned. And this, I think captures some of what's been recently discussed going back to Frank's good point about the workforce, not losing sight of that. So I'll try to tie these different comments together. There there are a lot of things in here that say invest and convene. Which does require dollars. Resources, whether it's staff time or and it's usually around things that seem to be identified as gaps that don't currently
exist. Which is smart, and I think that's why I like the what's needed approach versus specific action steps, because I think it calls attention to those. But I want to make the bigger point of when you're how does local government and its role in the community really do something to fill those gaps besides providing the incentive for convening? And are we really convening? You know, I've made Diane has had to hear me go off on tangents on this in some meetings that she's pulled together.
But it's always been a critique. I hear businesses and economic development meetings talk about how the education system is not producing the workers they want or need. That's lobbed at public education at K-twelve, that's lobbed at community colleges, it's lobbed at UVA. And sometimes I hear them not talking about the skills that are needed for their jobs, but for the type of employee they need to hire, who they can train with the skills they need to do the job. To me that's a gap in workforce development. And it's it's it's the subjective not subjective,
it's not the right word. It's the things like the importance of being on time. It's those kind of soft skills that I think, you know, that I think formalized education institutions have so much that they have to do that getting to that too can be a problem because they're also working against whatever life experience I made the point about, well, how can you preach to a student to be on time when their parent's the one making them late? And I have to fire their parent because they're late getting to the job.
Well, if they're where do you fill that gap? So that's just an example of what's local government's role then to say well that's a gap. We hear people saying they want it, but it needs to be done. Who stands up in the midst of all the responsibilities they have, and then what are the tangible things that we can done to fill that gap? I think we can say that about a lot of the gaps that this plan identifies. It's up for industry and community colleges and UVA to figure out on their own what they're going to do about that, and that's part I understand that's what the convening is about,
to get in, to try to figure that out. But I think to the point about leveraging and benchmarking other communities, that that can't be an overthought or an afterthought or something we do when we have time to get around to. And I'm gonna use the NFL is getting ready to start up. I'm sorry. I'm a huge NFL fan. And every week, what do teams do but they com they they when if they wanna compete, they better research and go to the film and figure out what they're competing against, figure out what that other team does really, really well, and then figure out how to leverage their own strengths and weaknesses to fill any
gaps in order to win the game. So we have a whole chapter around competing. We have a whole understanding of what our gaps are. And I don't think these gaps are unique to Albemarle County and our region. So it can't just be about the three or four communities we benchmarked for this report. It has to be about what county is doing something to keep talent here and then figure out a component that says maybe it's providing down payment assistance to employees to be able to afford to stay there because now they can afford to
live here and they can consider different jobs that are here. And that's just one example, right? Who does that really, really well? Who does, like the I think of the counties that don't Have a university. They're not university towns. They have not, I don't mean this prejuratively, but they don't have a whole lot to keep people there. That it's constant, I think of my hometown of Wheeling, West Virginia. The talent that exits that community is profound and you can see it with the population decline and the fact that they have no viable industry at that time. What would they do?
Well, you'd have to figure out a way to incentivize people to want to stay and live there, and what can local government specifically do? Somebody is doing something to make that work. And you've got to go to the film and figure out, oh man, how can we do that? You know, benchmarking, I think looking at other places and what they do, I think is so critical that it can't be something like I said that's done when, oh, we got two extra hours this week, let's take a look. You're limited because our staff is only but so many people and there's only so many hours a week, I get it.
I guess I'm making the advocacy to get to what Frank is speaking about. That it would take a lot of effort to look at the 50 states and all the 3,000 plus counties and that doesn't even get at the cities. But boy, there's people out there doing really good things and we could probably get at that through going to the film and figuring out how could we, and I say compete, but I don't mean like to beat them, to outmaneuver them. But to win and filling the win is filling the gap. I'm gonna open it up to Jeff because Jeff has Thank you.
Chair McKeown, I've got a lot of things on my mind right now and I'm gonna ask Steph to help. I'm gonna lean to my left first and I'm gonna ask Trevor and Emily to talk for a few minutes. The metaphor of looking at the film, let's talk about for a second the Saint Louis trip and use that as an example to share with our boards, something that's happened in the last year. In fact, I think it was last August, so it was about a year ago, that we spent several days in St. Louis and can y'all talk about that for a second? And while you're gathering your thoughts for a second, the second thing I'm going to do after they talk about that is I want
our Chief Operating Officer to have a minute in front of both boards to talk about our strategic plan and the SPEAR report that we do every August. So this will be coming to the board next Wednesday night on August 20. And I'm gonna ask miss Shiflett to come forward just for a second and talk about, with that SPEAR report, how that connects back once the metrics are completed out of this plan and how you'll work with Emily and her team, to talk about that. I think those, comments could help. Trevor, I'll turn it over to you. It may have been at this meeting a year ago we just Jeff,
Emily and I had just returned from St. Louis. St. Louis is the location of National Geospatial Intelligence Agency headquarters, NGA. St. Louis, ten years earlier was was was in a position where they may be losing that function, which was the main employer out there. And so we went out to see the work that had been done, we watched the film, if you will, of how a whole community had rallied around this industry, and became competitive, and it was not just St. Louis City,
it was the region, how they aligned to basically win through a procurement process new construction of NGA West, the headquarters. And through that process, and we could talk about for an entire hour, but through that process they aligned, you know, the geospatial study from middle school all the way up through the universities. And at the university level, there's a there's an institute that was created, that's 14 universities. So there is a direct line from from when I,
you know, opportunities within that, you know, within the inner city of St. Louis where they could see a path to a career that just wasn't there before. And so what what we went out to do was to kind of understand how that was built. And then and then we have kind of looked at what are what elements do we have here in in our region and what's missing? What are the gaps? And so that that I think is some of of this work. Strategic plan will help us do that. And I agree, what are the other localities that have had success?
And it's not to compete with, you know, geospatial necessarily, but it's to understand how they they built that alignment of work and created that that ecosystem. That that's what we want to capture here as it is unique to our area with national security, biosciences, kind of these core industries that we're calling out the strategic plan. So, Pam. That's great, Trevor. Thank you. And I'm going to try to I'll ask Ms. Shiflett if she would come to court. And Ms. Mikaela, as Christie makes her way forward, I think the Board knows this,
but our EDA Board members may not, that our Chief Operating Officer, Christie Shiflett, her responsibilities across the organization, one of the key areas is strategic planning, but it's performance in strategic planning. And she's got a team that works out of the County Executive's Office that works across every department in the organization and works with not just what are we planning to do, but let's measure key metrics and then let's report to our Board. I think we have about two twenty metrics that's tied back to this report. The final thing I'll say, and Christy comes forward,
because Frank asked the question, how are we gonna measure this? What are we gonna do first? And those are great questions by practitioners that have worked and know, and you know that you can't manage what you don't measure. And we want to get better. We're a needs improvement organization, and it doesn't bother our staff anymore when we say that because you're measuring what you're doing well, but you're also looking for the gaps, and what do we need to improve. And so Christy is waiting to do meaningful connection at the end of this work, not just with Emily, but across departments, where we've got goals that will be,
working, it's a very small team in economic development, but we'll be working across the organization to move the needle in the right way. Kristie? Yeah, so, Kristie Shiplett, Thank you for all the comments. I'm excited. I've got new team members because you're all gonna work with us on that. So actually, the the second year of this year report, we call it SPEAR, strategic plan execution analysis report. So we're really trying to measure and really be transparent to our community, what have we done, and what did we accomplish, and what was the progress on those things.
And each objective that we have in our strategic plan has metrics that we've developed. So in our strategic plan right now, 4.2 says update project enable to include the county's role in economic development. So we've been waiting for this moment, to update the economic development plan, so that now we can have that business plan that Steven spoke of, to really figure out, okay, so what's the next step? What do the next five years look like? What are those metrics gonna be? And then they'll connect it. Just like Emily had shown earlier where you had all those plans.
So each plan will have its own proof of work, but they're gonna connect back. So that intention is absolutely there, so we can communicate. But first we have to determine what are the things in each year that we need to accomplish, we think we can do. Thank you. Very helpful. Thanks, Valerie. And I am always conscious of our time. You're always conscious of time. Yeah. Because And board members may be ready to wrap up, but Ms. McKill, I have a couple of other comments I'd want to make. If you go back to slide nine, because Christy talked about our strategic plans and we talked about them earlier.
There's there's also something that I wanna make both boards, mindful of, and that is also that we do five year capital planning. So we have a five year capital plan, and we also do five year mister Sumner, our CFO, is here. We do five year financial planning. So the capital planning drives our capital investments, both in schools and in county, departments. Our finance our five year financial planning is in the area of operations, where we're looking three to five years out to how do our revenues look, how do our out year expenses look, and and,
you know, what do we look like? What are we gonna be able to do? That's just one of the lens that we look through, and that's the affordability lens, and and that's really something that that Board Member, Galway talked about too, is, you know, this is gonna take investment in order to move the needle and move forward in our equity, as part of our budget process every year, we talk about our economic development funding, and what do we need moving forward in order for the Department and the organization to be successful. So, Ms. McKeel, I'll wrap up and turn it back over to you. But before I do, I also want to go back and just make a point to,
Board Member Morrill's comments about the connectivity to this. I wanna look, there's a slide that's in the presentation that I don't think we were gonna get to, but it's slide 33, and it's the County's vision. It's the County's vision. So it's not the economic development vision. I've been here, I'm in my eighth year, but I'm and this was in place before I came. I looked at it when I came on board because it was a lot about what I needed to do to be successful. But just let me make a couple of points about the balance. Look at the, look at the bullets.
We want to, we envision a community that has abundant natural, rural, historic, and scenic resources. We want a community that has healthy ecosystems. I'll skip down. We want a physical environment that supports healthy lifestyles. Now stop. That's the environment and the sustainability. Now let's go to the balanced side of the equation. We want active and vibrant development areas. We want a thriving economy. We want a thriving economy. Then stop. Go to the last one. Exceptional educational opportunities for present and future generations.
We wanna be an exceptional educational community, not for our kids to grow up and leave and come back when they retire. And therein lies the connection to all of this back to the economic development strategic plan. In order to have a vibrant economy, we need good jobs. And that's what a lot of you have talked about today, and I was looking at this and I'm like, this is amazing when we look at the connectivity that's there, and the balance that's there, and the guardrails, which are not a bad word, in order for us not to lose who we are.
Absolutely the case. And I think that to see the thread is quite inspiring to me. So I'll turn it back over to you. I appreciate the time that staff has had. Thank you. You did a great job in connecting it. And certainly, I do think we need to wrap up. I, at some point we're going to want to have a motion to adopt this, I believe. But I would like Emily just to speak to your takeaways and where you think where we're going right now and show us a comfort level on what we would actually be doing on, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a slide,
that I put together, that just is next steps. And, the document that you received in the packet, and that there's copies of on the table, is the is the first draft of the finished of the the final draft document, from resonance. There are things that we need to do including copy edits, not knowing what the layout was ahead of the final plan. We need we need to send more local photos to be able to replace some of those stock photos with local photos now that we know how many That's correct. And what is on the page, and then we can do that work more effectively. And then,
we also have the ability to, to to address any as amended edits from today's discussion. And so, I know from the notes that I was taking, one one one thing that I wanted to offer, and I'm glad that, mister Richardson had us bring up the slide with the county vision and mission. One thing that I wanted to offer to address some of the comments that came up today, was perhaps if we added the county's vision, specifically to the economic development strategic plan, that that would then embed, I can move the slide. That would then embed, you know, the abundant natural resources,
and put that, you know, directly into the plan so it's not adding and amending some of the statements in the plan. Right. But but certainly bringing those connections more, concretely together. So that is one, edit that I would offer. Mhmm. So, Emily, I'm seeing a lot of nodding of heads just to move us off. That's good. Excellent. And then, on the metrics, just, cleaning up that the jobs are jobs in the target sectors, or with a focus on the target sectors. And I'm seeing nods there. And that, that we would elevate public schools in the plan document.
And I'm looking at page 21, which is the talking about our anchor institutions, educational institutions. So that could be a text edit on page 21. And, that is so that that that's what I that's what I captured. Is there anything that anyone feels like is missing? Any concerns? So we have our edits changes that'll come out with the final draft, and there's comfort level that we can take a vote on this today as amended with what you've just described for us. And I'm not gonna try and go through it again. So and and and effort to get us out one time and it has stopped
raining, which is the good news. I would entertain a motion and a second. Okay. I move that we pass a resolution to approve the Albemarle County Economic Development Strategic Plan with the amendments from the beginning. And I think it was Attachment C and then have to say as amended. Does that work? Okay. Alright. Okay. We've got it. Alright. Is there a second? Alright. And for the public, only the board of supervisors is voting on this just so everybody knows. Because the EDA does not vote on this. So, so we have a motion and a second, and I'll ask the,
clerk to call the roll. Mr. Galloway? Yes. Mr. Easton Gertley? Aye. Ms. Malick? Yes. Ms. McKeel? Yes. Mr. Andrews? Excellent. Excellent. What a great discussion we had. This was really wonderful. We should meet together more often. And Steve, I wanted to thank you. That was wonderful. And and the response to our questions were so helpful. So just really great work. Thank you very much. Mister Andrews does have his hands raised. Oh, okay. Yes. And so we have we have this approved, as amended. I just want to note that our agenda and Jeff,
you just leaned in. Is there something? I have an announcement to make after you wrap up. Okay. Well, I'm going that's the perfect timing because we have from the board matters not listed on the agenda. I want to make sure that no one has anything they want to add. And then we have from the county executive matters not listed on the agenda, or we can fudge that a little bit if you have an announcement, so feel free. You wanna go right now? I do. Our other deputy, County Executive, Ms. Anne Wall, texted me several minutes ago to let us know that Dominion is reporting that 4,200
customers in our area are without power. And so I want everybody to travel safely home this evening. I hope everybody's got got power. Anne, do you have an update on that since you last heard from them? No. I'm sorry. Chief Docuelson reports that a lot of this is, the north side of the county, probably Maine. There's, there was a Thank you, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you very much. So, the EDA needs to adjourn. Miss Postman. I'm just gonna sneak this in under from the board. Okay. Just because there's ears here that aren't open here. One of the things called out in the plan was seem to be concerns about
infrastructure and infrastructure bottlenecks. It'll be coming back before us in our legislative priorities, and I'm going to be making the call then too, that for those of you with your, you get some tunnel vision about what we're focused on, but if the levels of government above us did their job and funded their responsibilities properly, local government would have more resources to do the things we want to do. So when I talk when when we talk about not just raising or keeping tax rates the same, if we use the revenue we have in a more localized fashion,
we could really get after some of these problems. But if the state is not funding VDOT properly to handle road projects, maintenance and new projects properly, then we can't get at these infrastructure bottlenecks. Same with building schools. Schools, I see. You know, so there are things that happen in the general assembly session that we all could impact. And a lot of times we here at the local level hear the brunt of the impact if a road project doesn't go through or a school building isn't there. So I'm calling on all of you as you have relationships and you go out
and do your own advocacy for your own things with our local GA representatives and at the federal level even for their responsibilities, to use that influence to think about what you could also do to partner with us to help us get these unfunded or misplaced mandates from above that are costing local dollars for their responsibility so we could get, be better fine tuned at using those dollars to handle real problems that are the gaps that we know exist. Thank you. And I would suggest if we can figure out that for a bumper sticker, it would be great. Let's work on that.
Alright. Sounds great. And, hearing no objections, I'm gonna adjourn the Board of Supervisors to August 20 at 01:00 for Lane Auditorium. Thank you very much, and everybody be safe.