Alright, good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, or good morning. Good morning. Not the rest of the day away. I believe we have quorum.
Tony just stepped up.
Are we at the critical number? Alright, so I'm told I have a hot mic, so everyone, we are recording, and I appreciate everyone being here today.
Welcome to the meeting of the Economic Development Partnership Board. It is Wednesday, September 11th, and I have 11.02 a.m., and we have established quorum, so we'll call the meeting to order.
For consideration, the first is, we'll now begin items of consideration, item A, EDP 24-068, and consider approval. This will require a vote, it looks like, for presentation. Is that accurate?
Oh, for the minutes, I'm sorry. Thank you. Has everyone had an opportunity to review and feel accurate with the minutes submitted?
So moved.
Thank you, I have a motion, and a second. Any discussion? Third. Any discussion? Hearing none, all in favor of accepting the minutes as submitted, indicate by aye.
Aye. Any opposed? Same sign. Hearing none, those are approved, and we'll move forward.
The next item is EDP 24-070, receive report, hold the discussion, make recommendations to city council.
Hi, everyone. This is the best for me to stand over here. I'm Heather Gregory. I am the owner of Pickery and Rail Adventures, and we have a public-private partnership with the city of Denton to operate STOKE, which is the co-working space in Denton.
So I'm going to kind of run through the program timeframe from last July through the end of June of this year to kind of show what the partnership that we do looks like.
So as I said, we are STOKE, we are a co-working space and entrepreneur center. So we work every day to cultivate community and empower entrepreneurs through our co-working space and programs.
I know you had a little bit of history in your agenda, but I wanted to just kind of highlight some of the high level. In 2016, STOKE, well, in 2016 in August, STOKE opened and the city held a five-year lease on the space.
At that time, the Pickery and Rail Adventures entered into a partnership to operate STOKE, the co-working space and programming.
At the end of 2021, the city's lease was expired and Pickery and Rail Adventures signed our own lease with the Martino Group, at which point the public-private partnership shifted, where the city funding reduced in size and focused specifically on the entrepreneurship programming that we do.
In '21, '22, and '23, it was unanimously approved by this board and by city council to continue the entrepreneurship program.
So first and foremost, we are a co-working space. This looks like 20 private offices, 30 dedicated desks, and 25 hot desk seats, so they're kind of flexible, not assigned seats.
In addition to that, we have three, there's kind of a wraparound amenities for entrepreneurs and business owners and freelancers, including three conference rooms, a shared kitchen, private internet, printer, copier, scanner, a professional myth, mailing address, all of those things that a business would need to be successful.
And this all takes place in our 9,000 square foot space that leads close to the train station and the police department.
That's another picture of our co-working space. The mural is done by a local muralist, Art Lab 3000, which has done work. The big mural across from the Juicy Pig, they're longtime den names.
So for that co-working space, we have members. We have over 100 members that have access to our space. They're a really diverse group of people, anything from engineers to web developers, app developers, professional marketing companies, media buying, bookkeeping, legal.
It really runs the gamut to people that are operating their own businesses, some of the wraparound support industries that help entrepreneurs be successful.
And we also see, as you can imagine, a lot of remote workers, so people that really could live anywhere, but they choose to live in Denton and there are members in our space.
Largely those people are in the tech industry, so they're either doing the development, doing the sales, project managing, things like that. This is just kind of a sample of some of our memberships and some of the graphics that our team creates.
We launched a community membership in the fall of last year. We wanted to really do something that was affordable and focused on people that were really maybe just getting started and didn't really need all of the additional support just yet.
So they don't have access to the conference room or the printer, but they really have access to the co-working space and the community. And we've seen that really take off. We also have, like I said, private offices, dedicated desks that come with 24/7 access.
And we see those being used by people that are really finding success in running their business or they're those remote workers that just really need a dedicated desk all the time.
One of the things that we really take pride in is the community support that we provide. And when you have all of these different people that they don't know each other, they're not working for the same business, but they are existing in the same space.
And so we try to create opportunities for people to come together in community, to learn from each other, to make connections. We've seen a lot of incredible things come out of it.
So we've had Triptych Coffee Code do pop-ups. We had one of our participants in that Celebrate Her program has a food truck, so she popped up with food one day.
This is just kind of a sample of some community events that we've done in the last year in our co-working space.
We're membership-based, so we do two surveys a year where we try to understand what we're doing well and what we could do better, and we always collect testimonials. So this is just kind of a little sample of what some of our members have to say about feeling welcome and how the flexibility and affordability of the space is really crucial to the success of their business.
This is really the program and events, so this is really where we become really unique as a co-working space, because we have all of these things that we're doing for not just our membership of the space of the 100 people that have access, but for the community of Denton as a whole.
And so I'm going to kind of run through what these look like. So again, kind of thinking chronologically from last fall, because this report starts from last summer, we do Global Entrepreneurship Week every year, so we do a series of events that try to bring together entrepreneurs, provide education or support, or just really increase visibility for some business owners in Denton.
We did a fireside chat with the owner of Thistle Creative Reuse. We did one of those Tripp Jit coffee pop-ups. We did a creative mixer at Denton County Brewing that had a really great turnout and actually kicked off a new program that we started.
We did the Pitch Competition and Entrepreneur Expo. That's kind of a big event that we do as part of this week. Free co-working where we invite people to come into our space for free.
And then we also did a virtual startup call. So our team produced a handful of videos showcasing businesses around Denton.
Again, as a big part of the Global Entrepreneurship Week is the Pitch Competition. So these individuals applied, they were vetted, they went through a process of business coaching to refine their pitch.
Ten people were selected as the finalists to pitch in front of a panel of judges. Some of y'all were there. And then there were three winners. So they pitched, and these are all businesses that were in existence and had a real clear idea of something that they needed to help move their business forward.
And so these were the three winners from last year. This was the second year that we did this event, but the first time we did it really publicly.
We did it at the top of the Wells Fargo tower in Senago Bell. It was a really wonderful event. So we had 10 businesses pitching and then 13 businesses set up in the Entrepreneur Expo where they got to network with people that were there and show them and give samples of their food or show them more about their business.
Some of the exciting kind of outcomes of these winners, because this happened in November. First place winner, Speak Easy Speech Therapy has a really great success. They used their money, they're speech therapists, and they were trying to get in network with insurance so that they could increase the number of kids that they could serve.
And so this $5,000 helps them pay for it. There's companies that specialize in all of the laborious paperwork that it takes to do that. So they were able to pay for that. They are now in network with Blue Cross Blue Shield and doing the final steps to get in network with Aetna and Medicaid, and then they will be able to take all of those types of insurance, which will just continue to grow their business enormously.
And so that's just a small kind of sample of what we have seen from the success of this. Of course, Golden Root Ginger Beer and TripJet Coffee are the other two winners from last year we're already working on. We've just made the selection of who's going to be participating next year. We're really excited about that.
Accelerate Her is a program that we do in partnership with Texas Women's University with the Center for Women Entrepreneurs. So they're the ones that fund this specific program, but I like to include it because this program wouldn't exist if STOPE didn't exist, and this body is really a big part of why STOPE exists in the first place.
So this is a program that we do to support women entrepreneurs. It is a five month program where we lead them through business planning, managing their finances, marketing, leadership, everything the entrepreneurs need to know as they're starting.
And so this is the group that was in the program last fall, and we just on Friday kicked off our fifth cohort of this program. So it's been really exciting to see. I think there's close to 40 entrepreneurs that are alumni of that program.
SPARC is the new mixer that we created. I mentioned Global Entrepreneurship Week last year we did a Big Ideas Creative Mixer. There was a really great turnout, close to 50 people were there, creative entrepreneurs, and we thought how can we help support these creative people, but in our vein, and so we had started doing creative mixers to bring together creatives but to really try to have the focus be on providing that business and entrepreneur support for them.
So we started hosting these quarterly mixers in the spring. We had one in the summer. We actually have our next one tomorrow night. We're doing it at the Visual Arts Center, and we're hosting it with the Greater Denton Arts Council and we have a local lawyer who's going to be speaking about entertainment law to just kind of help musicians and artists kind of understand some of those business, those legal issues of intellectual property and protecting their creative work. So that's an exciting new program that we launched this last year.
Coffee and Conversations is a monthly mentor program that we do. We have experts in marketing, public relations, mental health, increasing your efficiency through developing your tech stacks.
So this is just a sampling of some of the mentors that led those calls over the last year. One of our big events that we do is FlintConf. This is a creative startup conference that we do annually.
We did the sixth year in May with speakers that include Amber Brighill, who runs Soma Massage Therapy, who is now franchising her business, Lucas Hall, who is a Dentonite and lawyer who works at HPWV, and Michelle Williams, who is a longtime startup expert who is based out of Dallas and runs the Dallas Chapter of Maths Challenge, which is a big international startup organization.
So, again, we held it at the Visual Arts Center. Close to 100 people were there. We had a day long of speakers, networking. There were two networking events as a part of this event, and it was a really wonderful day.
Again, some of their outcomes. Triptych Coffee Co. is in that bottom right. They served, so they had the coffee pop up at the event and served coffee all day long, and then Dave from GoldenRootGingerBeer, who was one of the winners of Denton Pitch Competition, got to tell his entrepreneur journey, which was a pretty fascinating story, because he just launched that brand last year.
One of the big updates from this year, which was exciting for us, is that we designed our first merch, so we have a wonderful designer that was on staff with us, and we designed some new merch, which I just think is an exciting step for us.
And then some of the impacts and outcomes. So we do two member surveys annually. We also do surveys of people after our events and programs to see. We're always trying to understand what we did well and what we could do better. And so from these, we know that from our members, 86% of them have experienced growth.
We have a 93% net promoter score, so that really just means that 93% of our members recommend or would recommend our space and our programs to their peers. We brought over, we brought 700 people together through our events and programs, produced 12 videos, including some that we paid to produce for like Denton Pitch Competition
and Flint Conference. And then also there were a couple that the city of Denton did to promote our events as well. That was really exciting.
And then this is just some stats about like the Pitch Competition. We coached, we did 28 hours of business coaching. There were 10 businesses that pitched, 13 participants in the expo. And then for Flint in this year we had 85 attendees and coffee and combo throughout the year we've had 75 attendees.
I wanted to speak to, I got a question from Council Member Meltzer about kind of some of the impacts and outcomes that we track. So it was about like success rates or stats of success rates once our members kind of leave our space.
It's never really been within our scope of work and I've never really presented stats of that. We do have a lot of qualitative stories of success stories. Like one of the videos produced by the city of Denton last year that I mentioned was highlighting Team of Defenders,
which is a business that decided to start in Denton because of the coworking space, ended up growing out of the coworking space. They're still a member, they still are a virtual member because they want to continue to support their roots, but they're one that is a great success story.
And we have others too that have grown out of our space. We have a couple of members that now office in the Wells Fargo Tower. They've built out their own office spaces. So we definitely do see that and have those success stories. They're more of a qualitative nature I'd say.
This is the team that we have that has done this work over the last year.
Yeah.
If you have questions.
Great job. Any questions.
And this is informative than no vote needed or anything.
We asked Heather to present her annual report. She does report quarterly to the city. The second piece that will require a vote is staff is recommending today to continue this contract. It's an annual contract. It was established in 2016 when the city took an effort to promote the purpose of driving a new business.
So the concept of Stoke was created in 2017, the city contractor of the Hickory and Rail Ventures, Heather's group, for the management operations of Stoke. That relationship has been very successful and staff is continuing to, is recommending today to continue that contract, a one-year term of $158,172.
So this program aligns with the, aligns with our strategic plan for our Creative Denton and our strengthening community inclusion. And after the vote today, the next step would be to go to council consideration for approval.
So again, this is an annual agreement. There is no increase over the prior year.
I see you.
There is no increase over a prior year in an annual agreement that we would take forward to council in the coming weeks.
I thought of this. I know just talking to different entrepreneurs before, like sometimes people struggle with even finding an idea or a need.
So a lot of times you have people come in and say I want to start X business and they already know what it is. They got a business plan to kind of support that right.
Is there an opportunity, I guess, to survey or get with chamber members or EDP partners or say, hey, these are needs that I have that someone could fill.
So, so it's like a different, different spin on that because I think a lot of times you have creative people, but they're trying to figure out what and what you typically see in a lot of these is I understand the consumer to business like relationship.
Because I always am in that one, but there's a lot of money in the business to business relationship.
And if you look at these, a lot of these startups, I would, I would guess, I mean, just looking at your examples, probably 90% of them are consumer to business or business to consumer.
Very few look like their business to business where there's a huge opportunity to grow and keep wealth in debt.
And quite frankly, so I was just thinking maybe there's an opportunity to leverage some of that with some of these partnerships actually gather some needs.
Like Steve and his people, they probably have a need for hazardous waste disposal.
I mean, I don't know. We have, we have ones too. Right.
And it's like just there's no one local filling that need. Right. And people just don't know about it because they don't think about it.
Absolutely. I think that that is an excellent idea and it's something that has come up. Essentially, it's the idea of what I call like a reverse pitch competition or a hackathon where you get an industry or a variety of industries coming in and saying these are the problems that we're experiencing.
And then right. You get you have in the room, engineers, marketers, entrepreneurs, you know, all all those different brains and skill sets that you need to then kind of spin up that idea.
I do think I agree with you that there's a lot of opportunity there. Thus far, it's really been about capacity.
So do you have the capacity to try to address that? Is that what we're saying? We we could we would need partners to come together with it. Right.
We would I believe that is even in the matrix is to do a like a again what we call like a reverse pitch competition.
I I think it kind of depends on the leadership role that you're looking for still to take in that because we are between the programs and events and marketing and everything that we're doing managing the space.
We don't have capacity to what we could. I would love to entertain that and figure out ways that we could work with partners or expand.
Sure. And we can bring that back as an idea to work through and see what how that impacts anything. We're actively looking at expanding our program.
This is working expansion program. And so I think that will be part of the goal is tracking what businesses actually need.
Just a quick question of the hundred fifty eight thousand. What are the funds go to? Is it personnel costs? Is it operating expenses? I'm just curious. It's all of the costs associated with developing, executing, marketing the program.
So yeah, a lot of that is our staff. A lot of it is the hard cost to rent venues, do the paid ads, all of that. Yeah. So it's really largely the personnel time to plan, execute, market.
What would what would that be? What would that equal to a percentage of your old total operating cost?
I have to look at my head a third. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. The majority of our revenue comes from the core. Thank you. So outside of the leaf space, what percentage of the revenue is that?
Oh, look at a hundred. No, it's not a hundred. Okay. We have we have to use another program partner that we have.
I don't have the exact breakdowns of that, but it would be 75 percent of the non space revenue, something like that.
And then so if you use contribution, is it similar to what this is or is it? It is not, but that is just for one singular program.
Would you say your strength now is more in making it possible for new ventures to form, you know, kind of lowering the cost of getting in?
Or is it just kind of providing a sustaining space for businesses of a certain scale or is it incubating businesses to get to the next round to grow?
Do you think it's kind of? Yeah, I would say it's two of those. So I think the co-working space really largely suits.
Right. So it really largely suits people that have some sort of steady revenue. Right. Those are the people that can pay for the private office. So those are people that are either remote workers or they are they have some sort of like secure business.
And they may be growing. They may be growing from one office to two offices. They may be growing outgrowing our space. They may be adding teams, but they're just, you know, distributed teams are prevalent.
And so they may be adding to their team and their headquarters is in Denton, but they're hiring elsewhere.
So the space really lends itself well to people that are especially the higher levels of membership to those that are established.
The community membership, that kind of affordable seventy five dollar a month is a great entry point for people to get in, network with people, test an idea, be around people that are trying to build something as well.
And they really want to be in that community. Our programs are really, I would say, focused on people that, you know, I think tech startups, it's like a very exciting idea.
There's a lot of huge success and and so many more failures. Right. There's it is not a sustainable way to grow businesses.
And so in the eight years that we've been doing this, we've seen what what Denton really needs and really supports very well is the incubation of small businesses that maybe you're going to grow to two or five or ten employees.
But they're doing that based on revenue, less so that kind of high growth venture capital kind of startup funding regionally. That's very much happening and Denton does have people that are contributing to that.
But I think our wheelhouse is really helping those early stage people test ideas and try to create some stability for their business.
That makes sense. Yeah. Do you know the percentage of you reference tech, but there's food and beverage companies that have also mentioned what kind of I don't have a specific breakdown of every industry.
I can look back at there's also this this funny thing where certain people need our space and certain people need our programming.
Right. And so we see different people accessing those things.
And so we are conducting regularly the member surveys, but that really only captures a certain swath and that wouldn't cover like the food and beverage.
Right. Those are people that like golden root ginger beer. They have their own space. They have a kitchen that they use so they don't need our space, but they they have benefited from accessing our programming. So we're sort of between the space and the programs are sort of serving two different audiences in a way.
And so we don't have, you know, I could probably look at getting more of a picture of the program participants and how their businesses actually that explanation.
Okay. Any other questions. We move to vote them and we're putting on the approval for 158,172. I need a motion. Please second it. Thank you.
And any further discussion. Seeing none, I'll move to vote all in favor by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Same sign. Hearing none, that measure passes. Thank you all. Thank you, Heather.
I'm staying because I'm going to get to vote on it again. Oh, you get it. Okay. All right.
All right. The next one is the work session. Is that right? All right. Let's do work session. This is such a different agenda from last time. We're in work session already.
Congratulations. All right. Item B, EDP 24. All right. My name is Gary Packham, director of Parks and Recreation. First of all, thank you for letting me come speak to you.
I feel a lot of what we do in Parks and Recreation is economic development just in a different way. And this really is economic development, special events, arts and culture, celebration of that is creativity.
But just wanted to give you an update on our Halloween program. So some of the objectives that we created as part of this program was, first and foremost, increase tourism sales tax and hotel occupancy tax.
That's our ultimate goal. Get people into town. Obviously boost our economic impact. Engage in and build community. I mean, that's a lot of what we do in Parks and Recreation is building community, bringing people together, unite, grow, play is our mission.
Enhance Denton's culture and take an opportunity to showcase our creativity and then also enhance our public spaces. So those are the objectives overall. We started this idea back in actually late last year.
We're looking at Halloween decorations, or I'm sorry, Christmas decorations and what we're going to do. And we're trying to figure out how we can be competitive for the winter events, November, December, but it's, we're going to have a lot of time to catch up with
Grapevine, Frisco, McKinney in relation to that space. So we're like, we already do Halloween really well. How about if we leaned into Halloween like they lean into the winter holidays.
So we talked to Christine about it. There was actually a conference going on right about that same time that she attended to and we started communicating with Conway, South Carolina. And they have really been our inspiration and kind of our mentor on this process.
They're our college town. And I guess this will be their third or fourth year that they've leaned into Halloween and they've seen a good tick up in their sales tax. So we're like, okay, and they just created spaces.
They had an event going on every single day of the month and just brought people to town and it just kind of organically took off. So these are some of the images that that we've used for inspiration from Conway and they've been a great partner.
The city manager and I email back and forth a couple times a week with ideas that we bounce off each other. So it's been kind of fun.
So we really are focusing on the three P's of Halloween programming, placemaking and promotion. So right now we're actually about 120 programs and events throughout the entire month.
Some of those events are going on every single day. Some of those are just one day type activities. Placemaking, we have about 13 to 15 areas that we're calling them like selfie station or Instagramable spaces where you can go take a look at the decorations, take some pictures, interact in some aspects.
And then also promotion. So while each one of these events that are going on, our marketing communications team has wrapped their arm around all of them and really lifted them up to a higher level to try to bring more people to them.
So our goal is to bring people from Oklahoma, Louisiana at some point in time, maybe not the first year as it starts to gain momentum, but to put heads in beds and put people on our streets. From a programming standpoint, while we have quite a few events that we've done on an ongoing basis, we're really depending on the business community to step up and put on their own events and they've done that.
That's how we've gotten to 115 events. That's our community stepping up, leaning into this and taking advantage of the opportunity.
So we have an interactive map. You can click on different items and see, this is a GIS map, what's going on in regards to displays. These are the displays that are going to be happening in the downtown. So we're trying to push people out to different areas of the downtown. And after the first year, so we'll see how that works, but to spread people out and stop in, have a drink, grab something to eat, see a few displays, maybe listen to some music, that type of thing.
So you can go to deadhalloween.com and see everything that's going on. And I'm not going to go through each one of these slides, they're in the presentation if you want, but this is just some of the spaces that we're recreating.
So this is Wolfs Park, obviously we're at the Werewolf's Park, makes a lot of sense. So we'll just have a little dress up things there so people can come down. We put some actually new lights in that park this week, so you can engage with the lights, we can change the colors, and when there's music playing, it'll follow the beat of the music, so it engages that. So it's an interactive art piece.
So this is City Hall East, Emily Fowler's Haunted, so we're having this as well as we're having a paranormal investigation going on that people can come to.
We're putting a cemetery in front of City Hall, we've created headstones with the community, helping paint those and some fencing. Our Ghostbusters team is obviously going to be involved.
This is the one that I like the most. So Cherry Orchard is very important to the city, and unfortunately it went away last year. So we've been working on Cherry Orchard 2.0, which would be similar but not the exact same, because we're never going to be able to replace what the original Cherry Orchard was in a future park.
So that's something we're working on long term, but we came up with an idea to really grab that creativity of our community, the inspiration behind the Cherry Orchard, and that energy, and turn it into Halloween, so we have the scary Cherry Orchard.
And it's all community-based, where we've reached out and said, "Hey, we want you to get a chair, decorate a Halloween theme, and then we're going to set up a display for everybody's art." So right now we have over 160 chairs that people have committed in the community that we're going to set up at City Hall.
So you can come down and check those out. We're putting 1,800 pumpkins on Hickory in the trees, just like you would a Christmas tree. So they're going to be lined up there. That's inspiration that came from Conway, South Carolina.
City Hall Alleyne, we're taking a little inspiration from another project and putting some lights and some tentacles coming out of the building, and it's going to be a mad scientist area, so people can check that out. Halloween Town, this is kind of a pumpkin that they had in that movie, so we're having a pumpkin that's going to be on the square, along with a large Halloween sign that people can come and take photos with.
Haunted Hotline, this is another interactive, creative art piece that we're leaning on some of our artistic community. Our marketing team has really picked up and ran with this, but we're taking three old-school phone booths, and they're going to be decorated with different themes, and the phone's going to be interactive, and it's going to be basically a scavenger hunt. It's going to send you out through the town.
And there's going to be voices on the phone that gives you direction and clues, and there'll be a telephone book, too, that you can work on that has clues, and they're going to be directing you to a couple businesses downtown.
So that's under construction right now, so that's something totally out of the box that we developed with the local artists. To kick everything off, actually at 11 o'clock, we're working with the Chamber of Commerce. We're going to have an official ribbon cutting of Ghostbusters headquarters.
Discover Deton's going to turn into a Ghostbusters headquarters, so it's going to be a business, so we're going to have that kick off everything, and then later that evening, when we have our national night out, we're going to have a pumpkin drop in cooperation with our fire department.
Use Chase is another way. It's a social media app. It's a scavenger hunt app that pushes people into the town, so you can earn points for getting participation in an event, photos with something, buying something. Again, force people into different areas of our downtown so we can support our businesses.
Just some interactive trick-or-treating, Harvest Festival, the library is doing a ton of things for young kids, so there's something for everybody.
MLK is going to have our Haunted House. We're working with our local roller derby group. They're going to have an event. They've been engaged in some of the activities.
Beer Alley is going to be turned into Fear Alley.
The Denton County Brewing is launching two new beers for the month, so that's another way to get them involved. Another artistic twist to it, we're going to have a graffiti art wall at GBAC where people come down and actually just do a graffiti wall and decorate that for Halloween.
It'll be at United to Please, just paint over it. Something negative comes up, we'll go out there and paint over it. And then we're also having artists come in to teach artwork as part of this program with GDAC.
There's more about GDAC. The courthouse, we're doing a handful of things with Denton County. I mentioned earlier, the pumpkin and sign is going to be on the courthouse. That will be lit up for Halloween.
Discover Denton, I already mentioned. DCTA is going to have a spooky train ride, so spooky story time. They're going to do that twice during the month to encourage people to take the DCTA train and create more awareness.
Obviously Day of Dead is a major anchor at the end of the month, as well as Arts and Jazz. Another way to get our Main Street businesses involved, they're going to have special menus, special drinks of the month, so that gives another reason to go out and visit or revisit a place that you've been.
There's also Arts and Jazz. Another cool event that we're doing, this inspiration came from Ole Miss. They have basketball on the square, so we were working with UNT Athletics, and they're going to set up a basketball court on the square.
It's modified, it's a little bit smaller. They're going to have men's and women's out there, and TW is also going to be coming out. So they can come out, they're going to do a little bit of exhibitions, shoot around, and then you can have Meet the Team autographs for the kids, that type of thing.
That's going to happen on October 16th. Ghost Tours, obviously. North Texas Ghostbusters, a local cosplay group, they have 21 days that are scheduled, and they're all volunteers, so they're coming up and getting the kids engaged.
Boo with the U is huge. There's the two brews that we're putting out, Ecto Juice in celebration of Ghostbusters, and then Night Witch, which is a dark paranormal investigations.
And then from a marketing standpoint, that's a sampling of everything. Obviously, Set in Halloween has everything that's going on. We launched a website in July. We're doing some merchandise sales. T-shirts have been pretty popular so far, so they're going to be on sale pretty soon at Discover J.
And then after year one, we'll go through a review process, looking at our three P's, our budget, attendance, sales tax, community and business feedback. We reached out to UNT to see if they could do some intercept surveys and online surveys with people that are coming to town to get feedback from them.
Obviously, volunteer involvement has been pretty critical for us, as well as business involvement. And then just the overall impacts of the community feel. Just trying to create October as a destination in North Texas for the city of death.
So we're 19 days and counting, and we still have a lot of work to do. First year, there's a lot of growing pains and figuring out a lot of logistics, so we're working through that right now, but we're going to be ready to go on October 1.
So with that, I'll stand for any questions.
Great presentation. Thank you. Any questions?
I'd just like to say Gary and his team has quite a team to help you with the event. We put on our Blues Festival every year, and we're gearing up for next weekend for our 26th. And I wouldn't want to work with any better team than Gary and his team, Russell, Craig, Ariana, to get back with you.
Make sure all the I's and T's across, dotted T's across for your event, and then make it real seamless for you. So we really appreciate you helping us with a lot of that background that people don't see that takes to put on a festival when you're going to have over 10, 12, 15, 20,000 people there.
So I commend you and your team. They're always easy to get back with you quickly, let you know when you're going the wrong way or the right way and helping you get on the right track. So we appreciate what you do for the city and make sure we stay on point.
Thank you for everything you guys do as well.
That was a wonderful example of how to be complimentary and also promote your own.
Any other questions? I think Paul does.
My personal observation, you're clearly having way too much fun. It's really a blast. Very creative and I think it's going to be awesome for that. But I'm going to share with you that there's a sort of in a cursory way presented at a neighborhood meeting in my district that I attended.
And it was an unexpected reaction, unexpected by me, where I heard some people say, oh no, this is going to compete with our own organic grassroots, very dentany, day of the dead, coffin races, and a certain art.
And I was pleased to see that. Well, first of all, I just made up the purpose of that meeting that, oh no, this is actually going to create audience and highlight those things.
I was hoping that was true. I did see that you had slides in your deck on those things.
I don't know if this is a question or not, but I guess it is. Will those events be integrated and highlighted in a way that will draw traffic to them?
That's a great question. And first of all, we've called Arts and Jazz and Kevin and David before we even launched anything to make sure that they were on board, they understood the process. So they've been in the truck with us along the way the whole time.
Halloween really is a marketing concept where we are taking everything that we do and trying to market everybody and promote everybody as a whole. Our goal is to get more people in downtown, more people at Arts and Jazz, more people at day of the dead.
So their events are successful for the month of October all around the brand of Halloween. Now, as businesses take advantage and jump in, you know, a local bookstore is going to have some authors with Halloween haunted related activities.
That's a way for them to kind of jump on that and try to take advantage of that. So our goal is to make every one of these events successful at the end of the day.
So I would say no, we're not taking anything away. We're trying to encourage people to come, not just for day of the dead, not just for Arts and Jazz, but maybe three or four times throughout the month instead of just once.
Steve? Yes. So is our goal to break even with the expenses that we are incurring or is this more of an expense, a net expense that we are fine with? What's our kind of goal from a city to recoup the expenses we had?
First question, number two, do we have any benchmarks that we're going to, that we know what we have to, we need this to increase by 10%, 15% to make this worthwhile so that we can, how do we measure success basically?
Great question. So for year one, we had $49,000 in our budget for Christmas decorations that we're using for that. And then we had $25,000 for marketing. So that's the budget that we're working with.
At the end of the event, we'll look and see what the hotel and sales tax click up is. Do I expect it to be that of the budget? Probably not, I don't know.
The conway was 18 and 21% increase for those two years. Smaller town, different environment, they're not in the Metroplex like we are, so it may not be apples to apples, but I definitely want to see a take up in that activity.
Positive feedback from the businesses saying, hey, we had the best October. Those are some of the things we want to see here from. It may take a couple years to get to a point where like, this is perfect, this is what we expected, but we'll sit down and reevaluate after year one for sure.
Yeah, I think with the partnerships that the city has, and obviously they're a huge donor to arts and jazz, but you would think you'd be able to get really good feedback on what their volumes changed. You know, they would help y'all to support or figure out, hey, we need to change something in the future.
But I do think we need to have an idea of what our total expense is. And I understand we have a budget piece, but it sounds like there's a lot of man hours that we're putting toward as well that may not be included in that 45 and 29, or right, 49, 25 hour it was.
And the other question, are hotels, are they, are they providing incentives to help draw people here as well from outside to kind of partner with the city and what they're doing to? Yeah, so the CBB has been involved in the planning of this, so we have hotels on the website.
You can go through there and get those incentives and I think it's still kind of in the works.
Yeah, that's the, that's the goal. Yeah, I get steering business their way, but if they could make it enticing to get people here by giving a discount for, you know, if they come through that portal or whatever, and that might get more people here.
I'm just trying to make it so the city of Dennis is not the only one trying to make this thing click. Yeah, it thinks bill it's for sure. Yeah.
How are we promoting this to the Metroplex outside, obviously the goal is to bring people in. Yeah, as much as people within the community to what social media security. Yeah, so obviously social media is a big one.
We're, we're, the one thing that we learned from Conway is that organic social media took off in the month of October because people are taking selfies sharing it and all that so we're definitely want to see how that works.
Our bar com is doing paid advertising on social media.
We've reached out some magazines they have radio spots are going to start September 14 I think ish somewhere in the mid September on radio we have billboard on 35, at least one up on the north side that I know of.
They're going to have a media day on October 1, inviting all the media up to kind of kick it off and do some, some shots there.
I think we've talked some influencers to come up and experience things so there's a handful of things that are okay.
Gary, Gary, thanks again, appreciate the presentation, and I look forward to the success of the event.
We're going to move on into the staff reports at this point.
That was a hard presentation to go after, but first off, thank you again for this board really do appreciate your time every month and I know that it is consuming times but we do appreciate your efforts here.
So during the past month, the city didn't office of economic development we have an employee, Clay Parker, if you don't mind saying he's our new business recruitment specialist.
Clay is a graduate of UT Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs, and so that's a master's degree program, and he has served at different public agencies including the city of Austin, the Texas letter slayer and Texas Workforce Commission.
So we're really excited to have him on his primary duties will be his development so directly reaching out to companies that we want to see here.
Data analytics, finding a better way to market our community so that we are selling to our prospects the best data available and project management leads into active projects.
The downtown road construction on August 22nd pexot contacted the city to inform them that they were going to move north to repair the roads and shut down the roads as well.
So, the businesses downtown, we knew that they may have a decrease in income and so we wanted to approach that early on.
And so I want to give kudos to Kristin or Main Street manager who reached out to those businesses before the city released that the roads were going to be closed.
And so I think that made a difference and we contacted the business owners and letting them know that they were going to be effective right.
So I want to point out the downtown signs here that you see on the square. That's something that our team put together or a few months ago when the roads initially sat down I think it was two to three months ago.
And, and so, Kristen Paluto she went out and along with Matilda we didn't she set up the signage.
And so discovered it and had published it so I just wanted to make sure that that was recognized.
On the recruitment side, currently we have 11 active projects. We have seven out of those step 11. There are seven that were completed have completed incentive applications or site visits.
During the past quarter we responded to 13 RFIs. Three of those were manufacturing, two an aerospace aviation, two an energy supply chain, one in semiconductor fields, one in automotive supply chain, and four in the green energy supply chain field.
So Christina Davis our business development administrator, she has been walking those out the past quarter. So we're hoping that we get some type of response from the state, which is where the RFIs come from.
During the past quarter we have four site tours. We have three companies come in from out of state. So those are initial visits and we have one follow up visit.
And then in downtown we have four active projects who are currently in the downtown reinvestment grant process. Either they've been fired about the grant program, or they've implied for incentives or they're waiting on their check.
So, our team has been busy.
During this past week we attended the commercial UAV Drone Expo in Las Vegas. It's the leading international trade show and conference focusing on the integration and operation of commercial UAS.
And attendance was Clint Pertel with UNT who's with their aviation supply chain department. Ryan Adams our airport director and Jerry Filder who's our engineering manager for the municipal electric.
And so the reason that we all went to this particular expo is because there's a lot of emerging technology in the UAS field. It's not just a hobby anymore. There are drones that are actually used for monitoring electricity infrastructure, which is why Jerry went.
Also, even if you look at maritime there's drones that will go in the water and inspect pipelines. Commercial delivery is a big focus in the drone world right now.
And so we did receive a lot of leads. Our focus was contacting some of the manufacturers.
In the drone world, many of the international companies right now are more advanced because they don't have the same restrictions as the FAA here in America, which is great restrictions here in America because they are focused on safety concerns and right away concerns.
So there's two different designations that commercial pilots can apply for right now. It's called part 107 certification. So that allows pilots to fly any type of drones. And so the FAA is working on the second part, part 108 that will allow companies to actually apply for the certification and then will be liable for their pilots.
This certification will also allow the drone companies to fly. It's called BVLOS, the on visual line of sight. And so two of the leading companies in the drone world is their wing and zip line.
Walmart has put investment into those companies. And so you've seen probably wings delivering their packages from Walmart and other cities. And so that's something that we're definitely looking into.
But Ryan and I are really wanting to take part in this building, this UAS ecosystem here in Denton because we really do feel like we can be a landing pad for those companies, especially if they're coming in from out of state.
So I do want to kind of recognize the marketing materials that we put together. We're kind of going between two different taglines where innovation takes flight and Denton landing. So land your business here in Denton.
And actually they'd get a lot of recognition. A lot of people wanted to know what's Denton doing. And so we told them about UNT's second round of NSF grant funding. If they're able to win that funding next year, it'll be $160 million.
And so we definitely want to make sure that we're part of the game when that occurs. And then this gentleman on the right, he's actually from Brazil.
Just wanted to let you know that there's tons of international companies that were in attendance. And so he really liked that little promo that we gave him.
So back in August, Jamie Adams with the EDP and Christina Davis, Business Development Program Administrator, they attended the Denton ISD/CT Professional Development Day.
What CT stands for is Continuing Technical Education. And it's my understanding that students have to pick a program early on, whether you're a freshman or sophomore, to enroll and then hopefully they'll graduate with credits by the time they complete that program.
And so during our past meeting, I did mention that we want to collect as much data as possible. And so Christina asked these three questions, which I found were really insightful.
How can economic development partners assist with Denton ISD, i.e. facilitating with employers? And so the most common answer was transportation, job fairs on campus, meeting students in class, provide transportation again, make the process easy.
The second question was, in your opinion, what are the biggest challenges for students choosing a career field? The top answers were unrealistic money expectations, too young, they don't know about available jobs, lack of passion, too many options, exposure to industry, and my favorite was baby dreamers.
And then the last one was, what is your most effective way for employers to engage with students? The top answer was apprenticeship, internship programs, facility tours was the second, third was mentorship, and then last was career fairs.
So our next steps is really kind of developing maybe an upscaling program or some type of workforce development programming with the chamber. That'll probably be part of their upcoming contract, but I just want to let you know that we are listening and we're working on developing some of the data and the surveys.
Any questions? And another thing I wanted to mention is next quarter, I would like to possibly hold a board retreat so that we can develop a better strategy. I don't know if that's something you'd be open to, but I do think it's important because we do have a few new board members, but just to let you know that will be coming up in the future.
Is there any data on DISD and the CPE of where those students are getting jobs? Like where are they going to actually land and get work? We're paying ISD and we're paying taxes to ISD and then to school kids, and that's awesome.
But it might be a potential opportunity for us again, the collaboration to say, hey, we're training 800 kids a year in auto tech and only 20 staying there. So we need to like, we've got this pool of people or this pool of labor we're training that's going somewhere else.
So there's an opportunity to either open more auto tech businesses or there's an opportunity to, you know what I'm saying, like those things are, you have a supply chain, supply to demand imbalance.
And if that's the case, are there opportunities for us to take, to leverage those, take advantage of, you know, how we're training people. It's hard to even tell kids like, hey, if you want to stay in Denton and you're interested in nursing or auto tech, hey, if you want to stay in Denton, go to nursing because Steve's got a shortage, you know, or whatever, right?
It's true. Yeah, I mean, if you're picking between the two, right, like it's got one of those things we can kind of integrate to keep people here.
My understanding, North Texas has a very large drone club.
I thought we would learn to reach out to somebody up there and find out.
Right. And so we learned that 10% of young adults, age 16 and 24, are disengaged. And so we realized that it's probably, they're just, whether they have a degree or not, they're just kind of hanging out on someone's couch, kind of trying to figure out what they want to do.
And so we're realizing that employers probably need to get involved at a younger age so that they know what's available to them and they can choose what's, you know, what career path to go into. So we will, we're working on that for sure.
That'll be coming out in the near future. And then, yes, there is the North Texas Council of Government says have a UAS task force and they have six monthly meetings and we attend those.
Thanks. Anything else?
At the next time we wanted to quickly render, give this board an update on what the economic development department budget looks like for next fiscal year.
So there are a couple different buckets for economic development. The general fund budget houses the operating budget for the department. The budget is approximately $5.6 million.
The bulk of that budget is focused on existing incentive agreements that we're paying through property tax abatement or sales tax.
And then we wanted to highlight the projects that we've talked about in this last year that will be the focus of activities that Brittany and her team will be working on this next year.
So we are working on the downtown, the downtown tourist boundary expansion coming up. That will be an additional tool to help fund some of the catalyst projects identified in the downtown master plan.
Brittany is going to be working on an incentive study we've talked about before we are limited and which the fact that we are potentially competitive in the Metroplex.
So she's going to do a study that can tell us how competitive are we? What do we maybe need to look at changing?
She's focused on direct recruitment, like going out to the drone show where she's able to meet directly with companies that we want to attract. And then the marketing, the city's going through a rebranding study.
We're working on a downtown public improvement district. If you remember the ambassador program that's currently being funded as a two year pilot.
So the outcome of that would be to establish a sustainable ongoing funding source to sustain that project if the downtown business is like it, because it would be an additional assessment for that area or if there are other things that could fund.
We presented last month on the razor ranch public improvement district. That will be a project during 2014.
And the best place for working parents designation, obtaining that license. That's when we highlighted that came out of the leadership didn't project. We are very close to having that licensing agreement where we can incorporate that in also to our applications.
And also awarded to other local businesses to highlight with our workforce development, who is providing those incentives that lend themselves to working parents.
And then our economic development partnership agreement is coming up. We hope to have that on the agenda this month, but Aaron and I have been working on the CBB transition.
So we'll bring them out for next month and in the stove agreement, which is our entrepreneurial hub that Heather presented.
A couple other tools that we do have the catalyst fund, which was just established in 2022. This is our cash type funding for incentives, which is brand new to the city.
It was seeded initially with, I believe, to 2,000,000 or 2 and a half million from our utility funds and then has another income revenue source that we're trying to start up.
So we do, we are going, we are projecting to begin the year with 4.5 million dollars in that fund balance. And we just right now have revenues and expenses budgeted as a placeholder number. No projects have been identified yet for that funding.
The other additional tool we have is the downtown terms that is going to be limited to that specific geographic boundary, but when the boundaries expanded, that would open up the opportunity.
So we are looking to begin the year with 4.4 million dollars in that fund.
And we have around a million budgeted the will probably will need to update that a little bit if the fine arts theater when they get completed, we anticipate that next fiscal year and that I believe it's a little over a million dollars would be awarding out of that fund.
And then all those downtown grants for besides sprinkler systems are coming out of this one. The West Park Terrors, which is over in the industrial area is plan to start the year with 2.6 million. There is an incentive that was improved back in 2014 for when I'm looking at Erica.
That we are projecting to come online during 2425. That's that large number of expense, which will draw down that fund balance pretty small.
And those are all of the funds that we have right now as tools for economic development. So once we do that incentive study, we're certainly looking forward to bring back to showing.
Any questions.
The contract.
Is that a forever contract.
It would require a vote, you get two part vote because it was there was an election held to take that percentage of sales tax and dedicated to.
So, it is evergreen unless there was action to undo that.
What would have to what would we need to incentivize that. I would think our incentive study is going to be a start to kind of show what are we competitive or are there things that other cities are doing.
Any questions.
I don't think it was by charter though it was an election.
24 year.
Other cities have to have the same boat.
Could we remove ourself.
I think each individual city.
We get those questions.
I would vote to look very closely.
Thank you.
A few slides and reporting what's going on in our world one want to share and it ties into kind of what Brady was talking about our website didn't need to be calm.
This is a snapshot for the month of June, you know, we get about 4000 users about close to 9500 page views.
But as you look at where these people are coming to look at our website from international India, China, Germany, the United States, Virginia, California.
It correlates with what Brittany's talking about with our RFI coming in with companies that are looking to come to Denton are going to our website along with the city's website to find information on there.
What we want to do is make sure we're telling the story of Denton.
So focus of ours over the last at least every month is to have a story about a local business and their success story how they got started a story about a cultural event in town and then also celebrating victories here in town.
So an example of the last few months we've got a story on made a more craft we've got a story coming out of man a man. We've got one that's on our website now that talks about the history of warehouses in Denton.
Why it's been so prevalent over the last 40 some odd years.
You know, it's all accordance to our location here in Texas, United States.
We also tell stories on we have a fourth July drama show we've got one coming up day of the dead, along with all the lagging on the square and the point of that is if you're from India, and you're coming to look at our website, you get a good snapshot of what we're selling here.
Want to share a little bit of that talking about industrial growth. This was off a costar that I want to share with you guys.
I thought it was very interesting. One 10th of the country's inventory completely in the last five years it's been in North Texas in the DFW.
You look at the blue graph here that's in the last five years the red is five years before that 2014 2019 blue is 19 to 2024.
This 2019 DFW is built 217 million square feet of industrial space Houston second 142 in Los Angeles has been pretty consistent you see kind of a growth there.
Phoenix Aaron Phoenix or Tucson, where you're from. They've had a good growth there too.
But it kind of speaks to why we're so prevalent. I see so many warehouses here.
Texas is a great location to build and Texas is a great state to build in. It kind of leads into vacancies and issues.
We see warehouses coming online. We're hoping to fill those. Hopefully our RFIs.
Part of what I do is I meet with a lot of our partners who are building from East Group, Scanlon, XPT, Exeter, whoever it may be.
Basically them and some of the feedback I get from these groups is can the city keep up in our growth.
The answer I always give them is yes of course we're right here with you. We want you to be in our town. We want you to bring business and bring jobs.
We're going to keep up. They always want to point out that once they get through the permitting process then it's a great place to build them.
They feel it runs real smooth. I say better than other towns and they always look at me and say yes better than other towns.
Someone wanted to mention here. One thing we do here is we have our larger groups like I mentioned East Group as an example.
Then we have our groups who are local to Denton and they ask all the time are we getting the same treatment as a larger group?
Are you treating, are you excited to get a 400,000 square foot warehouse as you are a 50,000 square foot warehouse?
The answer is yes. I want to tell them that we're excited with growth and that we want to continue to help them in any process we can.
Just pointing out West Park, these numbers over here on the left are, right now we have about 24 properties in the West Park industrial area, about close to seven million square feet.
About seven properties are, that number is moving daily but close to two million square feet are available for lease or for sale.
From a private side from the EDP, we have currently about 130 investors.
Geotech's engineering joined last month, we're on five new investors in the last one month.
It's a great group and we're working together to, when RFI's come in and companies from all over the country or all over the world say,
you know, what's a great partner to use for X, for Y, you know, obviously our investors are somewhere to point out and say they're great partners in our city and we'd love to get you involved with them.
From a networking standpoint, over the last month we hosted here in this building a forum,
a lunch and learn with primarily geared toward HR professionals but it's open to anyone who wanted to attend.
It was on growth in Denton and how it affects workforce. Speaking of Legrone, we had Marcus Boyle and the principal of Legrone Academy come and talk.
And he shared stories of how to get students involved in the industry, local industry and kind of what we're talking about.
How do you make sure they work in Denton? How do you make sure they don't do it for words or find a job to the places?
And a lot of it, Brittany was sharing some stats earlier as they just don't know, they don't know what opportunities are out there in Denton.
One of the things Marcus mentions a lot is the deterrents, a lot of them don't have driver's license or driving these days.
So we have to make sure that we are hosting events at Legrone that are bringing our industrial partners there,
manufacturing days, different types of tours, different types of job fairs.
So this event had so much good feedback that we are taking this group and anyone who wants to attend to Legrone in November
to do a kind of a more in-depth tour with industrial partners and hopefully continue to build that pipeline that we were talking about
where high school students are willing to stay here in town and continue to work.
Last thing, working on another forum, economic development partnership forum, focused on AI and how AI can be a benefit here,
how businesses in Denton, not really from a global standpoint, working with Dr. Wood at TFU and Dr. Dillon at UNT
and making sure that we can really answer not just a global question but how can a business with one employee,
a business with 500, use AI to their advantage and be ready for the next wave.
And that's all I had. Any questions for the EDP?
Seeing none, Jamie, thank you for your report.
Thank you.
Good afternoon. It's afternoon, right?
My name is Emily Dillon, Main Street Program Manager and I'm going to give you our quarterly report for Main Street.
I'm going to start with the Denton Main Street Association vision and commission statement.
As we are partners with Denton Main Street Association, they maintain downtown Denton's appeal as a center for shopping, dining,
and entertainment to promote business growth and preserve Denton's historic character.
The mission is to promote and preserve downtown Denton as a vital asset of the community.
Main Street uses the four-point approach.
We are a national and state-affiliated program with the National Main Street,
and we do community transformation through four points, economic vitality, design, organization, and promotion.
One of the tools that supports economic vitality and is part of the Economic Development Strategic Toolkit
is the Downtown Reinvestment Grant, which is located within the Turbs.
You may have seen this slide before when Jeremy presented last month, but we do have an update.
Little D Property Group at 104106 West Oak just received their fire suppression grant, so they are complete there.
And just a side note, we are going to keep promoting that fire suppression grant because we did have a recent fire downtown,
and thanks to fire suppression, it was out before a fire even arrived, so thanks to fire suppression.
Denton Main Street Association created an economic tool to support our small businesses, and it's the Denton Main Street Dollars.
They launched this in Q1 of last year, and so to date, visitors have spent up to $3,000 on these Denton Main Street Dollars,
and they go right back to the downtown businesses, and right now we have 94 participating businesses.
Back in April, Denton Main Street hosted a shop small crawl.
You're going to keep moving forward with these crawls because they are directly linking back to more dollars spent downtown.
The key item for this was there were 282 entries, and for every $25 spent in the business, they were able to enter into a raffle.
With over $7,000 going directly back to the downtown businesses that Saturday before the eclipse.
Denton Main Street also launched their free music concert series in May and June.
We did an economic impact survey where between the hours of 6 and 9 PM, retailers saw an uptick of $50 in their shops, and restaurants saw an uptick of $100, an additional $100 spent at their restaurants during Twilight Tunes.
These are the downtown openings and closings from April through August.
We had 12 businesses open, four businesses closed, we gained 145 jobs, which the largest employer there was Union Bear that opened back in July, and then we lost 22 jobs.
And then I might have mentioned this before, but we do have two businesses that have extended their location.
Old Bear Vintage had a property on University, they opened a shop on the square, and Boca Belize also moved from Golden Triangle and opened their second location on Narcini Street.
One of the things that we're trying to focus on in economic development is our downtown business retention and expansion.
Denton Main Street Association hosts quarterly retail roundtables, but then we're focused on our BRD visits.
So I'm partnering with Jamie so that we can have a uniform template on getting that business, the data from businesses, on what they need.
So the goal for myself is to visit three businesses a month, and then these are kind of the questions that we run through.
And again, two locally owned small businesses have expanded to their second location in downtown.
You might have seen this slide when Christine presented on the Fine Arts Theater back in April or February, March, or April.
I wanted to bring this back up because it shows the decrease in our vacant buildings because we've had a couple sales go through.
And so we decreased square footage by 25,000 feet on the downtown footprint on the square.
The businesses in orange are the partially vacant. They're under construction, so McBrides is still under construction.
They should be opening soon. And then the ones that are starred, the old post office, as well as Fine Arts, we know that those are purchased.
But they were working closely with those property owners to get those businesses up and running.
And then as Brittany mentioned earlier, we, Economic Development, launched the sign initiative during the tech stock construction.
We did, we created main corridor signs as well as feather banners for businesses and parking locations.
So businesses, so guests of downtown knew that businesses were open, as well as where to park.
We also partnered with Dent Main Street Association to create a bingo card, which directly links to help those local businesses that are, you know, kind of hurting during this construction time.
The Downtown Beautiful Business Award was awarded to five businesses during April and August.
The mission was to promote a clean and vibrant business district through litter, cleanups, and beautification. Station 222, True Leaf, Debbie Doon Co. Salon, Greenhouse, and Elements Salon and Spa were the winners for those months.
And just a couple pictures of Economic Development and Main Street partnering together.
I was able to attend the National Main Street Retreat and then was able to have our DMSA board president and board member Heather Walker attend the Texas Main Street Retreat in San Angelo and then our Main Street Mixer.
And that's just a little bit about what's happening in Main Street. Any questions? Yes.
We're a third of the way through the Expo Health Square. What do we know about how those businesses are faring already in a critical situation?
From what I've heard from businesses is businesses that were kind of already suffering prior to the construction are still suffering.
The businesses that have had consistent, strong business, they seem to be doing okay.
What we've tried to do is kind of meet them in the middle and say what do you need from us in terms of marketing, promotion? How do we help you? Is it a menu change? Is it just getting the word out there?
And so that's what we've tried to do is really kind of help them figure out a way for them to kind of think outside the box and what they can do for their business.
Working for the ones that are important. By the way, I know, second in a row, car rights. How much? Good. That's what we've been doing in our office. We bring lunch in so since the construction we've been ordered from all the restaurants or anybody up there that we could for bringing lunch in a couple of times.
Little things like that. They're going to order something. Do it there or any services that are downtown. I think that's been good.
Our business particularly, but I know some others.
I know that the businesses have really appreciated kind of the support that they've seen from you.
I just want to compliment you and the team for the big bill card. It's a great idea and I think it really gave people some kind of motivation and it's been fun. So thank you for helping people.
Just want to point out to you that the pasta has sootles.
Yeah, all night. Thank you for the presentation. Appreciate it. And economic trends report.
Hi everyone. My name is Matilda. Normally I sit over there, but I also do some other stuff for my job. And today I'm presenting to you our new trends report. You may have seen it previously in different formats like our quarterly report or our stand report.
But now we're just going to keep playing a simple college trends report. And it's different from Britney's in that it's not about what we're doing. It's just about what's happening in our local economy.
So first I'm going to go over permit values, starting with residential. This is a three year comparison with green being 2024. There's obviously a big spike in January of 22.
That is from a large town home development. And then down in 2024, August, you can see we're kind of lower than previous years. And I've kind of asked around in development services and it seems like it just adds and flows with how many residential permits we get and that was chopped up to just less single home permits.
Is this multifamily or just single family?
Oh, because this is from a big town home development and that was from single family. I can get back to you on that though just to confirm and be sure.
And then next is commercial permit values. Again, green is 2024. There's a huge spike in December of 22 and that is from two big projects that contributed to that. We're at home in Razor Ranch and then the Chill Cult Storage off of I-35.
And then the big spike up here in April of 24.
There were three big projects in April that helped contribute to that big spike and those were a hangar and training facility, a manufacturer and an auto sales project.
Oh and Emily, our WB building official, I was kind of asking like why are we at 5.8 in August versus 8.6 last year for commercial permit values and she says there's not much of a consistency or average month over month or year over year.
It really ranges and so we get anywhere from zero to 10 commercial permits a month and that could be anything like a McDonald's or a huge warehouse. So it really changes the values.
Moving on to sales tax collection. Red is 23-24. This is a two-year fiscal year comparison and we have around four to five billion a month.
We now have unemployment rate. I have two different charts. This one is Denton, just year over year, three-year comparison. Green is 20-24.
And then this one is Denton compared to Denton County compared to the state compared to the US. So you can see July it increased to 4.3 but that is kind of on par with the national which it also increased to 4.3.
So we're usually staying just about the same level as everyone else.
This is my favorite slide because I contribute to research. So this is the city of Denton contributes to the cost of living index research which is every quarter I submit pricing for lots of things.
Some of it seems kind of like a McDonald's quarter counter with cheese and then some of it is like housing, the cost of a new build or the cost of renting a two bedroom two bath apartment.
So I have highlighted here Denton in yellow and so the composite index is 100 is an average. So Denton is at 99.9. So we are not over the average cost of living. We're right there in the middle, which I think is a good thing.
Because our counterpart in Dallas, they're above the average cost of living at 101. And then the lowest this is a comparison of Texas cities. So the lowest cost of living in Texas is Wellington, which you could probably chuck up to.
Their cost of housing is significantly less than our is here in the Metroplex. And then I also put in Plano, which I have highlighted in blue and I have a little disclaimer they did not participate in Q2 research.
So their number is from Q1 and I'm not sure they forgot to submit pricing or if they decided not to participate anymore but I wanted to include them just to compare ourselves to some other Metroplex cities.
And you can see our utilities are less than Dallas and Plano, even after a rate increase after several years without one.
And then the next slide is just compared to some other cities in the country. So again, I have the Plano just for comparison.
To give you an idea of like what a low cost of living area would be, that would be August City, Oklahoma, or maybe Decatur, Illinois, those are much more rural and just like in Harlingen, you can compare, you can contribute their lower cost of living mostly to housing.
Just because housing costs are less in those rural areas. Then on the flip side of that, you'll see Manhattan is, their index is 226, which again, a reminder, the average would be 100.
So they're 126 points over the average. And just like in the lower cost of living cities, their housing is a major contributor to that at 495 points.
And then I also included some college towns like Kalamazoo, Knoxville, Waco, just to give you an idea of what some other college towns are looking like across the country. They do have a lower cost of living than us.
And then I thought it was interesting that Nashville, a bigger city, has the exact same number of us. So that's just to give you an idea of where we stand in comparison to some other parts of the country.
And then the next four slides are just some real estate information for residential real estate that I got from the Greater Benton Wise County Association of Realtors for April, May, June.
As you can see, the average median home price was 385 in April and then it spiked up to 400 range in May and June.
Then we have active listings and closed sales. They look to stay about the same with an increase in banks.
And then we have the days on market and days to close. I think some of this extended days on market might have contributed to the lower cost of living in the house in April.
And then months of inventory. I apologize, my graph is a bit funky and I'll fix that for next time. So the months of inventory went from 2.3 to 2.4, but it looks like a huge jump, but it's not.
And then last week I have my commercial real estate part, which is industrial. I pulled this from our site database and these are just sites listed on our site database that are available or up and coming.
We have 23 buildings, 8 land lots at 3.9 million square feet and 579 acres respectively. I realize it's not a big snapshot that includes like retail or office space. I'm still working out what I want that to look like.
So that ends my presentation and I am welcome to repeat that.
Great presentation. I'm going to apologize. I've got to step out. Question specifically for you. Was it really? It was on health care. It's the lowest in anywhere in the nation.
Well, I do think we benefit from having access to some things just because of the size of DFW that contributes to it. I would actually need to see what the timeframe references are on some of those. Those are current or with a reference to pre-pandemic versus post-pandemic.
It made me wonder, something to think about, is health care a kind of area of competitive advantage for us? I mean, just now that I'm in that health care detective, I feel like it's very important to think about that.
That was the people.
No, he said I don't think about that. It is.
I can come back, happy to come back.
Generally it doesn't come up when we list our core competencies.
Well, you certainly see that much of a difference compared to some of the others that go into that factor as well. It's a really good point.
I apologize for saying I'm going to step away if you need anything from me. Tony, thank you. Still like Mike.
Thank you. We have one other item. Yeah, very last item is our future agenda items.
And this is just our notification to the board of what is coming up. We've had very full agendas.
So, looking at November, we have all of just our standard items. Right now we're just talking, we're going to look at rotating those to try to keep the meeting to an hour because we know your time is valuable. And so the only item that will be pushing to November will be the economic development partnership contract.
We'll bring that one back as an annual agreement that we need to go through. And then in December, again, these are all just normal business in case any incentive agreements come back or the terms expansion will be soon too.
So if there are additional items, I heard a couple questions today throughout the presentation. So we'll put those down and bring them back. Specifically, are we measuring on Halloween?
How did that look like with our benchmarks for sales tax, mixed beverage tax, hotel occupancy tax to bring back those benchmark numbers and any additional programming questions for Stoke?
I don't know if you still do that. The city used to publish a report, I think it's monthly or quarterly, on the demographics of the city at different age, you know, ethnicity, income numbers and all that stuff. Is that still out there on the website anywhere?
I can. We are working on that. We're building a more comprehensive version that will be updated annually and also be potentially made into a print version for prospects.
Yeah. Thank you. I think we have Mr. Fox, you have. Yeah. So I failed to mention when we talked about the Halloween energetic committee, it did come up or it was discussed that the parking situation right now, they basically bought other parking lots or negotiated with landowners to allow parking in areas that is normally a paid parking.
I don't think it's going to be an issue because the studies we've done have shown that we have ample parking in the downtown area when construction is not the case.
But it was recommended just to look and see if it would be, if it wouldn't be cost prohibitive to open that up on that month as well, as opposed to just during the construction, if it makes sense. So that was just a comment that to consider.
I don't know if it's that, but related to, I thought about it after you were sitting down, Brittany, but you know, we go to the city, we go to hopefully all over trying to get businesses to come back here to move their business here and all that.
You know, obviously, Jamie, with the economic development partnership, is there a way that maybe, you know, we can help on that side on these these trips where, you know, we have more people, you know, maybe, maybe be, you know, have five people instead of two people or whatever it is.
But just so that we have, you know, kind of our numbers maybe help out. Are you volunteering to go to Vegas?
Definitely Jeremy is the answer. I think we're on our end, just for my department, we're working on streamlining processes and so we've been kind of waiting to get to Jamie's side.
He's been very helpful. He's been helping us with our site visits and so it's just kind of figuring out what the focus is, right?
So, but I definitely think there's trade shows that we can attend. Yeah, I just think there might be a benefit to do it jointly, you know, on that. And obviously we have the budget to to pay, you know, our way or whatever.
But just a recommendation if it works, it works. If not, I understand.
Another additional thing that I'm also going to have to go but FEMA has about 25 people in here from around the country working on the hurricane that's about to impact Louisiana.
You're so low key in this community that I don't think we understand the economic impact they provide, but so that's probably going to go on for the next week.
I think it'd be fascinating to have someone from FEMA give us an overview of kind of what they do now. It's just another unknown, amazing asset.
Good point. Any other items before our board this morning or this afternoon?
If not, it's, what, 1240? You know, we'll call for a motion to adjourn.
Okay, thank you guys