I'm not long for it. So we're recording. So whenever you're ready, I can go ahead. All right, we're going to go ahead and open up. We have a forum.
So we're going to call the meeting to order at 104 PM.
Basically, we're going to go through a working session. Ed, a 26 dash oh, six folder retreat workshop and discussion facilitated by opportunity strategies, LLC, and by staff on priorities regarding the city's economic development challenges, strengths, and goals for the 2526 and 2627 fiscal year.
Estimated presentation discussion time is for our with that I'll hand over to me.
After you record. It's great to see you. As always, I'll be very excited to attend our border Creek. Not for sure when the last board of creeds, but this is a first in the past decade, I believe.
We've had we're in a pivotal point in time and did history and that we can actually set the vision for what we want to be in the next two years is the goal of this retreat, but also the next decade.
Look at our surrounding cities like Frisco Arlington and they've done a great job of setting a big vision for the city and I want us to be the same for who we want to be and the goal for today. I want you to bring big that brought his little life here.
The light that I have in my office. I was reminded to bring big because we're all there's a lot of momentum and didn't and I think our team, as well as chamber and our boards and our city management. We're all doing a great job right now. There's so many opportunities in it, which is why I took the job to begin with.
So now it's time to focus those opportunities and grow for the future. So I'll hand it off to Brian and Dan off now to provide a looking ahead synopsis for 2026, 2027.
Sure. So I just want to say I'm also very excited about doing this. We have not done this as long as I've been on several different boards and everything in the city of Latin America.
Lived and dead. So I do very much appreciate everyone's coming in here and I hope that we can get out of here with a lot of good discussion and direction going forward for the next year.
Maybe skeleton out some of the processes and deliverables that people would like to meet kind of as a next process steps as well. But very excited about this. It's a long time coming and please, please participate.
To be my past for everybody. So that I will hand it over to our facilitator.
Thank you. Good afternoon. Okay. My name is Alicia Cook. My company's opportunity strategies and I'm your facilitator today and tomorrow. Good to see some familiar faces. I think most all of you were here for the economic development training and more training and sales tax training that we did a few months ago.
So I appreciate y'all coming back today and opportunity strategies. We did three things. The first thing is training. So we train city councils, economic development boards, chamber boards and other community boards on governance on community and economic development.
Just so you can make your community as strong as it can be lots of different workshops. Second thing we do is professional facilitation. We facilitate town hall meetings, public hearings, adult and youth leadership programming and team building retreats.
And the third thing we do is strategic planning. So we help chambers, economic development organizations and city councils get their goals on paper, develop strategies to achieve those goals and metrics and timetables and all that good stuff. So
everybody should does a little bit about kind of what all we do. We're going to be doing no training today, but we're going to do a facilitation and strategic planning today and tomorrow. Everyone should have an agenda there in front of you. If you would take a look at the working agenda.
I want to walk through that today and tomorrow. So you kind of know what we're going to be doing in just a moment. I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself and tell me
who you are, what organization you represent, how much your paid job is, if you're paid then somebody will send your paid job today. What's your role is here on the board.
And if you came here today with an expectation, if there's something that you want to make sure I talk about or you want to make sure you talk about or someone else talks about
you came here with any expectation, please tell me what that is and I'll do my best to build your expectation into today and tomorrow's agenda. You came here with no expectation at all. That's completely fine. You don't have to manufacture one. I just want to make sure we capture anything that's important that I might not have about already.
So after we do that, then we're going to talk about your homework. So thank you everybody for doing the homework. We have a lot of content to go through. In fact, there's so much content
on your homework that we it was like 10 or 11 pages. So instead of going through 11 pages of comments today.
I condensed and combined all that into different categories and it's an order of how many people said which things a little bit more
easier to digest before pages instead of 10 or 11. So we'll do that first. And if you remember your homework was the SWOT analysis, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and then the start stop accelerate and then what do you feel like need to be the top goals for this strategic plan. So we'll see what everybody had to say about that.
And then you can count on a restroom technology break every 90 minutes today. So the first break will be around 230 240 somewhere in there.
And then we're going to talk about what of the things on the homework that everybody had things to say about which of those things stand out. What are the things that we need to talk about and talk through in order to start thinking about what the goals should be for the organization.
So two things we for sure want to talk about recruitment and business retention and expansion. Those are two of the city's comprehensive goal comprehensive plan.
Goals for economic development is strengthen local inclusion and fostering growth. So we'll talk about kind of what that means in 2026. I think your comp plan was written in 2019 or 2020. So some things have changed since then.
And then we're going to start getting into the goals. What do the goals need to be for the remainder of this fiscal year and for next fiscal year. So we're really kind of doing like a 19 20 months something like that. You just saying, I think.
So what are the goals that need to move forward. Now, one thing I've learned after doing this for a long time is that there is a magic number to the goals and that magic number is three to seven.
So we're going to leave. If y'all come up with 15 goals, we're going to condense up down till we get down to a real manageable number. So I'd rather you have three goals.
With a lot of strategies underneath those than to have 15 goals moving forward. The next two years. It's just a lot
for staff to manage. It's a lot for Ryan to manage those four chairs. So we want to keep it concise. So hopefully by the end of today, we will have determined what those three to seven goals are. We will adjourn by five o'clock and then we're not adjourned. We will suspend
the meeting till tomorrow and then we'll start back at eight o'clock tomorrow. Tomorrow is on the backside of your agenda.
That's when we will start getting into language strategy development and then we'll get into the metrics and key performance indicators. How are we going to measure the things that y'all said that you want to do. And then we'll be out of here by noon tomorrow. So any questions about what we're going to do today or tomorrow.
A lot of stuff to cover in a real short period of time. So it's pretty, pretty fast paced today. Okay. I like to start every meeting with a set of ground rules. So I would like to put these before you.
See if y'all can agree to these. First of all, we want everyone to participate. You've either been asked to serve on this board.
Asked to work here because your opinion is valuable. So I want everyone to please speak up. This is your plan. I'm facilitating it for you. But your opinions are what's going to build your goals and your strategies.
So please do speak up and participate. Next, out of respect for one another. If you Google and turn your cell phones on silent or vibrate unless of course you manage critical services or you have a
Emergency in your family or your office today, you can feel free to keep it on and just step outside if you need to.
And same thing with laptops. Some of you, you know, have laptops. That's fine, but just
Well, well, when I had so much distraction with that and then sidebar conversations. The microphone is on and is recording every word and we tested it earlier and it will pick up a whisper. So if you whisper to your neighbor, it will be recorded and it'll be broadcast. So just keep in mind, even a whisper.
And it disrupts everybody else anyway. So we'll get a chance for everybody to have to have a say today. I keep an open mind. Y'all like each other pretty well.
For the most part, usually. Okay.
Just keep in mind today, even if there's someone here that you don't know or someone here is not your favorite person. Maybe there's different philosophical beliefs of how economic development should operate.
Or be governed. Maybe there's different religious beliefs or political beliefs. But today we're going to judge them the ideas on the merit of the ideas.
So try to keep an open mind with new ideas. Next day on target. We do have a lot of stuff to cover in eight hours. So we're going to be going really fast paced today and tomorrow.
Get creative. I want you to be willing to do some things that you haven't done before. I heard Brian say it's the first time y'all had a strategic plan. I think Britain had told me that too.
So get creative. What can this organization do? What can this community do that maybe you haven't tried before? Maybe you've seen some other economic development organizations across the state or across the country. And you're like, well, that's interesting. Maybe we could experiment with that or try that. So
Be willing to try some new creative things that Denton's never done before. And think big. Like Brittany said, she's got the dream big. Think big. Sign back there. So I want you to think about what's next for Denton in a big way. Next share the air.
I can't remember from the first meeting who the big talker is, but they usually reveal themselves in the first few minutes. So if you'd like to talk through every board meeting or whatever, just make sure you get everybody else's chance to participate today. And ask questions. This is a great place to ask. Uh oh, I see some grounds.
With me. Is it you? Okay. Nobody was pointing a finger, but usually when there's snickering, I know that somebody's got somebody in mind. I'm sorry. I don't think you're going to prevent anybody.
That's good. Good. So that's the next thing. Please do ask questions. I have been an economic development for 33 years now.
I have worked with economic organizations all over the country and I teach the first day of the basic economic development course, which is the course.
That every economic developer in the United States has to take if they plan to pursue any kind of economic development certification. And this will be this is my 23rd year teaching that so
If I don't know your economic development question and someone else in the room doesn't know it, we know somebody somewhere who does. So use me as a resource today and use my network and people I know
to get questions answered. If you have a question, chances are someone else in the room has it too. You don't want to ask in front of the group. You can come ask me on a break and I'll get you answers. Okay, so
And the most important thing is to have fun. I know that everybody here could have been somewhere else today. But the fact that you care about jobs.
You care about people opportunity community and economic development enough to take a day every two years to do this says a lot about y'all. So I want you to have a good time while you're here. Y'all live with all this.
Okay.
Alright, couple other things before we do introduction. So everybody should have a tent card. If you don't see your tent card here on the table. It is printed outside on that table. So I printed them and then somebody's staff printed them too. So if you don't see it, here is outside.
And then we have some blank ones to
Name tags. Everybody should have a name tag. If you would just your first name is fine on your name tag. If you'll write that with your Sharpie. Everybody has a Sharpie marker here. You'll just write your name on the name tag. That would be great. I'll help me.
I'm really flexible and the way back. You do not need to wait for a break to get more food. They brought snacks for y'all drinks for y'all things outside. Go help yourself. You don't need to wait for a break. You go to the restroom. Just go do that.
Deliverable. So after tomorrow, when we adjourn tomorrow, these walls will be covered with all ideas and your
Framework, your goals that you want to set forward for the next few years. I will take all of that. Get that typed up within 30 business days, which is about six weeks.
Y'all will get a draft of all everything that you said, you'll get a chance to look at it. Make any edits to it.
Get it back to me. And then my graphic designer will put it in your brand kit. So your logo, your color, your fonts, your style, all that stuff. So it'll look like it was in-house produced, but you will get your work plan that we're building today. Then you'll also get a one pager. It's going to have like mission, vision, goals, guiding principles, whatever y'all, you know, adhere by and then what the goals are. So y'all can post those in the chat and then we'll get back to you.
You can post that on your social media or newsletters or places where someone doesn't have to see every single goal and every single strategy and all that.
You'll have that document. So you'll have two deliverables. Restrooms. Has everybody been to this facility before? If you haven't been in this room before, the restrooms are behind this door. So walk like you're going out and the road on the left.
And then the last thing is five cleaners. So everybody should have a couple of five cleaners here. We did not have time today or tomorrow to do team building. That's either reassuring or disappointing to some people.
But we're not going to do any team building. But if you're a fiddler, these are just for you to fiddle with. Studies show that people are more creative when they have something tactical to do. So if you're a fiddler,
these are for you and I have a couple hundred more. So you can use as much as you need to create your works of art there. Okay, so that's all on the housekeeping stuff.
Let's go ahead and do introductions. And if you play with an expectation of me or of someone else in the room, that's fine. Just let me know what that expectation is. Anything that's
on your mind, on your heart, stuck in your crawl, elephant, I don't know about, whatever. Just let me know. So let's do introductions and then remind me how long you've been on the board or involved here. So, Jeremy, we'll start with you.
Jeremy Fikes, I'm the president of Jerry Bank Trust here in town. I've been on the board for almost two years.
Okay. Okay. Great. Thanks. Lucy. Hi, I'm Lucy Dari. I'm the chief financial officer at Medical City Denton. This is my second year. Oh, great. Okay. So were you here for the board training? Yes, we did. Okay. You look familiar to me. Okay, great.
I'm Rick Wilford. I've been on and off the airport floor for most of the last 45 years. So I'm here as the aviation representative. I was also on the school board for nine years. So I have some interesting experience from that perspective. And I'm chair of the downtown economic development board. They're doing a cooler job. Great, good deal. We'll get to see you again. Thanks. All right. Jason.
Jason Thomas on Texas Fomans University. So seven or eight years. I'm the chief financial officer.
Right. Y'all came here with no expectations. Anything on your mind or heart today? Okay. Okay. It looks like it's already built in. It is. All right. Thank you.
I'm Garza Turner, UIT's designee. And I handle corporate, external, and community relations for 50 brand new as a second meeting. And I have no expectations. Okay, great. Thanks.
My name's Vanessa Sparsa. I'm your board secretary and liaison.
Okay. Great. Thank you. Great. Right. Thanks.
And I have a lot of expectations. So we really need guidance from you. We really appreciate your opinion. So that's why we're here today.
So I'm Brian, deputy city attorney. I've been with the city for four years. And I'm the parliamentarian for this board. Okay. My expectation is home and compliant.
Good. All right. Good. You keep us at work. All right. Good to see you again. Thanks. Brian.
Brian Danoff. I've been on the board for a couple of years. I've been on the Peterbilt for 21 years now. I've been for about seven.
Five's meditation or be in love with, say, two or three actionable things that will really tackle in the next year, year and a half.
All right. We can definitely do that. All right. Thank you. Thanks, Leo.
Leo Morales. You see a funny hanging there and on the board for the second year and until the second, I guess.
You know what I mean? Almost two or something like that. Okay.
My expectations are sitting, especially now here that we haven't done this for a while, is to reengage our long, short and
immediate term decisions because I was thinking, like, Brian, two or three actionable items, but I was
more thinking of along the way that when I look back at my children, here's to now, I can say this was the
board that spent some time to make a decision. Okay. So, but that has to go short, long, and
of decisions. Okay. And I don't know that in two half days, well, this will be a comprehensive list,
but we'll kind of combine this. You're re-engaging some of this will fit into this two or three action
while I see it for sure. And you'll, we'll probably have some short minutes. Okay. That is okay.
Thank you, Amy. Any visits by a day job as a zoning and development consultant, as an economic
developer, and I think we talked about that in the last session. Yeah. Hi. Yeah, good to see you. Thanks, Vicki.
Hi, I'm Vicki Bird. I am representing the City Council, representing District 1 here in the
city. I have been on the board, I think this is my third meeting. I'm saving this, this
boiler. I just, I have a lot of expectations. Okay. So, what I would like for this board to do
is keep in mind our, of course, economic development part, our nonprofit part of us as a community,
keep in mind our educational community. We have families, corporations, companies coming in and
they want to know where their children are going to go to school with, school district, as well as the,
as well as the, I don't know why I'm giving a break here in my brain, but economic education
nonprofit, and our city, our administrative part. So, how does all that work together? How is that
coming in play? How will those be coming out, a free city, you know, at the moment? Okay. I'm going to
have some questions. Is there any people out there? Good. They have lots and lots of questions. Okay.
Did you come with the elected official training? Yes, I did. The understanding of the economic
development, I thought you did. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I did. Good to see you. Okay. I couldn't remember,
I still had a bunch since then. So, what were your takeaways from that, that you thought could help
some of your constituents with the questions that they have, just from a standpoint of the overall
picture of economic development here? Yes. I think I'll be meeting with the association that is
obviously living with POTH and I'll be going right over to the people. And there, of course,
their concern is a number of what they can see. And so, I'm one that I want to explain, like,
why are you seeing this? Why are you seeing so many apartments? Why aren't the roads being done
quicker? You know, just those kinds of things. So, you're just giving them that economic development
piece and learning more about it. That's just going to fill in. You have questions about everything.
You have questions about non-profit, homelessness, you know, and all of that. So, do you think that
your constituents and the public understand the relationship between the education of their
children and being tomorrow's workforce? That their children's education, their grandchildren's
education is economic development? Absolutely. You know, we're working on that piece here,
I think, including our universities, are, you know, demanding a lot out of our education. And
then, you know, in the same token, our families are demanding a lot out of our city to bring the
housing in. So, it's just a matter of educating our public that we're all, it all flows together.
You know, what you're, you know, gotta have this piece before this piece is like a puzzle.
And so, to be able to explain that to them in a basic way, trying to keep things on a six-way
level, where we are in the community, you know, overall. And, you know, so maybe, you know, get
them through that. Okay, thank you. All right, we will definitely cover that stuff, I think tomorrow.
So, thanks. Thank you, Leigh. Leigh Ramsey. I'm called Orson Holdings here then. I grew up here
then. And I've been a business owner for each year. I think I've been on the board. That's 46 years.
On this board? Yeah. Okay. And some expectations. I'd like to see, come up with a balanced business
plan. You know, not just industrial, not just, you know, construction, but a balanced business
improvement plan. And also talk about how our homeless is affected, our businesses here then, and recruiting
high-end businesses, the homeless issues that are directly affecting them. Okay. And what's your
perspective on the direct impact of the homeless stuff? Obviously, the visibility of it. Yeah, we
don't want to, I mean, I could go into that, but I think it'd be better if we could have a discussion
about that, I guess. You know, we have companies that come looking to my office to say that,
ladies, they don't want to leave the office after all. And where those businesses locate,
this is located, then where even could we do that? You know, for higher-end officers.
I thought it was a problem. Sorry, sorry. That's good to know, because I didn't realize that was
such a big issue. So, yeah, we'll definitely figure out a way to weave this conversation in.
Because this is really important. The image of your community, whether that's beautification,
trees, sidewalks, whatever, safety and the image impact where people want to bring their employees
and their families to live and work and play and even tourism. So, we'll definitely address that.
Okay. Anything else, Lee? Okay. And I see your tent card says, are you the chair of the
chamber this year? No, I'm just an employee. Okay. I saw it underneath. I was like, okay.
All right, good deal. He turned out, but Jeremy is our chair. Oh, okay. Good deal. All right.
I'm Erin Carney. I'm the president of the Denton Chamber of Commerce. So, my role here is
executive official, really just to support the continued role of our partnership. I've been
on this board the next few weeks since I started in '21. My expectation for today is to support
staff and to best figure out how to continue to expand and hold the administration and our
economic development partnership. All right. Back here. Christina?
Christina Diaz, president and all administrators of the city. And my expectation is to hear some
great input from Ron Holden. Okay. Hear good input today. Okay. Good deal. All right. Thanks,
Erica. Erica Sullivan, economic development programs. Administrator of the city. I use
the Senate administration, development district administration, staff-based to legal finance.
I've been here 18 years. Christina's been here nearly 19 years. So, if you need history,
it's educational knowledge. Okay. All right. Anything specific from a staff standpoint
you want me to talk about or you want anybody else to talk about today? Incentives. Incentives.
Senate policy. We'll be doing an update here pretty soon. The tax abatement expires in the
beginning of May. The what? The tax abatement policy expires in the beginning of May. Okay.
Have y'all already begun crafting a new incentives policy? Okay. Are y'all doing that in-house or
you have somebody helping you? In-house. Okay. Great. Thanks, Erica. Clay? Clay Parker. I'm a
business improvement specialist for the Office of Economic Development. Expectations. It's just a
great time for us to review the past future plan, which parts of that were great for the time of
focusing on COVID and everything, but expectations and trying to see that next step is now that
some of those parts are looked out, David. Okay. Yeah. And that's really what you'll see on the
agenda. Those are the two things that we pulled out in preparation for today was not all the goals,
because some of them were, you know, resilience from COVID, because I think y'all wrote it in 19
or 20. So, but so that, yeah, we are going to focus on those two main things about strengthening
local inclusion and support and fostering growth. Okay. Thanks, Clay. Hello. How are you doing,
Kristen? Kristen Bolido, Main Street Program Manager with the Office of Economic Development.
And my expectation is very similar to Clay's. I think it's great that we have all these
great minds in the room and kind of updating that strategic plan to put us on the right path forward.
Okay. All right. Good deal. That might be that. And Jamie? Jamie Adams, economic development
partnership. Expectations are here to learn and listen and take the knowledge and be able to share
your opinion. Okay. Good deal. Thank you. Sir? Oh, just for the public. Are you the public? Okay.
You have to? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Great. Okay. Great. Thank you. Thanks for being here. All right. Good
deal. So, thank you for the introductions and expectations. I'm going to try to build all of
these again, behind it and tomorrow. We're probably going to be helping.
Okay. So, do y'all want to see the homework you did? Everybody else did?
Is that a resounding yes? Yes. Okay. Actually, I'll take that one back.
I don't know. But I'll, you want to hear a story about that?
So, when Christine Gossett was here, your downtown plan, your downtown, I did her strategic plan in
this exact round. And it was, either the heater went out or the air conditioner went out. We were
all in this room for Main Street Forward. And I can't remember who was the heater, the air
conditioner, but this whole space became uninhabitable. And we had to move all the
tables and chairs and even the markers out here, and the markers out here into the grass.
And we facilitated her board retreat outside because it was, I think it was too cold.
You know, it got so cold that they had to call in.
Yeah. Do we have anybody here that is with building facilities that can control the air back there?
We have someone, we have someone.
All right. Also, on the back of this page, we'll start with five. Is there one, three,
four somewhere else? That's not the right page. Did I hear you? No, no, no. This was already
at my desk unless that isn't. Oh, yes. That's the first page right here. This is page one and two,
and that's page. Yeah. This is one, two, three, four, like SWAT.
And that's the form that you see underneath this, this SWAT. Okay. So the one I just handed you
is the board, an elected official. Everybody that was sent the link that you filled out online
is the sheet I just passed out. The sheet underneath your agenda that looks like this,
that actually has SWAT spelled out, is the staff responses to that. So we're going to go through
board responses first, and then we'll talk about what the professional staff had to say and we'll
see how some of that stuff lines up. Okay. So number one is strengths. I asked you on the link,
what do you think are the strengths of this economic development program?
I'll give you this. I'm not going to read every single bullet point to you, but I will give you
just a minute to read through these and you can see the highest ranked ones were at the top.
Okay, so what stands out to y'all on the strengths?
Definitely several weeks of that one. You're in a perfect location for any kind of work, right?
But the thing to think about, especially from our last session together, is that y'all are not a
desperate community. You don't have to take every single project that comes your way. Y'all are
a prestigious enough place that you can say, "No, we don't want certain things." So proximity is
great, but it also gives you the authority to be able to turn away investments you don't want here.
That would be a better fit somewhere else, right? So what else stands out?
Responsibility of diversity around here has improved. Workforce development.
Really good. Workforce development.
Entrepreneurship and all sorts of other things out of it.
As we talked about last time, economic development, one of the eight pillars is education,
workforce development. So when we can have lots of post-secondary education facilities,
institutions in the area, that just raises the bar of the community. So that's a
definite strength there. What else stands out to y'all?
Obviously, I think the airport is not known by most citizens in this community,
and a lot of elected officials probably don't know about it. A lot of the businesses understand
the importance, but I think the general population is still unaware.
Okay. And what do you think is the reason for that?
It starts with city council, but it won't go down. There was a period of time when the
council took the management of the airport way. Nobody on that board had any expertise whatsoever
in the airport language for four or five years. Now it's starting to turn around.
Okay. So what kinds of things are you doing out of the airport right now?
Can you say turning it around? Like what does that look like?
We're building runways, renewing our runways so it's stronger.
Good.
Working on another tower, trying to expand to the west side.
New master plan for now for the airport or how?
We're doing a master plan every so and so. I think you asked the question that answered
the other question, which is I don't think because you got VFW, you've got to figure
out what we're looking for. I don't think people understand what we're looking for.
Thank you. When you take the airport, you have to figure out the word.
Right.
You don't think about the word.
That's a good question.
And the counties will get a little traction with their attempt to go to commercial service.
Right.
I think they're going to find more problems and find solutions for several years.
Yeah, it's a lot. No plan intended is a hard thing to launch.
So, okay, so yeah, let's talk about some of that.
Well, three people did mention that was one of the greatest strengths.
So that's a good knowledge in this room.
By the way, the Den Airport is a 15-minute airport in the state of Texas.
Really?
I did not know that.
So what was needed in the airport business in the United States?
Right. Who in here knew all that?
Me.
Okay.
Okay. What else strengths stood out to y'all?
I think our existing business is underspoken.
Like Peterbilt, I think it's recognized, it's appreciated how many businesses Peterbilt
brings. If Peterbilt were to leave, they would have waves of them by.
So there's other businesses here the same, but Peterbilt will definitely be anchored.
I mean, so four new businesses that Peterbilt
has actually almost required to leave are concerned miles and maybe get on my skis.
And I keep talking, but I mean, they can get employees like that.
So there's suppliers and markets here.
Like you drive through the industrial park, there's all kinds of businesses out there.
They're on time delivery stuff.
We have only 26 million square foot of other facility outside of the house.
I didn't know that.
That's a big number.
I don't know what percentage of the market and it's a pretty large percentage.
So I think building on that to talk to larger employers
and see how they're considering businesses here.
I think that ties in, sorry.
When Erica was talking about the extended program that ties in,
wasn't that a good proper way for that?
Yes. And one of the important components of a good recruitment program, of course,
is a TIA, a target industry analysis.
Where y'all have one of those?
No.
So one of the important things that kind of build on what you were just saying,
a good target industry analysis shows you as community,
which businesses are most likely to succeed here.
And a lot of that is based on which businesses are already here
and like who are your suppliers already.
And that goes into an input number at a university.
And then we also take into consider, not me, I don't do that work,
but take into consideration water capacity, electric capacity,
workforce development, what kind of skills are we producing
in the universities and the CTE programs and community college, all that stuff.
Takes all that stuff, whips it into an algorithm, spits it out and says,
these are the top five or 10 businesses that are most likely to succeed here in the future.
So in order to do that, somebody has to know
what all those businesses are that are your suppliers for Peterville.
And so the next natural question is, is there a list somewhere that's kept
of all of Brian's supplies?
Do we know who those 1.6 million square feet employers are?
So, and that's an important component because in economic development,
we call that warm leaves, right?
So somebody has to be calling on Brian, sitting down asking him and his HR manager,
what skills do you need for the future and who are your suppliers?
And somebody's got to be getting on an airplane and going to go fly to meet
his suppliers that are currently in Chicago or Ohio or Miami or wherever they are
to grow that number of suppliers that he's already got here.
So just question based on this, did most of those suppliers come here
because of your efforts or someone in your organization
or someone at the city or economic development go get them?
I think in the past, it was kind of us.
I think in the last couple of years, it's been important.
So engine tech in particular is important.
Okay.
I think in the past people have been curious about this.
They've been very humble. They've been able to lean on their suppliers.
We want you close and they've got a huge impact of regular people here.
But we have other business like Cypron.
We have Tetra Pak.
We have all these others that the ideas of what you're doing that aren't as proactive
as Peterbilt, that would be great.
A lot of it depends on the industry and what they do.
Those webs, you know, could we be reaching out to Stoltz
if they're here and what we've been doing with Peterbilt.
A lot of it depends on your rate of costs and everything else.
Yeah.
That's what it looks like.
And what you're making, you know, what is the actual product
depends on, you know, who the suppliers are and where they are.
Okay. Yeah.
So we'll talk some about that because that is one of the most important components
of a really robust VRE program.
So where would y'all say, this is probably going to come up in just a minute,
but where would y'all say you are on VRE business retention and expansion initiatives?
One of the pluses here, I have a story on Channel 4 or 5 yesterday,
that our Texas is experiencing financial shortfalls
because of the decline in the number of students at 12, 15 million dollars.
I'm a little concerned. How can we help them in trying to make sure
that that institution continues to be as enforced as it is?
Right. And it was one particular institution or is it all the UNT?
UNT specific.
That's what I'm supposed to be helping with.
Yes. Yes.
All right. So fair say shrinking enrollment, right?
Then 12 or 12, 12, 12 shrinking homes, what they're trying to do.
Yeah.
You know, combining two departments.
Right. Right. And I'm sure you can speak to that.
I remember you speaking about that a little bit last time too.
Okay. All right. So back to my other question, where are y'all on a VRE?
Would y'all say, yes, we have a strong VRE program.
Everybody knows what they're doing, where they're asking, where it's deposited.
We built dossiers. We know the visitation schedule.
Is all that?
I think that we've recently realigned responsibilities.
Okay.
And the VRE is housed under the Chamber of Commerce now, which I think is a good place
for it. It's the Chamber of Commerce experiences in our community.
But that's a very recent realignment.
So we have, I don't want to repeat things that you already know.
So we have a public-private partnership.
The Chamber of Commerce has the public side.
So underneath the contract, we each have different responsibilities to hopefully help
the city's strategic plan.
And that's the economic partnership within the Chamber different from this partnership,
right?
That's in this room.
This is the partnership.
Okay. Yeah.
I'm sorry. Go ahead.
It's okay. No, that was going to be looked at.
So we do the private side, so we have an invest.
So JB is the employee under the partnership from the Chamber side.
And then Brittany and her team are the employees from the public side.
And so we collaborate to accomplish the contract for service.
But in the last contract renewal, roles were reversed until we handled the retention side
and received just over 100% of the improvement side.
Yes.
And I think from our department's perspective, we have multiple contractors.
So we have a contract with Stoke to support small businesses.
They'll have a cohort being centered.
And then we also – I don't know if I'm going to mention.
But we also do barry as a city because we're the city for a taxpayer-funded organization.
And so if a business calls us, we have to help them, right?
So I think at some point, I've helped every business probably in the room already with
certain aspects.
But we also have Main Street, what is underneath our program.
We have a product for the Texas Main Street Association.
And so when that was brought underneath the city in November of '24, then we also have
a new BRB component, too, because that's part of the Main Street program.
We have a contract that we have to maintain.
And so we do BRB as well.
Okay.
I mean, it takes from, like, from my standpoint, I don't have a bunch of experience, but it
seems like from the city's standpoint, and even the analysis that we do, where we go
through different jobs, capital events and things like that, it seems to be geared more
toward the new businesses.
And maybe we, from the city's standpoint, don't look at retention the same way as they
did, or in any case, probably, but it seems like there should be similar, in the incentive
standpoint, we do the calculation.
There should be a lot of work placed on retaining that business.
Especially, what I just read, 68% of job growth is from...
What we'll do is parent them.
Give you God, and that's the best way to disenfranchise.
What would be the target for the, sorry, what would you be tracking?
I guess when you say it, it makes sense, and I never even thought about it until you said
it, but like a retracking number of jobs created, years that have been in at Benton, and then
coming up with some matrix that allows some type of benefits a period of time, and then
incentivize businesses to grow, expand, and to stay.
Is that kind of where you're going with it, or?
Not usually, sorry.
I don't even know, I'm just letting you know, kind of like the perception of being on the
board, and just where it seems the incentives tend to be geared toward, whenever we provide
those.
But then when I read this, it says on the business retention and expansion, 60 to 80%
of all new jobs and capital investment typically come from within the existing firm.
So if that's the case, then there may be a short-term surge on a new business, but if
we look at more of a longer-term approach, and you know, have a plan for some of the
business retention, then we'll probably have further gains of long-term, and then we aren't
just in a short-term intermediate there, if they were looking at our paper.
I don't know how to tap into that, maybe they'd be in the, have to create something in that,
like a model they need, I would imagine.
I would just say, no one, and just getting involved, because I was more curious than
anything, is there's not a systematic way to like, maybe make sure we're touching points.
Like, I think it's gotten better in the last few years, but like, there's not really a
good systematic way of, hey, we're surveying existing businesses, you plan to grow, you
plan to, what's your challenges, you know, what, do those kind of things.
Maybe that's maybe a way to reach out, or we do a lot of things informally, like leadership
and then maybe a lot of economic development days, but there's not really a systemic, like,
same state of the union, state of the business, and then you might have an insight, you might
get insights more from larger employers, say in the next two to three years, do you see
for growing, or do you see what's your challenges, whatever?
Right, and we call that predictive data.
So what you're describing is a serious, robust VRE program, where all that stuff is laid
out, it's all systematic, where there's a visitation schedule, there's, we know who's
visiting which businesses when, there's a dossier built, the staff can go in and see
what your last conversation was with a business owner that was visited, and to answer your
question, that right there, what he's talking about, is where an organization or a city
determines who gets which incentives, so the only way that we can figure out if an existing
industry is interested in expanding or is being courted by another state, coming in
here trying to steal your business to go to another state, that's what we base the retention
incentive policy on, so every good economy, every good community needs a refinement incentive
policy, a retention incentive policy, and expansion incentive policy, so, and those
are determined by what Brian was just describing, a program that says we can go in and see,
but the only way that a business owner is going to tell us if they're being courted
by Louisiana, or Oklahoma, or New Mexico, or wherever, is that we've already built a
good relationship with them, and that relationship is fostered in person and documented inside
a dossier, so. If I may, we used to have that, Christina and Erica have been here a little
bit, so they may know, we used to have a shared platform in HubSpot, or everything, I don't
believe that exists anymore, but that did exist at one point in time, where if I were to go,
or Christina were to go, we collaboratively shared and were able to update, so we was
business owner X, and we was considering moving, but I had a better relationship with him,
I could go meet with him and still collaboratively share, so it broke down any of that barrier
between two organizations, but it doesn't matter who's running the organization, or
who's bringing credit in, do we get to keep the business, how do we keep them, what can
we do to keep them, do we get to recruit the business, what are we going to recruit them,
how do we get them here, doesn't matter who wins the trophy between the two organizations,
it doesn't matter, we had that, Christina, I don't mean to keep referencing you in the
back, but you had to be here the longest, yes, definitely, you definitely know.
So what happened, what happened, y'all think we're getting off track, but this is the whole
purpose of this part, is to start picking apart some ideas here, so why did that go away, why
is there not a central hub that we gather all that data anymore? I do not know the answer.
When I came online, I realized that HubSpot was kind of out of date, so I've used multiple CRM
and economic development, and it wasn't the most robust system, so we wanted to update it,
but we also realized that some of the projects that we're working on as a city, we can't share
with our outside partners, so some of that's confidential that we can't share with outside
contractors, and so that's why we have our own system. I think, I need to look at the
work plan, that we may have tasked the Chamber of creating their own CRM to start tracking VRE
business, I don't have to look at a contract again, but I think we did try to accommodate
the change. Can the, can a contract be written where there's an NDA, where
that's not, they have access to it, but they can't disclose it? I think it'll be difficult,
because it would be hard for the city, who's actually saying what, right, like how can we
actually track if information is being shared, so that would be a little bit difficult. Well,
and a lot of times, it's not even the city's, city doesn't have the authority to make that call,
it's usually the business that's being visited, that makes y'all sign it, makes somebody sign an
NDA, that says, you know, I'm fixing to lay off 100 people back in my home state, and that can't,
that can't be called acknowledged, so. Well, when I, I work at a bank, we had a process,
there's like the core system that we use, so like Lee had an account with me, it would be our core
system, which to Jack Henry, who's our processor, they have access to that in the agreement, you
know, they can't disclose Lee's account information that they, I mean, like anybody, right, I mean,
it's just kind of part of doing business, right? Yeah. I can give you the history of why,
because we, Jill's not here, but Jill and I worked with the past city manager, whenever there was,
hopefully you guys were here, it was, there was very much a silo between the health and
development, and it was not a good situation, so Jill and I, who believe, put the city manager in
there, and said, okay, we got to get some roles here, because we're running two sites, you know,
we need to get this work done on the same page, and ever since then, I mean, there's been a little
pushback here and there, just being real, but it's a much better process, and I think we're on our
second in front of the city manager since we did that, that's been years ago, but, you know, and
then it, the question always comes up, okay, you got to do business coming in, and they don't want
anybody to know who they are, city can't sign the NDA, because it's all public record, right? I could
document your request, I didn't get any of that. There's some protected under-executive sessions,
yeah. It's very, so that gave some opportunities for us to talk to some of these businesses,
by either they were going to lose, for your exact reason, people wanted, so that's the reason we
brought this together and said, okay, let's work as a team, rather than being sent to silence,
and I still, to this day, believe that's the best scenario, is how we're working through that.
How we communicate that, I mean, we can get the technical details of that, right,
but I think the important thing is, as we're aware, is that who cares who gets the trophy,
how do we get it finished? All right, that's what we can. And I think what, indicating in here too,
is like, there's not a lot of understanding of what that delineation is. Well, it is, it's very
clear, we have documents and worksheets, and it's very, very clear on whose responsibility is at what,
because I know they work very hard on that, and so I don't think that's a problem.
Some people in the room think it is, well, we'll get to that in a minute, but if it is crystal clear,
maybe it's just that we need to fully, you know, expand on what they... I think it is crystal clear,
anybody who reads the document, right, and I think both of them know very well,
you know, pretty clear, and work, I believe, work together well on that. So, I mean, we can produce,
I think those documents are approved by city council. Yeah, I mean, so the contract that
both organizations have together should be in everybody's board notebooks. Yeah.
I will say for the NDAs, the city can, we have an NDA template that we send to businesses,
and so we don't have any issues with those businesses, and they've already signed it.
Some of them are all, I think, panel rated as well, and so it hasn't been an issue thus far,
and we've had the most capital investment injection over the past two years, versus over
the past, like, since Amy. Amy was over economic 10 years ago, so I think that's when actually they
had the most activity, so it hasn't been an issue for city managing NDAs. Well, and so I was talking
about the reverse. I was talking about when the city, when the company requires you to sign an NDA.
Like, we will tell you who we are, but you have to sign first, and you have to agree to not tell
anybody else. That's the flip side of that, but it goes both ways, so yeah, I mean, as long as
there's some process in place for that, then that's what's most important. Kind of switching ears
going back to that business position. Yeah. So, like, I don't know how to say this, but I mean,
I've been thinking about 15 minutes trying to figure out a way to say it, but, so obviously,
Peterville has been very successful in getting suppliers and everything else to the area.
From a kind of a geographical concentration, it seems like business retention and working with
other companies in the area to help do what they have done to the area would help balance that mix
so that as a city, we don't have a huge concentration risk of basically one company and all of their
suppliers. Now, I say that, and I was hesitant to say it, because I'm not, I certainly don't believe
that we need to hit the brakes or anything on Peterville's side. I'm just saying we need to hit
the gas on the other side, and that alone, from a risk standpoint, should be the best reason to hit
the gas on economic development in order to balance that out. If, you know, 1.4 million square feet
could be affected by one industry, you know, can we get other industry and focus on other industry
as well to help balance that? Okay, it's not that, it may be an economic issue in Peterville,
they aren't selling as many trucks, right? So, it's not a thing that Peterville's going to ever do
that. It may be a business decision. They don't have a choice to do that, right? They say, "Hey,
our truck count's gone down." So, to crew... Yeah, economic factors that force a company's data that
could impact the community. That's right. And, Peterville should not be penalized because of
the success that they've had, and the fact that they've promoted Denton for 55 years. Yeah.
A lot of companies don't do what they did. A lot of companies are just here,
and then we'll have to figure out who their suppliers are and where they're located. And, technically,
truthfully, that's the job of the economic developer. The economic developer's job is to
go sit in Brian's office and say, "Who are your suppliers? Where are they? What are they supplying
you with?" And, that person taking the initiative. But, the fact that they did it on their own
is a coup. I mean, it's coup coup for y'all. But, like, you can't go around teaching every employer
how to do that, or even how to do that well, like they have. And, that's why you have economic
development, because the paid professional is the person that's supposed to be building those
relationships, making those calls, flying out to talk to his suppliers wherever they are. And, so,
I don't know if that falls under recruitment, or BRE, or whatever, but here's somebody in this
organization that should be doing all of those visits and all of those outreach. Right.
And, to diversify the things, the important things. I mean, that way there is a downturn in
one sector. It doesn't affect the entire town. So, I think that that should be a huge point in
economic incentives. Uh-huh. Yeah, for sure. And, that's what incentives are based on. It's like,
what are our values here? What are we targeting? Who are we going after? What do we need here to
make our community more balanced? And, that's what we put incentives behind for recruitment.
Now, retention, it may look different. Your incentives for retention, but either way,
you need it. Y'all said you're working on incentive policies, right? Erika,
you need three separate sections of that. And, so, you don't always pull out the retention one,
right? That's actually good for business. That's right. For us, for example, you get a bunch of
automotive companies in here. We're going to be just competing for each other's workforce all
the time. That's right. That's not good either, right? It's not good. It's like, you got to have
that diversity. So, there's a totally different economy, like medical or whatever, right? That's
growing while we're trying for here, right? And, a TIA will show you that. A TIA, with a contract
with the university and a consultant that does that, they can say, "Enough of that. We don't want
any more of that." Because, now, we're getting into the territory that hurts Peterbilt. So, now,
we need to go after something else. So, that's what a good strong TIA shows you is what the
breaking point of all that is. This is exactly what I'm saying about this business. That's it.
So, that we have an ecosystem of both of us. Right. And, that keeps our young people here, right?
Yeah. I mean, I think that the city's reliance on the developer to bring utilities in certain
areas. And, that's what I kind of asked. If there was a way we had kind of an overlay or
number one, where the city council wanted to develop a big. And then, where they want the
developments to be is kind of north of way, from my standpoint, when it comes to this type of product.
And, then, with the utilities overlay on that, they're not available. So, they're kind of at
least at this point. So, they're just kind of in interest there. And, the developers are sure that,
yeah, can't really, a business can't sum up that cost and the city's not willing to pay for it yet.
So, that's the catch. Are y'all operating off of a future land use map right now? Does the city have
a good future land use map? The 2040 plan already laid out there. And, I was going to try to squeeze
my little point of view in here because it was going to lead to number five, committed or dedicated
to staff, a dedicated staff. It's the idealism of someone coming in here to the city. They're
going to be expecting certain things. And, it does gyrate with business. Businesses want to know
what the school district is like and where are the parks located and where we're going to live.
So, the land use map is very important to see out to 2040 at least. We still have that plan
that things change. But, it is definitely a lot of work. And, that's where the infrastructure should,
and you know, in an ideal situation, once council adopts the top plan, the 2040 comprehensive plan,
and they say this is where we're going to build our infrastructure. We're going to build water,
sewer, electric, whatever. They're going to build their utilities based on that land use map.
And, so that growth should be following that map that's already there. So, you said 85, 15 inches?
No, council does have to put the infrastructure in because, you know, we're in a competitive
situation where these, I mean, I have to tell y'all, y'all are on this board. Like,
when businesses come here and they're ready to locate here, they're not saying I need a building
in six months or say I need a building six months ago. And, so if we don't have a site that's site
ready, that has infrastructure on it, that's shovel ready, then y'all don't have an economic
development program. Well, I'll add something, but this is what I do every day. So, I would say in the
last, Scott McDonald left, but while Scott McDonald here is our planning director for engineering,
the city has taken a very different step over the last 24 months on a huge water infrastructure
project that's going on, a sewer project that's going on out west of town. So, we have, it's not,
you know, advertised all over because it takes time, engineering time, and easement acquisitions,
and all these things. So, there are some projects that the city is doing to enhance that. I think
we've kind of moved into the weaknesses here. I think we flipped over a little bit. But, to what
Jeremy was saying, we're looking at a pilot industry and we said, okay, we want a financial
corporation here, a whatever, Wells Fargo or Schwab. I think we do have to identify some of those
sites. It's like, where would we have a spot for that? But right now, Schwab came again and said,
hey, you're going to build a 200,000 foot office soon. I know every side of this town, and it's
pretty hard to find. And that goes back to the conversation about safety, and where do we put
those sites? How do we access them? So, I think, you know, identifying some of those locations for
those types of tenants and making sure we're ready for those, to Jeremy's point of view, transport.
Yeah, and then, how are y'all on, you know, class A office space availability? Like, a ton of it?
Zero? Yeah. Okay, that's very common right now. Well, it's back to this own situation of where to
put them, where do they do, you know, you know, our wait, our offices is on January 8th, and all the
way out there, we have all these issues. Okay. And so, it's, where would we put them? Schwab
came to me right now and said, we want to put the campus or Google, I'd be going. All right,
that's fair. I actually want to capture that, that available sites are not just industrial,
but commercial too. Erica? I was just saying that the location goes along right now,
with Opportunity Zones, because they're coming out with new maps. We have to submit some sites
this summer. So, we have a couple of sites we've identified that have infrastructure issues. So,
that'd be another thing that would be good to discuss. All right, the Opportunity Zones stuff.
Okay. All right. So, kind of dig a little bit deeper into the weaknesses here. So, the first
thing that came up, at least five of you said, our greatest weakness is
siloed city departments and lack of interdepartmental collaboration. So, this isn't
with partners, this is inside the city. So, what is, what is this siloed city departments here?
I'll speak to that. I think you asked about both Jeremy and Lee, and the, you know, economic
development may well have one vision, and planning has an event, and engineering has a vision,
and none of them are really well coordinated on, when the food's on the ground, maybe from the
council level, it looks coordinate, but when I'm actually in the, in the weeds trying to get a
project through the whole process, you know, we identify, okay, well, we almost had sewer capacity
in our industrial area, and then we lost it, because there was a lack of vision in the engineering
project about how important having sugar costs to that, to future economic development opportunities,
it was essentially sold off for the price of the infrastructure itself, and left us with no
capacity in that area for several years of the future. And I even said it to somebody in engineering, and it's like, it feels like I don't talk after a long time, and 10 years, and nobody talks about it, and I don't talk about it.
Oh, he is. Okay, so that's a structural, internal operations issue. So, is the city manager here today?
Okay, so that's a, that's something that has to come from the city manager. The city manager has to say,
you're all going to get in our room together, you're all going to make sure we're all focused on jobs
and opportunities for our children and grandchildren, and that includes economic development, that includes
partnership, that includes planning, that includes development services, because engineering and the
council has to be, you know, the council has to make sure that that's, we want collaboration in working
together, and then that message goes from council to the city manager, and it's that person's job to make
sure that all this happens. So, is this the whole first city manager to be in meeting like this?
Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes. The first city manager, she's a city manager, so we're at economic development, she tries to take it as she can, I'll say,
but they, so from our perspective too, is we have felt the same from our perspective, and it's been an
uphill battle. However, we have implemented new processes where we're actually helping our others
understand economic development, because I think since the city didn't manage recruitment, the city
directors, they didn't understand what economic development was, so even, I think, city council were a
little bit disadvantaged, they weren't seeing the projects up front, so when we take our incentive
proposals to do their whole process, we first stop at city council during closed session, and we let
them know what's coming up their way. Then it goes to EDHB, then it goes back to city council, but I think
that has actually, sometimes with the way the partnership was in the past, it's hindered
the other city departments knowing what economic development is, and now they're using it in their
terminology, they're following us now. It's actually kind of overwhelming, it's great, I'm happy, right,
but they're sending us leads, they're putting two and two together, so it's improving slowly,
it's still up for battle, trust me, if you don't want to take an opportunity, I'll be all about it,
so you have to listen to me, but it's getting better, but we felt it too, it's one of those years.
Okay, and so in order for it to get from not great to better to ideal situation, there has to be a
room where all of y'all get together, the development services team, the planner, the engineer,
everybody has to get together, and it means something different, it's no offense to you
for anything, but it means more when they hear from their boss, the ACM, or the city manager
that says we're all on this together, and your performance, department officer, your performance,
building inspector, code enforcement, planner, engineer, your performance at this city is going
to be based on how well you help these projects move through, so y'all remember last time when
we did the training, we talked about frictionless, about removing friction, and so if this is a
friction here, somebody's got to boil this machine to where it functions right, and whether that's
council saying we want this to happen, or city manager saying we want this to happen, or ACM,
or whatever, this is what your reputation is, y'all, your reputation's not what some investor
tells you it is, it's what some investor from the outside says, and you remember my story about how
when these developers and builders leave and speak to this, you go to a sign and build conference,
what do y'all talk about? So you can get things moving the quickest, and which are the slowest,
right, they don't talk about least group, they don't talk about the okay communities, they talk
about the communities that they can't get a single project to go through no matter what, and I'm not
taking any more business there because they don't handle me with with kid gloves, and then they sit
around and talk about the places that are so great to do business that everybody took care of me,
the process was smooth, the permit process was easy, somebody answered all my questions,
the checklist stayed the same, the whole project through, and then they want to do more business
there, so that's an internal expectation that has to happen, so wherever there's friction,
we got to pull out the oil machine here. Another major surprise to me after I got on this board,
the airport had started a new master plan, and I don't think they'd ever talked to planning until
I suggested that they come make a presentation to this board, and it was like, you know, duh,
and even when he was there, I'm not sure they followed through at the same level, but my god,
when they started a master plan now, we talked to the planning department to see what the airport
needs to support. I need to defend staff a little bit here because our council has put
on the view of economic development, like multiple times over the last 20 years,
probably more times than the economics council, so I think that has crushed services and staff
a lot of times, and we've had a lot of staff turn over because they're headed down the path,
doing a good job, counseling the blips, and then all of a sudden they don't get in different direction,
right, so I've been on many boards rewrapping our codes and all these things over the 20 years,
and so I think that that's something that our city manager has to try to filter. I think that
maybe while we've had some city manager turn over over the years, and that takes a little bit out of
some of staff's hands because now they're just getting different correction under
any of these things. So I don't know the solution for that, and I don't think we're going to come
up with that solution, but we can identify it as a hindrance to say, okay, how do we manage that,
right, because that's just something. From a operations, from a structure standpoint,
the comp plan is the boss, not the council, not the city manager. The comp plan should be so strong
that the public helps write it, they help design the future ladies map, everybody participates in
the process, developers look at it and say, yes, this makes sense, and then city council adopts
the plan. That's the vision for Denton, and you shouldn't be able to get elected if you don't
believe in that vision. That the people wrote, the people wrote the comp plan, and so that should be
the vision, and then everything else should fall for that. The council gets elected because they
believe in that vision, the city manager gets tired because they believe in that vision,
the economic development plan comes from that, the downtown plan comes from that,
the land use map, all the pieces of the pie, the main street, downtown, all pieces come from
a good strong comp plan. Now, I don't know if that's, you know, the way it's operated,
but that's the way it's supposed to operate. That's why they call so much,
because it's such a big, strong robots of planning. So, I don't know if that's...
I think that's a good speech that everybody needs to know.
When communities have a really strong vision for the future, and they say this is what we want to
be, and this is what we want for our children and grandchildren, you can't get elected here unless
you believe in that. Unless you believe in that vision. So, anyway, that's...
Because you're talking about a line one person agreement, we're going to agree until we have
the majority of the direction, oh, we have a line. When we create a vision that we have a line,
most of the issues that I see on that piece of paper is, they were all working with different
calendars. I'm working with 2027 deadlines, you're working with 2029 development, and the
engineer has to get it done in 2026. So, and I know it's not silly to simplify it that much, but
that focus has not been expanded for the engineering as to what their impact is, and why they need to
think greater than being asked. And it goes back to the vision leadership, I don't know what you've
said, but they'll have the good calendars. And I think that's where this is the number one weakness.
People in this room with us, the number one weakness is this silos and apartments.
So, it sounds like y'all made some progress, but it sounds like that's still the number one weakness
here. And number two goes right with it, by the way. They do go together, and I think that
while we can't solve that problem that you've got written up there, that's outside of our purview.
I think we have the opportunity to put a tool in place that helps circumvent that problem.
For example, incident policy that helps create an infrastructure that's been removed from our
incident policy and still developing them, but it may not be constructed. And there's no point
system that they could think of. Oh, wow. We're forcing us to accept all of it, but we're the
ones that are helping write up our public plan. And if they're not feeling like people are hearing
and understanding them and their needs, their basic needs, then it's very hard to get things
pushed through because we do have that public input, the strong public input system here.
And so, if they're not feeling comfortable with it, of course, that's going to pressure the council.
You don't know if it's behind these to make sure that we are
in the most satisfied. And sometimes we don't do a good job of explaining what economic development
is all about, right? I mean, I could walk down the street and ask 10 different people and they
wouldn't know what that meant. But they do understand that they want their children and
grandchildren to have opportunity. They do understand that they don't wish their family
all moved away because their only opportunities were away. And so when you package it like that,
like what everything we're doing here today and tomorrow is so that our children and grandchildren
have opportunities in not in Florida or Oklahoma, they have them here. And when we want our families
to be near us, we have to find ways for workforce and education to succeed for that pipeline.
So sometimes we just don't do a good job of explaining that to families that this is what
your taxpayer dollars are going for us to help your children and grandchildren have opportunities.
Now, if you don't like your family and you want all your kids to move away,
then be anti-development. That's okay. But, you know, so that process. Okay. So one and two kind
of go together like a funding mechanism. So if you don't have a sales tax perforation,
infrastructure goes back with one and two kind of there to strategic alignments short term versus
long term goals. So I guess that kind of goes back to getting all this aligned. And Amy,
to kind of speak to what you were saying, this group, you're right, this group doesn't really
have the authority to mandate this as a group, but this group can say, hey, look, we're hindered
because this thing isn't working right. And so what if we host a quarterly round table and we
invite all these people, city manager, council, engineering, whoever, development services,
think we'll get all these people in one room once a quarter and say, let's all talk about what your
role is in the vision. And when we cast a vision and we start crafting a vision and casting the
vision, it's real hard for this to go sideways when they're all in the same room to go. So
y'all, I can dictate this, but you can say, uh, this partnership is going to host the first
quarterly meeting. And at the end of that meeting, you say, who's going to host the next one engineering
or city manager's office or planner or whatever, and just getting all the players at the table.
Maybe that's one thing y'all can control on him for last year. So pretty helpful.
I wouldn't have an issues like that. We hear about it in the community to let her talk to the other
departments. And then there's a situation, I guess a little less than a year ago where it had been
going through plenty of development for 13 months. And then they came back and said, they've been
having water and already gotten the rights from x-optical one and 380 and everything improved.
Then they switched gears, the values of kind of a change in home and, uh, pretty helpful in that.
And that's when it first came up to like, they need to be part of the economic development meeting.
This is all your sales team. Like when we say your economic development sales team, we're talking
about all these players, plus the chamber, plus the school superintendent, plus the CTE director,
plus all the university representatives. That's the sales team. And all those people have to be
on the same page about what we're doing here. And that's where you can uncover duplications,
gaps, misunderstandings, miscommunication, all that gets smoother when you do a quarterly,
you know, like we're in a development meeting, but just a bigger group than at four.
Kind of skipped all three, but with the recent election we just had, and there were some
constitutional sentiments talking about funding and things like that, maybe we need to go back
and look at funding, making miscommunication and see if there are changes that need to be made.
Okay. Like what?
I know that water tax goes against cut in property tax because it was pretty high back in the day,
and it's still hot. I'm not saying that, but maybe we need to have a tax corporation or
catalyst fund or something like that. Okay. So y'all are maxed out, right?
So in order for y'all to float the idea of having a sales tax corporation, you would have to
pull back a rebate, a tax rebate, or you'd have to pull back DARC or what?
Yeah, there was a vote back in like 1996, I think. So the vote failed for the economic development
sales tax. It goes to DCTA, debt and county transportation, which is another form of economic
development. So it would have to come back. It would have to go to a vote again.
Okay. We do have a council member that sits on the DCTA.
Okay. And we do have a catalyst fund that we created in '24 with the budget.
And then we were talking about infrastructure. We do have water and wastewater plan line funds,
two million dollars that swirled into the catalyst fund. Can I address any of these comments?
So not that we don't need to be even more robust, but you were here when we used a different way,
though. Yeah, it's been rolled into the catalyst fund. That's good, too.
Good deal. Okay. So, yeah, we can talk about exploring some more of that, too.
Okay. Anything else standing out in weaknesses to y'all? Some of the stuff I already mentioned here,
BRNA. You're going to say something? Oh, anything else standing out to y'all?
Well, I think right now we're getting ready to have our
next mayor, mayoral, local, municipal voting coming up in May. So I think all of us are
very interested to see how that's going to turn out because there's some significant swings in
diversity of thoughts among some of the, you know, people that are running. So I want us to
keep that in mind as well. We're going to have to listen to what they're saying. Usually when people
are speaking, they're going to try to, you know, run that into position. So, you know, as we've used
a lot of surveying purge, everyone here will listen, at least to the mayoral contest to see
how they are. If they're aligned with the people's vision. Right. All right. That's fair. And another
thing is y'all haven't updated the cop plan since 2020, right? I know I developed a strategic plan.
Yeah, but the comp plan is updated, I think 2020 sounds about right. 2020, comp plan? 2020.
We did a whole new one, the 2030 and then the update. But I mean, you did it in 2020 for 20,
that's the 2020 plan. Okay, so that's pretty, that's still pretty recent. I mean, there's
probably some shifts since COVID in there, but it's probably still at least 80, 90% for all in.
Okay. Public awareness issues. I think that goes back to what y'all were saying over here,
like the public just doesn't really know what all we do and how it works and all that stuff.
Watch it. Okay. Well, that's always pretty solid. Yeah. Yeah, we can. Yeah. Yeah,
two 30. You're right on the dot. Okay. You're a good time watcher. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go
ahead and take a 10 minute break. 10 minutes is enough for y'all. Okay. There's a line out of
that and we'll take longer, but 10 minutes and we'll hook up with number three opportunities.
Do I have a recess for everybody? Yeah. Yeah. All right. We're going to take a 10 minute
recess. So we can't discuss business during that recess, right? That is correct. All right.
So we'll read, we'll read it can be a two 40. All of these back to work. Thank you.
Right. Let's move into number three, greatest opportunities
that you feel like are facing this program, I think economic development here,
before four mentions, four different people said the greatest
potential opportunity is the expansion of the terms. So who wants to speak to that?
I want to share that I can guarantee you with Amy, there's four different people.
Amy has been speaking about creating another industrial part or potentially expanding the
west part. We're creating another tours for a separate industrial park. And so I do think
that's important. I think if we're running out of heavy industrial land, could we focus on
like science part, could we focus on a different industry? That'd be cool too. But I think that's
what Amy just wanted you to complete. Yeah, because we have 350 acres, I think it'd be perfect.
It's industrial that we're developing right now. But I think Amy's point is let's find the spots
that the utility expansions as she's speaking earlier, she'll be back, she'll have the big.
But I think the tours helps with utility expansion. And that's one of the main reasons
she's pushing for that because there isn't a lot of opportunity for that unless the city just funds
it. But in those areas, sometimes it's easier to have a joint venture.
Right. So what's the right word for exploration, science? Yeah, there's science. I can't tell you
whether it would be. But it's just getting it done because some of them are multiple landowners.
So it may be an EDC thing, taking the lead and saying we really want to turn this here. We want
to drive development in this area instead of maybe waiting for developers just to come and say,
like, again, that goes back to, you know, engineers got to be involved, you know, but
Okay, yeah, well, we'll circle back to that. Okay. And then anybody else can comment forward,
you mentioned that. So I think one thing just kind of on that is that we did have our first would be
last meeting. It's really kind of the story of what that does. That last package version is very
successful. You can look at all the charts, you look at the ROI, the impact in that area,
need to be, we need to be informing people and educating people exactly what that means,
what that means. And that helps city council, what else? Everybody say, well, what I'm doing,
this is why it's not just giving people money or whatever. And most of the time,
it's developer funded in the first. So I think a lot of people don't understand that. Yeah.
And I think to transport this, we've done some 380 agreements with Johnson Tours, and a lot of them
have been wildly successful. But the people who put those in place are no longer in the EDC or
city manager or whoever. So I think it's important to go back and celebrate those lands. Yeah.
There used to be a slide that Westpac heard, it said all this land got 96 dollars in tax revenue.
Wow. That's a powerful placard to have out, you know.
There's just how do you, how do you do that? How do you do a very simple program like that
where it's very package and memorable? Well, like when we first, the city came to us and said,
hey, we need industrial space. So we went for the 400,000 feet building that we got a 380
agreement and counted the city. And the problem was, investors I saw didn't believe in market
rates, right? Once we went out and approved market rates, it was like, oh my God, they got
by 50 a foot for that industrial people. All of a sudden, the Western Boulevard starts blowing up
because, you know, rents got bulged. Right. And, but that was because the city came to us and said,
hey, we need this, but we want to do the taxing. So we were scared to death because rents were 350.
Yeah. Right. And the old industrial. Like they're just going to make you. Yeah. I mean,
we're signing personal guarantees with Jeremy, he's going to take my car.
And I think we got to celebrate these things when they work. I think if you look with that
and the 380 agreements that we've done and said, look what this all produced.
It used to be that we had people go talk often with some rotary lines and all the service clubs
to tell them what was going on in various places. There's been one single program about the airport
because I insisted on other roads. So we have about 18 months ago, but we're not taking advantage of
the opportunity to sell to the business people and we're in those clubs. What does this mean?
Did the city develop the airport that 15 years ago, that one area, they put the money up
and then it developed out and it became a success. It built out. In 1982, they put in
six or seven taxiways and we went into a recession right about then and it took six or seven years,
but with some incentives and things like that, it's fully developed and been producing lots
of money for years. There was a specific taxiway they added or a road they added,
like where they did the teenagers and all that. They did that with the public and then they build
up. Yeah, I think I wrote that down Rick. I think that's a really good point is that y'all do have
some great stories to tell like Lee's talking about. Who's going to do the storytelling? Well,
it can be this group right here, can do the storytelling at Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions Club,
Garden Club, wherever, but also at a chamber, your day well or your annual meeting or whatever,
somebody telling the past success stories of the city there, Main Street meetings,
Main Street events, state of the city, when the city manager and the mayor do their state of the
city, that should be a story that's told, is written in their script. So I think there's a
lot of different places to tell that and whatever else we can think of too, but I think you made a
good point there. Okay, also we've got Logistics Supply Chain Center of Excellence leveraging
Peterbilt, UMC, and Hereford. So what is that? Well, I'm going to tell you, I'm excited about
what Texas is doing and the logistics and the change of some of the policies that
Kim has talked to us about, but there again, I think that word needs to come out to others,
because while we can be excited, we've got the community excited about what's going on out there,
they're doing fantastic things for this community. Is this Center of Excellence already in place,
or is this just an idea that's a possibility? So UMC's Logistics Department is number three
in the country, no one has that. And so of course it's the logistics hub, so I'm so sorry,
I'll save that seat for you. So one of our goals is to start being kind of the logistics hub
for the DFW area with corporate partners, and taking that lead, and on a national level,
it's bringing in people to be a part of this. And you are number three in the nation. Number
three in the nation. Yes, I'm number three. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean that's a story that has to be
told on a national stage, right? Yeah. Okay, so we've got, so flip the page over, we've got
P3Ds for creative incentives. Is this somebody saying we need another P3, or you're saying we
need this P3Ds to come up with its creative incentives? There wasn't a lot of explanation.
Okay, what else stands out to y'all now? After you, Graham, is there a question already?
I don't see it all here, just maybe it's just that maybe the different industry,
and you talk a lot about logistics, because we're at, you know, the 35-hour attention,
we should receive over where we're at, but the UNTC is a lot, but the other pieces, I just, you
know, there's a lot of medical and other things that are coming, and those are good industries,
and everyone gets older, lives longer, and it's totally not, it's totally separate, so it's not
going to cannibalize on something you already have, right? It's a different piece. And I imagine,
I mean, I'm no statistician or data person, but I imagine if y'all were to go get a TIA right now,
that would be in your top five, just because of the population density, this whole DFW area,
and, you know, aging population and certain pockets. It does tie to logistics, because
a lot of the supply chain from medical, they can get in and out of here between here and Alliance,
and very quickly, so they're a big opportunity. It's the number one drive-in, just to finish your
strap plan, and it's the number one. It's the medical. I'm not a good surprise. Has anybody
been down to the Valley lately? It's crazy. Unbelievable. The medical facility, down in
McAllen and Barr and Edinburgh, they are becoming the next Houston. They have any specialty you can
imagine. People are flying in from all over the world to get world-class treatments in the Valley
of Texas. I mean, people that would normally be going to, like, MD Anderson and some other places,
so I think there's a way we ought to carve out some of that up here, not just for medical
treatments, but also the medical, industrial, medical industries, that's fine, to say.
So Friday afternoon, somebody works in Texas. They've removed all about $30, $90 from the fan
work that's going on here for some reason. I don't know what it was.
They've removed the funding for a lot of the projects that were planned,
which kind of impact the airport, because we made a road on the west side, and so something's going
on in Texas that will kind of impact us building roads in the short term, maybe not the long term,
but he said they've removed all of that. Okay, interesting. Okay, kind of awful bit of
opportunities. Okay, so what else? So here we go, streamline permitting again. That's an opportunity
for us to get, for the city to get better with streamline permitting, fast-track development
services, all of that. What else stands out to you all on this?
So one more time, Kim, describing last session, when were we all together? November, October,
November? November. I remember you talking about this number nine. Can you speak to that again? So
I don't remember the specifics, but I remember you talked about. UNT, we've actually designed
approval for this, and what we want to do corporate concierge program is it'll be public and like
released on June 1st, and it will be everything that we're talking about, a lifelong service to
do the corporations, help our city, our county, but also help our corporations like for workforce
needs that we need that the president does not want to just grow, just to build. We want, we think
the only way to sustain us is to beat industry demands. So that's our focus. It will be very
complicated, but I'll have a team under me that will help with this to make sure that, you know,
that we toward people that we, you know, have relationships with our people across it.
Okay, and so how, in y'all's plan to roll out, how does that enter, how does that entity interact
with all these other, with the city, the ADP, the chamber, like what? You're my new best friend,
I feel like I'm always talking to you. You're already here, you are the catalyst. I feel like
always talking, yes. You're whispering, swinging out things in your ear. But yeah, I mean, we all
have an invested interest in this, in doing well, UNT does well, TDAV does well, so we all have the
same goal, that it's how we work together, and I think that has been a seamless and creative
perspective. We have not delivered that. That is our goal, what we will be doing. Okay, and a lot
of times, you know, a government, a city government doesn't quite understand how a university runs or
how economic development runs or how a chamber of commerce runs, and so everybody kind of lives in
their own little pockets, but when you can have some kind of unifying message like that and say,
"Here's Bob, what we're doing helps you do what you do." Well, I'll tell you with Kim running that,
and the new president of the university focuses very much on where can I move my needle, right,
not just to do things, and I've seen Kim, her fast jobs, knocking it out of the park, so I mean,
not to put my workload on you, but I mean, if you, she will drive that to the point of the golden
goes without abstraction, so I'm really excited. Okay, and then someone, when y'all mentioned
financial services relocation, that was on there too, strengthening our relationship with the
chamber, and then affordable housing, opportunity with affordable housing. But the financial services
probably is more in the limelight right now with some of the tax applications in New York,
and the fact that the tax and stock exchange will be open June 1st, down in the city area, so
that would seem to be a hot area. Yeah, I think so too. I don't know, I don't know what that's
gonna, does anybody have any predictions of what that's gonna... It's already making the changes.
I mean, I know it's gonna make a lot of... I just read an article in the business journal about,
I can't remember the name of the building, but they're going in, it's all kinds of financial
services are moving in. There's 200,000 people, I can't remember exactly, but it's, it's maybe...
The governor is begging the rich people to come back to New York to know their problems.
Okay, interesting. Okay, good deal. What else? Okay, anything else on opportunities that really
stand out? We talked about a lot of those already. What is the end... I need to go back to the
affordable housing. Yes. Of course, that falls on city council to make sure that we're meeting the
needs of the community, and we have to listen to economic development folks. We have recognized,
and we are a mid-level financing group of people, I mean, but a workforce, a workforce. So just
hearing them and knowing what types of salaries are coming in, and all of that, we put them in,
we want affordable housing. We've made our mark on that. See, a lot of apartments coming up,
but that's where that affordability is gonna come in. Yeah. We've hit that out of the park,
it's already in the council, but that's not really what it needs for affordability. Okay. In a unit,
the kind of idea of beautiful, long, you know, covered home, but it's a place to stay. Whether
you like it or not, the truth is that a brand new teacher, fresh out of college, a brand new law
enforcement officer, they can't go build the house that our parents and grandparents built. They just,
they can't. So we're definitely down the road out of the park, bringing in that housing for those
professionals. Okay. And also one thing that we have found through great staff that we have in
the city is that we are much less expensive, our housing is much less expensive than other areas
in North Texas. And therefore, we've had to adjust and say, when we talk about affordable housing,
we can't look at the North Texas market and say, you know, in this area, you know, this is what we
need. We have to go even deeper to really make it affordable housing, because some of the programs
and groups that were coming in selling affordable housing and we were signing on to is actually
market rent or higher here. So we're already starting out as far as housing better than
those others in the area. And now we're being really careful saying, if you're going to say
affordable housing, then we're going to work with you to incentivize you at all. It really
has to be a deep cut for those that are lower and bottom lower levels of affordability. Plus,
you know, with Landmark and Craver Ranch coming in, I mean, supply and demand, I mean, I know that
there are going to be some nicer houses. However, they're, you know, both doing everything from
multifamily to townhomes to small zero lot lines to larger homes. So there's no way that that one
also had an impact on affordability here and the ability of people to own homes. So I think as far
as, I mean, I know that it's something that is concerning and it's nationwide, but actually here
in the city of Denton, I don't think the word gets out that actually we're, we're better than average
as far as affordability. Anyways, thanks for letting me come in and say that. Yeah, just so y'all know,
from an economic development industry side, so Brittany and Jamie can speak to this,
that we don't even, we're not even using the word affordable housing anymore because some people,
some people think that affordable housing means workforce housing and some people think that
means section 8 housing. So we kind of abandoned that term in economic development and so the word
that everybody is using now is income aligned housing and that says we have housing for whatever
your income is. If you're a student, we have housing for you. If you're a brand new, you know, person
in the work, in the workforce, early 20s, we have housing for you. Your mid-career CEO housing and
then retirement housing. A lot of people are selling their big acre lot homes and they're moving into
town homes and garden homes and we've got housing that's aligned with that fixed income or that
retirement income. So that might be a better, you know, language for y'all to use if you're preparing
for all those different types of incomes. You're having housing for that. These are all board
members. Vanessa is our secretary and Matilda's also the lawyer. Well yeah and we, are those two
coming back? Yes. He is, yes. And he's purchased them. Yeah, I think they've been set up. Maybe we
have some people in RCC but yeah, I mean you're welcome. Jamie, you are welcome to come sit up
here in my spot. I'm not sitting here. I'll participate. He does more than I do so like.
Yeah and we can also scoot Scott over and Brittany over and, you know, we can put you right here too.
Oh I'm good. Thank you. Okay, so anything else on that? Let's go to the potential threats. Now
we're not here to spend a lot of time on mitigating every single potential threat that might come your
way but I do think that there's some relevant things to just think about as y'all are writing
goals here. Six of you said one of our potential threats is competition from surrounding cities,
Frisco, Dallas, and Fort Worth. So what would y'all say, since so many of you said that's your biggest
threat here, what would you say is the threat that these other communities bring?
I know you're competitive with them but what's the competitive thing? What is it that they're
doing better or that you're scared of that they could do better? Infrastructure ready to go.
Roads and utilities going to sites ahead of time. We haven't had the funding to be able to do that.
Other places do. It's much more turnkey and then of course everyone always brings up class A
office space to accompany some of the manufacturing and other warehousing that we have here.
We've touched on both those. Apologies, I had to blow up and had to stay there. But you're right on
track with what we've already been talking about. Yeah and just the ease of work, the standardization,
what I hear a lot of complaints are as we keep moving the ball we're like Lucy and Peanuts.
That group's come in and I have represented commercial clients wherein they're told this
is what you need to do and then they come and say nope you got to take all that out and start over
and so and part of that I think is turnover and it's just tough to compete with other cities.
We do have a lot of fun here and so it's hard to get people that really know how things work and
how we want things to work but I mean for decades and decades we've had this reputation. It's not an
easy place to work with and that's your if that's the reputation there is no amount of money. There's
no amount of economic development professionals that can bring a better situation to bear because
if your reputation is I mean I've like I said I've been doing this for 33 years. I have seen a ton of
economic developers love the city they were in that they ended up having to leave because of
development services because once they hand their client over to the city and that client doesn't
get the white glove service that they got during the during the courting process when that person
was porting the business they had them over to the city and they don't treat them like they're taking
them to the prom they treat them like you know they're just picking them up on the street
and we can't handle there's too much competition for y'all to not be providing white glove services
here concierge development services. I think it's also like Sanger and Ford
immediate area cities that it's more just a reflection they don't have to prepare themselves
they're willing to. And you also have to think about is that what you really want to be though
you know. It's a it's a it's a fun one right Scott Scott was doing driving that matter of fact he
had put together a task force of a group of us and going through okay let's go through all the
checklist let's go so Scott and Donald was driving that and whether Charlie takes his place which I
think Charlie can do but whatever that that needs to be scraped from the rooftops of what
you're saying right when that business comes in we've got in other cities that we've evolved in
and what's called fast track program it's it's expensive you pay for it you know it's probably
around 30 to 50 thousand dollars but we can set down to get your plans reviewed in 15 days.
A big company that's not a lot of them. Who cares like yeah I just did it with 3.0 worth on assisted
living. Your timeline is more important a lot of times. Yeah so I've said that for a long time
to manage that you know I can go into details fire system setup the third party contract engineers
could be in play. Anyway it can be done it's not hard to be done right so I think that would be a
huge needle in the work but again that has to come from city manager of okay we are going to empower
our staff to make the decisions to do these things because what happened in the past
is a staff member makes a decision and there's some backlash on it they get handed over and now
they're like oh I'm going to lose my job I don't make that decision again. We're talking about
to get you to speak on how to develop services in white gloves any surgery that committee with us
going through the checklist we've been working on those things and Scott even he was starting
to drive that at a pretty high level so I'd like to hear your opinion on you know how what you think
that means you know a fast track plan permit whether it's 30 50 thousand dollars I just did it
forward you know how could that move the needle that's kind of where we're at I'd love to hear
your opinion. I think the city has extended a fast track before and it wasn't defined in such a way
that it actually functioned the way that it should now it does actually slow things down
but I do think there's an opportunity there to do that and that could be
a solution that helps that perception that developers cost them being
anti-farmers. Okay yeah and that's that goes back to that reputation management that we talked about
earlier like that's how your reputation is firming and the fast track permitting if that's you know
for what can even say that some cities are doing that for free because the management has demanded
that it shall be this way if we're going to be competitive companies want to pay for it like
and that should be passed on to the contractor right so like if this if the city is having to
contract some of those services that extra fee should go to pay the rush job for the contractor
so city foreword use bureau veritas they do a full plan review they do your inspections they do
everything through the process and the city gets a last look and plan when they're finished with your
plan the city gets a nice look and then they get a last look at your client film and co and it
we were happily paid because what our size project is like for what we lost an interest
carried in the time we closed the land six thousand dollars who does that uh there's
yeah and that company i hear a lot of people talking good things about that
there are so few so few communities doing that that could be on the front page of your economic
development website and that would get traffic y'all can put ceo behind that i mean seo behind
that statement drive people to your website just for that one testimonial that they took care of us
there was only one checklist four different contract four different permit officers told
me the same exact story each time that kind of thing is what sells projects so okay um
so competition i think we're really revolves around that it revolves around
quickness to you know speed to market and white glove service and that can set you apart and then
the thing that jill was talking about where it's uh um you know focus on what is it you just said
you're awesome trying to talk about how few things i'm sorry about the reputation having shovel ready
shovel ready we're also trying to say shovel ready so yeah so the site having the site ready to go
there i think all of those go into number one before we get off this it's really from what i
did it's the developer's bucket right when he's taking a large tract of land and saying i'm getting
this ready so that goes back to where do we want those utilities where do you want to make us in
our master company and then second to that it's what britney you know deals with on a daily basis
i got an end user that needs that site so you got a planning process and then you have an end user
building could be building and planning but britney your opinion would it be more valuable to an end
user coming in saying we can get you on the ground faster or we give you more incentives what what
do you think carries more weight getting on the ground faster that's what the time they're coming
to us they need to break ground in a year or two and so if my biggest fear is when we hand it over
to development services is that it's going to take a year or two right and so it gives me anxiety
just letting you know but again we're improving our processes we're making better but answering
your question yes master development so if we're saying okay we need to focus our ideas since we
don't have edc dollars specifically because they were there wonderful trade how maybe we could
something that doesn't cost a lot of dollars that could be an edc focus because my opinion i would
rather have speed to market as a developer than tax incentives every developer i said that yeah
that's exactly how does he help that though what how can we do that well scott donald's doing it
i know and we can do it it's just we're redoing the checklist right now which is since scott's
left to slow down my like uh our comp so i think if we could put together a program and advertise
we can get you to market in this amount of time which that takes the city manager city council
everybody's support i think we could do it with less incentives taxes incentives and have a bigger
up right because the cost to do that is pretty low well i'm happy to help on that if if i mean
that's not my area of course but if in this position that i'm in if i can be a convert to
help do something now because i want to help move it out along you can even start like let's say low
failure from a satisfaction standpoint you target certain markets with that so if it takes someone
in california for example who wants to move here four years to do anything if you do it
six months they're going to be like holy cow this this is really fast right you know when if you're
trying to carve out what y'all's competitive edge is i will tell you this i work with economic
development groups coast to coast almost everybody's terrible and maybe not this part the side readiness
part but these things they're terrible white glove service there's a few that are good at it
and but it's because it's demanded by the management that says what cities have you seen
that are good at they're good at uh this competitive edge uh well i would swell and a lot of this
depends on the economic developer pushing on too i would say abilene uh abilene abilene has probably
the best economic developer in texas maybe in the south uh tyler texas uh in temple i would
say temple uh but temple doesn't have temple has a p30 the city's not involved in it so the city's
kind of excluded so but they do demand uh some of that stuff but they're they function differently
but i would say tyler and abilene and um new bramples for a while but i don't know if they still
are but yeah but it's just it's a decision right it's a decision that says we're going to be the
best and if we're going to be competitive we're going to have available property and it's going
to have utilities to us and if we're going to take care of you like we would take care of our
newborn baby here and we have implemented frictionless developments are easy permitting
fast track responsiveness whatever online you know some of these cities now are doing these
online uh like domino's pizza you know it shows you where you are in the process of your
permit order who's reviewed it what state it's in that kind of frictionless development and all of
that and for us all that's who speak of working so let's talk about a couple negatives to that
right because i think this is something we should really bring to the forefront of this whenever
somebody else is bringing their project they go why is that project more important than mine right
so another guy building a domino's pizza in town right or whatever it is you know that's something
that the staff has to be prepared to answer the edc has to be prepared to answer because you know
there's two sides that goes they're called city council this industry here my business has been
here so we have to manage that also right and so that's that's been one of the pushbacks over the
years so that's why i think if it comes with a fee that separates it right purchase this tier
starts that's right and so i think we're on to something here i think it's more important than
incentives but i think we would need to go through if we choose this to be one of our top ec we go
through okay what's the community what are they what are they going to hear from the other people
in the community right whenever we do this and why are they getting set apart and so that we can
answer those questions because we need some time on this let's let's say yeah it really is a true
competitive edge um and one thing i'll say to that too in addition to this i agree with the tier like
if you want extra service you want to buy a lamborghini that's different from you buying the
you know entry-level car or whatever so that's that's a one way to do it another way to do it is
understanding that if we're going to provide white glove service we might have to have double the
staff we have at development services or they may have to get different training or it may have to
be different people correctly uh you guys are most better i think the initiative how do we get
developed the services to pay for itself right that's been an initiative like in the last few
years i don't think that should be an initiative i think we come over the services should be as a
minimal investment to an edc compared to what's that if you could collect the whole tax and not
have to give those incentives and you run that performer i think that the numbers tell the story
right right and it's a city service just like any other city service in my opinion i mean you know
if we're going to be you know it's going to be paid for out of the taxpayer dollars but they we
can elevate certain parts of our city services to be white glove so it's just a matter how important
but i can tell you this right here can set you apart from 75 percent of your competitors so you
know number one this the number one site selection criteria in our country i said this last time until
all of us are dead and gone is workforce development that's the number one thing do we have the right
workers with the right skills and do we have the capability to train up the right workers and the
skills that we need to employ people here in the future i would say this is probably number two
once you can prove that you've got the skill set here we take care of them to the nth degree and
i would say real close underneath this and it's really elevated since covid is quality of life
incentives i would say four or five six down here it's just not and when i started in this business
for the 1993 everything wasn't set whoever could throw the biggest pile of cash won the project
every time because workforce was plentiful and uh you know this wasn't a big deal because everything
was safe ready back then so anyway this is a i think this is going to be a game changer if
y'all decide this is something that you want to push i i want to close that question jill and vicki
as council members do you feel like that's a palatable objective given how like lades said
earlier i don't think you're a fair bill yet the you know the council kind of flip-flops back and
forth every couple of years with more pro-business anti-development kind of sentiment is this is this
something that you think you need to get census around from the council level um
so the comments are are taken i mean i the point is is taken as far as you are correct we have some
anti-business and developer sentiment uh that's uh it's a small group but it's loud uh and
unfortunately i think they sway some more than others you know squeaky wheel gets the grease
however i think that this applies not only to business the way we think of business but it
also applies to the affordable housing model models you know other types of services so i
think that you know we settle in that it's just being a good partner versus this is to help us
specific kind of business sure i think there's also a lack and i've talked about this in the
past when i was on this board a lack of understanding of what economic development is and i even hear it
today in the forums we're in uh campaign season and so you you hear things from people that it
just can make me crazy because that's just not true um so i think that you are right in that i
think part of what and what i wanted this board to do also is help carry that message uh so it's
not just a couple of people on council saying this is why this is good for everyone uh at
every income level um and those unable to make a living that this helps everyone uh to bring in
these types of dollars to the community so um i think so because i think it's also going to be a
multi-year endeavor this is not something i think that can be done overnight i think what i would
be interested in seeing are these exemplary cities and find out what they're doing will they let us
talk to them will they come talk to us um you know can we just look at their websites and see what
they look like versus what we're doing um you know i i'm not sure what the comparables are but those
are always kind of helpful as far as not reinventing the wheel if they've got a relationship way that
here's how we made it easier and they're willing to have lunch with me or someone if we go down
there uh why not include that or maybe even during one of these meetings have you know different
people reach out and come back with what it is that they do differently but also what i don't
want to do is be in us versus them i know that community services um has made huge strides there
are some very smart professional people there um you know i i don't want to just blame uh the
people there because that's not it you know it could be antiquated uh software or the inability
to purchase certain um tools bless you that would help them so you know i'm also coming from a place
of ignorance and so i certainly don't want to project on to that department in a way i'm sure
they do get beat up a lot and so i think it might be also important to talk to and they've got a new
head maybe we can have during one of our meetings that they come in and say and let us know how do
things work and what do they think could be improved and how could that be improved and is
it more people is it another tool so i don't want to leave them out of the conversation i want it to
be an actual two-way conversation with them and um and not the adversarial at all because that's
not going to help anyone so uh but sorry to answer your question yes because i also have to have hope
and belief that when people understand what it can do for our entire community that they will
understand that it helps everyone so i think you're right on the money i think that uh one thing so i
added what you kind of said about the internal unity is another competitive edge so when you said
what are other communities doing that are succeeding you know texas's biggest client is i mean biggest
competitor is georgia i would say north carolina south carolina are right behind y'all but every
year texas number one in business georgia number one in business next year is georgia next year
is texas so a lot of projects that look at texas also look at georgia i don't know who y'all's
competitors are within texas but that's texas's main competitor and one thing they do really really
well in georgia is they get along the city and the county and the chamber and the edc and the
school district it is like walking into it's when i go work over there is walking in a totally
different environment everybody works together like you said nobody cares about who gets the credit
i worked in georgia for six years and i can tell you a little bitty tiny town can have a prospect
and they call up the governor's office and the governor will fly commercial and he will send
his plane to this little bitty tiny little town so that they can take the prospect around to visit
different places like the governor always gives up his plane because even at that high level they say
we're beneath the the concept the customer the investor is the top tier over there and they treat
them they roll them out you know they take them to the masters and uh take them on quail hunts and
they really roll out the red carpet in lots of different ways that we don't do here in texas
because we just don't walk in your comment that you know cooperation of course i'm exactly
they're not heard anything about collaborating with the school district or the county which i think is
extremely important because we're all in this together yes and and the school district can kill
us or they can help us the county can kill us or help us and we can kill both of them
i mean so i i think that really is important i don't think we communicate
so that well i'm trying to say you know for the quality of life of part of we have gone we have
taken significant consideration in putting ourselves out there to the rest of the world
that we you know have this reputation of being a small town field type you know we're the cousins
we're the small town field big city amenities that's what i've heard us say before so we are
really uh wanting to uh keep that we have to be proud of sales or supporting small businesses
but we never talk about those large organizations that are here is worth a lot of people don't know
about what's happening on the west side of 35 unless we will take them over there they don't
know where the airport is they're just here you know on the east side of i-35 and you know and
that's what they know but you know we as a council we we're the ones that are supporting all of this
verbally what we say all right you know a lot of times whenever we're running we'll say well the
city's not doing this and the city's not doing that i'm gonna go in and save the world but then once
you're getting here you can see um you know where all the hard work is and we do have to do a better
job in projecting that to the people that we're speaking with they call us and they email us and
they text us about all of their concerns and that's our job is to make sure that you know whatever
wherever we say that we think we are we need to all be on board together right that's why i think
that storytelling is so important i added uh assets to that so celebrate our past successes and our
current assets through storytelling and you know there's not just a ton of cash sitting around
right your city's not just like how do we spend all this money that we have laying around you have
to make hard choices and some of the hard choices are what do we want to be and what do we want to
be known as that do we want to be known as the place that provides opportunity for our children
and grandchildren or do we want to be the place that says enough that i close the door no more
no more jobs i don't think you leverage enough part because i know based on how people behave
around our business that we're so close to like bfw here the reason i say that because they don't
leverage that we don't leverage that because he developed it and gets more visitors than
anywhere else in pack bar because anyone in the country can fly directly here and then drive for
40 minutes and be where we are we have over 11 000 visitors in here that are blessed wow because
we're i think it's just already we didn't know well it's just because it's easy to get to right so we
we just don't really remember yeah we always talk about like what then but we don't talk about like
okay i can go down the road for 20 minutes and be by three different legs they're not dead but
i have to you know or i can you know go to horse country or i can see the dallas cowboys orange
stars or whatever so we don't we don't really leverage that cheaper and we're easier to get
around in and yet you can still do all this which is what i always looked about growing up here
because concert because that's why we have a lot of visitors they want to come here see the plant
and then go see the dallas cowboy yeah right and they can do it with one flight directly from
wherever they're at right like that's a huge advantage that's right i mean no kind of huge
accessibility i think maybe is the way to okay yeah that's a definite uh competitive edge too
we often figure out how to tell that story yeah um they do that california reference that i can
go to the beach you go skiing and go hang out in the lake well that's what we used to do in georgia
you know you find at atlanta you can be in the mountains in an hour and a half you can be on
the beach in four hours you can be at a gust of you know in three hours what they always talked
about the proximity of the mountains to the gulf to the beach and so yeah i think they're leveraging
that uh and you know this this should also uh dictate what airport what airports are y'all
advertising in right now you're advertising in any airport yeah but we probably should
forget that international can live build yeah for sure yeah uh well i mean other airports too
alone i mean yeah yeah here too but uh so it just made me think of this when we were talking about
georgia uh atlanta is the other huh yeah uh not that long ago i landed in um the atlanta airport
i know it was dfw i can't remember which airport i think it was in dfw and you know how when you
get off your flight you know go to that very little dim gates as its own baggage claim you know and so
i was waiting there at the dfw baggage claim i had worked in georgia flying into dallas for something
and i was standing there waiting on my baggage claim there's a big ad that my
baggage claim so they know texas flights come into that thing into that baggage claim and it said on
the wall why georgia is the number one place that in business in america in the dfw baggage claim
and my buddy is the president of the state chamber and i took a picture of that and i was like this
is pretty clever because he's targeting his audience business people waiting at baggage claim
in his competitive state in his competitive city and so like y'all got to get strategic with some
of that stuff too so when you have a tia your tia will dictate not just what business you should
you should be talking industries you should be targeting but what businesses to target and what
cities they're in so a good tia will show you that cleveland ohio or you know miami florida is
the place to put up your ads so that's the kind of like strategic marketing that y'all should be
doing and talking about this kind of stuff on your website as well okay so what else goes here under
potential threats and if y'all are clock watchers don't worry about us not being right on we're
never going to be on time on the agenda so we'll still get out of here on time but don't worry
about us running over it's we're just actually you don't have more actually discussing this
desired outcome trying to get to so what else do we need to bring up
let's continue to be of course we've already talked about but to what jill said uh as far as
council meeting was your stuff i've done a lot of projects here in town and even the
some of the council members in the past not some on now some of the past online a lot of times
if i communicated clearly to them what the benefits were and they just listened to what was important
to them and incorporated a little bit of that in a lot of times i was able to get support
just by listening so i think what jill's saying is a lot of it is communication and understanding
of what is the benefit communicating that i think that was a very good point we should
really drive home and then in our in fact it was staff also for the development services
i think we have a pretty good staff but right now i think they communicate well i think they're
pretty good but i think if we want to say as a city this is what we're going to promote time to
market tell the story with the numbers see you could easily be put in a spreadsheet if we give
tax incentives this is what we could keep instead of giving tax incentives but this is what it's
going to cost us to go make this our cross we're going to die on right service i think the this
spreadsheet tell the number so fast to go it makes sense to invest in in this because you know their
workloads go like this right and they're doing i think they're doing a decent job i think it's
getting engineering on the same page as development services if we make that focus and spend some
dollars there i think the numbers tell the story if we can keep the taxes it always pencils out here
you're a big city or you're a tiny little city it always pencils because not enough people are doing
this not enough communities are making the effort because like you said this is a lot of effort but
this is a decision this is just a decision council city manager the city has to decide
we're going to be this competitive and we're going to be this competitive through these things
and once that decision is made then yes it's going to cost some money it's going to cost some blood
sweat and tears elbow grease but you can become the very best yeah and i think i don't know
i don't know how to because we're going to have a very new council we have five seats up i'm going
to post or we're going to have new people on the council and they there are some that i've seen get
very bogged down in the development code committee and not really recognizing all of the purposes of
the development code and and so i think that the interest of speed is going to be it's going to
have to be put on them because there are many that have never been in in business or or developed
anything and so i think they're used to a slower pace and don't understand the importance and so
i think it would be helpful if it's not just me saying that but somehow we create an opportunity
when we onboard these new council members to do quick economic development here's what's going on
let's bring in some guest speakers bring me in and talk about what is people's problem true
investors who've already invested yeah i think those are your spokespeople and right here that
you know this is development code changes also speak to speed the market and white will of service
it's the communities that say yes we have development codes but we are willing to change
anything we need to to get the right development and to satisfy our vision that our citizens wrote
in the comp plan if we're going to work for that vision the citizens wrote the comp plan and the
citizens are demanding that they want these things so therefore we have to do this you found was back
into you know but cities that say no we wrote that code back in 1974 and it stood strong and we're not
even going to consider it those are the communities that people go not too much and work with them i
think and not to discount it but i think it's currently being looked at solely through an
environmental lens and there's no one else at the table explaining the purposes of the development
code yeah so like you said like you just said like you got to have the people that are walking in the
booth you put that up so i'm going to say just a moment of liberty here too did i draw out this
tax triangle for y'all last time uh this is a very uh rudimentary exhibit but this is great
from council members to when you're having these conversations this is really a tool for y'all to
more than anybody but there's only three entities this is very simplified i was saying there's only
three entities that pay taxes who are they citizens businesses and tourists right
y'all have an award-winning downtown we know we get tourists in your downtown
that's of tourists from tourists uh you have people who live here and pay taxes
and you have businesses that are here pay taxes right so i'm not here to tell you what your
triangle should look like some triangles look like this other triangles look like this
and they work for certain communities right so what happens if i want to take peter bill
to highland park inside highland park it's not going to happen right because the citizens say
i live in a multi-million dollar house for a reason and i live there because i don't want
businesses in my backyard and i don't want tourists in my backyard same other gated communities
you know the wealthier the more the citizens are willing to pay taxes
they can squeeze out businesses and tourists right but what about like a steel mill town like
allentown pennsylvania what do you not see in a big huge industrial facility
i don't see homes you don't see tourists right they've chosen for their triangle to look like
this what do you see in orlando florida no industrial parks some citizens but they're
kind of on the outskirts in the suburbs right because they put all their eggs in the tourism
basket not all of them but 90 so the all three of those are successful highland park is successful
steel mill towns are successful orlando is successful so there's no right or wrong triangle
but if we are anti-business we don't want any more jobs here we don't care if our children
and grandchildren have any opportunities for the future then we better be super affluent we better
be willing to raise those taxes sky high to shut out this and to shut out that right and same thing
with businesses you know we have all businesses we're not going to have a lot of this and a lot
of this so this is a very simplistic model but like you can move your triangle to satisfy whatever the
tax burden can be you know what is the what are the citizens willing to pay for and the wealthier
you are there's less of this and less of this but a good a good you know equidistant triangle has a
little bit of all three which i think is what you are trying to be right you're trying to not have
exorbitant home citizen taxes and some places to work and let's get some money out of the tourists
too right so i think sometimes this is all you got to explain to some people that we're trying
to keep your taxes down by having some economic development right here so i know that's very
rudimentary but no i love that i mean the point is the point is through to citizens who don't study
economic development they don't study development code all they know is all this development and all
too much traffic and my kids don't have opportunities whatever so whatever that's
worth or i'm not going to steal that news i plan to here probably maybe so did that help at all
will you say vicki okay okay so let's get back to um greatest potential threats anything else on here
oh yeah don't change the air it's finally getting reasonable
okay um work force retention recruitment challenges um citizen perception of
economic development as corporate handouts so that is one person mentioned that that is a
potential threat but you can just talk economic development is not about incentives as much anymore
um okay and what do you think those challenges are so being a college now come to large universities
what are we doing to those graduates in this town these industries um we're challenged as
health care in our nurses in this area people are wanting more than to hire anything from those universities like those
those young group opportunities want to go to the doubt so they want to go without and to where they
don't know where were their perception of the funding like this okay and so we are we we already
know it's more horrible to live here so how do we make it more fun here how do we get number
and not college focus uh good plan you were elevating professional you don't professional
y'all have a young professional group with the chamber what are y'all doing that focus on i think
i've heard some stuff about your chamber or working on that what are y'all doing so it was a program
that was created out of our leadership that class was they did identify the next generation is not
growing up is interested in paying civic rent or getting involved locally so a couple things
helping them connect to service organizations and projects a lot of young people that
we want to live here also want to feel connected to the community so teaching them about
whether it's friends of family or children's advocacy center served at connecting them to
opportunities to stay here don't just grab it drop home um and then building a community within
themselves you know they all speak the same language i do i learned some new cool phrase every time i
go and i feel so old um but it also helps us to understand what they're going to be out of this
community going forward i think i don't know if you'll send it or if you said it would be but
elevates that experience we have a lot of services for college students and then how do we keep them
in that second tier so you see young professional groups kind of split doing first career and then
second career maybe family maybe home ownership whatnot and tearing it off so kind of a combination
but you're right we're not seeing as many young professionals stay here what can we do to get them
to not just want to work here or want to live here and if you're like most chambers you're probably
losing participation that's like business after hours because people would rather spend time with
their newborn family than come to business after hours and so chambers everywhere are struggling
with this same thing how do we keep you know the young professionals they used to come to everything
because it was the right thing to do but now they're now they're choosing their yeah now they don't
want they don't like that yeah they're choosing their family yes yeah so yeah but i think that's
a good thing to focus on is like how do we make this the cool hip but affordable place to stay
after school i actually should have identified vanessa on the ev team is on the young professional
committee and she would have done a much more articulate description of what's happening
okay i want to say something it's you are on the committee yes it's a lot of fun i do think
i feel a lot more connected and with the community and we have talked about
um doing work service events together and we're thinking about doing one of our events
maybe like every month so one of our next events is going to be
kind of like a volunteer fair to try to help a lot but it's been a lot of fun it's very cool been
meeting a lot of people here in the city so it's been a really nice experience to meet a lot of
other people and young professionals um outside of the city like just not in the local government
area like setting so and what do you mean by fair what kind of uh just like having like nonprofits
in with other organizations like a resource yeah like um like come volunteer for us everything
because a lot of them are just saying like oh we know where to go and it's like okay well like
let's all go to the keep them beautiful you know try to do something okay good thanks for sharing
um so something i've thought about is listen to here i don't have a minute but um the uh
the thing about connecting workforce and education and stuff where are y'all
had this group or has the chamber or the city have y'all or the isb done a career showcase before
like i'm wondering about the old career fairs with security tables i'm talking about a career
showcase jimmy jimmy did manufacture okay christina do you want to speak for that yeah um we work with
the isd to the career fair with some of the major employers um and then we also work with the cte
group okay as well so um like four times a year we meet with them something like a big park at
peterville brings in their equipment and their trucks and like it's all it's like a parking lot
and a civic center full of stuff like they recently had a heavy like a manufacturing day
and i believe that they came to that right well and what what kind of stuff have y'all done as far as
employee employers okay manufacturing day we do touch the truck all the time we'll bring trucks up to elementary schools people want that
but not in a one place where every every sophomore freshman sophomore and junior gets on bus and comes
to you we do that so we do that with a couple like we do that guy or but it's just because the teacher
did it so i think that's another game changer that y'all could consider you know a lot of communities
now really up in their game career showcase if workforce development is the number one site
selection criteria and it is like what are you doing to elevate that experience like raise your
hand if you knew in high school you're gonna be doing the job you're doing today oh everybody
you did you do as a kid lee you're gonna be doing this okay we got two okay
so a lot of young people in school they don't know what opportunities are out here because they don't
know what it means to work at a university they don't know what it means to run a logistics program
or to be a builder developer or to run for city council or they don't know what those jobs are
nobody told me in high school oh you want to be an economic development consultant so like there's
so many opportunities that everyone in this room could showcase speaking at career day of course
but also putting on a really top-notch y'all there's really not a great career showcase in texas that
i know have you been to the corpus christi one no but i heard the bass line okay i heard that they
have modeled that after alabama right they don't model that after tesla lusa for sure but i i think
i have heard about they have their regional schools high schools come out to a big um just like a
fairgrounds building and um they have multiple employers there with their own booth and the
students get all the outfit free t-shirts and bags and they get to talk to the employers and
it's a really great event that's what i'm talking about where the kids climb up in the truck they
put the welding mask on they put on the safety gloves they have a they get in the bucket truck
and they lift up in the bucket truck that's the kind of career showcase i'm talking about i will
get them papers and have them edit it's going to be so cool but why you weren't you doing everything
they're real right we have a right line to your right so yeah so yes he has done they've done big
one i've participated on panels with that before as far as the people industry so you know i know
that they do it and i know it's still but i don't know the details just unfortunate yeah and i mean
if nobody's here has participated in something of that scale i don't know does anyone here have you
been to anything like that here didn't participate you've been to that where they bring out the 18
wheeler the dump truck and i was the legal so okay so does that do a good job of i think it's right
we don't we just do like it's not you just do it yeah i think yeah i'm talking about the city for
the school i mean the last thing we did was that manufacturing thing so i'm just saying that that
could be an opportunity if you're trying to move the needle on goals that could be an opportunity
but i just don't know anybody in texas i mean corpus christi yeah i've heard about them actually
but nobody's doing it like tuscaloosa is doing it i mean you know chambers are flying in from
all over the country just to go sit in Tuscaloosa and watch them do it i mean it's it's the best in
the country and i think that you could look at corpus you could look at there's one in south
carolina too up in the upper part of south carolina that's done a really good job but
i think that's something else i'm not trying to leave goals in your mouth but that's something
else that i just thought of when jill was talking about something that could set y'all apart from
other communities here well from like the universities where people are going to get
down yeah we do we track it all we um do career more fairs than cases with us and it's still valuable
i'm just saying that and we do track it uh most of our lives stay within bfw like significant like
85 percent uh but they're you know clearly spread out yeah yeah oh with the career and technology
center and they're getting ready to build another one i would think that would be an easy i'm just
wondering like where those two things intersect right we got this these kind of industries here
and we got this many people in that industry getting education that are leaving like like the
verbs thing right yeah what do we do to keep verses here because y'all are training a bunch of them
but they're going bad right and and it is a good br it is a good retention tool for youth retention
because if they know oh because every station like the way tuskloos has it said every station
it'll have like a 18 wheeler truck and it says if you want to have this job as a 18 wheeler driver
this is the education you need here's how much the education cost here's your first
paycheck you know your first salary mid-range salary retirement salary and they have that
huge sign on every piece of equipment so you kids can walk through and go oh i didn't know what
welder starts with this i could i could you know retire at this amount as a plumber and so they
go station to station and i just think that that's that's a good way to keep people baby in the area
is to show them oh i didn't know i could work at peterville and how many job titles y'all have out
there you know all you could have your own showcase that says you can do this job this job this job at
these amounts of money so i just think that nobody's doing a good job of showing kids what
the opportunities are if they want to stay or should should they stay i don't know what i'm really
um have recognized is that we don't talk about retirement you know like these two are never
growing up that that was probably things you're working with your tire what are you going to do
in retiring you're 16 years old wondering you know how long does that gotta be oh yeah but you know
that's a conversation to be had because i'm one of those types of retired people that i feel like
i'm doing whatever i want to do what i want to do it and how i want to do it and so just even
getting that mindset into a younger uh thought process like you used to be um you know they they
can look at that salary and look at the benefits and all that kind of taking that knowledge and
berkeley south carolina has done just that berkeley south carolina has a program in their schools called
uh cool c-o-o-l cost um it's not cost of living it's uh
can't remember the acronym for but it's it shows kids at each of those stations that says you do
this job you can live in this house drive this car buy these sneakers and actually has the thing the
lifestyle it's like that's what it is cool lifestyle quality something culture something lifestyle
anyway it shows kids oh you want that best boat well you need to make this amount of money to buy
this boat but you can make this amount of money if you work this job at this welding company
and so it's like it splits because they may not know what a hundred thousand dollars is they may
know what fifty thousand dollars is but they know what they want the ram truck is whatever so
they're not even motivated to get drivers like the 16 yeah what's that
they don't want that's a whole other discussion
it was in still motivation too yeah and i mean we're just trying to get kids to consider staying
here so so and someone said oh my gosh lisa goes back to lucy's question i think from the
recruitment perspective we are sort of incorporate more family oriented businesses
so christen landed monster minigolf for us she had reached out initially to them to come to
downtown but they couldn't find the site that was i guess big enough for them so they are they're
going to another building outside of the long triangle mall but it still worked out but we see
a need for more family oriented activities yeah it's like quality of life which people are way
more concerned about now than they were before now that we learned a lot of people can work from home
body of life shot up the site selection criteria list since then okay someone said the greatest
potential threat is a disconnect from the channel so you know working keeping the chamber working
together there uh negative employee attitudes towards developers goes back to what we were
talking about earlier the developers are treated with negative attitudes um you're definitely not
in the competitive edge okay so i asked you we're going to go through a little bit quicker what is
the city need to start doing or what does the program need to start doing stop doing and put
the accelerator on so y'all said what do we need to start doing extending utilities and infrastructure
well that's not this group's job but you can surely launch with that right
for extending utilities and input plan and make recommendations looking at the comp plan going
okay this these sites fit our kind of use and make recommendations to the city council or
engineering saying we believe these areas when they're making their engineering budgeting
decisions or cip decisions we can make recommendations
you can also make sure the other side well we are regulation but state and federal regulations that
get back to our area because they're different cook count yep they are so heavy manufacturing
like you're not like if you want to put a paint booth somewhere here that does over
so much about it's going to take you three years to get it so those moving to cook county
the non-attainment yeah yes the air quality yeah which denton helps pay for
a lot of other cities don't help it but it's just one of those things it's like it doesn't make
a lot of sense to recruit those companies know that this don't like don't really help us right
it's a good point and yeah yeah we'll show you that okay labor i just say 20 minutes north they
could do so i think that's a very fun opportunity and i was just right he said
there's no point spending time with these horses
all right what do we need to start doing educating and collaborating with those city departments
we've already talked a lot about that streamlining the RFI and RFP response processes so
two of y'all said that is that like from the governor's office
i know this is the board responses so unless you combine ours on here no yours y'all staff's
responses are still on this other page this came from the board then um what did y'all have to
identify who said what but what is the what is the thing that needs to be more streamlined
the way we respond to the governor's office just big black leather said permit 60 days
but nothing else i mean then that would get everybody's attention yeah i'm gonna love that
to you at least thank you um what do we need to start doing when you start a pr campaign or
residence and council on economic development successes we already got that up bigger on the
storytelling piece so y'all have said that multiple times already engage community on
economic development potential and use that triangle for some of that and you know maybe
i've just gotten sassy in my whole age but i just say it out loud we're doing this for your children
and grandchildren and if you want your kids to continue to live here and raise a family here we
have to have jobs for them if you're anti-development where do you hope all your family leaves you and
moves to and that's really going to boil it down that's really what we're doing we're not
providing jobs for us we've all got jobs we're providing jobs for tomorrow right and so
talking about it that way to taxpayers uh number six leveraging existing the business as catalysts
kima hospitals universities i'm not sure what what did y'all mean by that leveraging businesses as
catalysts maybe that's kind of like that your system when compared to the ecosystem that
i like fear-built suppliers coming here they're doing that same kind of thing
for fema for example for a university or a hospital it is like stuff that they need
the anchor business and then what is ancillary to that that we could target yes that makes sense
and would help you be closer uh financial services relocations i already mentioned that
um utilize the edp board for site visits somebody said so right now site visits are
doing are being done by city and by chamber it's by us and our utility directors typically sometimes
we include the chamber and then we'll include workforce solutions as well when we talk about
site visits we're talking about existing industry visits right we're talking about property business
um i don't know so i just answer for recruitment visits for brv visits i'm not for sure that's
james sorry okay so when somebody said you want okay so for site business i guess that meant for
like off-site like y'all going to visit uh prospect somewhere yeah we will for brv visit if somebody
says hey they want some real estate reports or they'd like some information we will ask somebody
for us from workforce development for sort of didn't isd or unt that's that's common well one
of you wrote that you want this board to be used for in some business so i don't know if that's
recruitment or retention but site visits so something worth thinking about it could be of
course yeah okay what do we consider to be a waste of time what do we need to quit doing on this
board we need to quit visitor tourism activities and leave tourism stuff to the cdb two people said
that we need to quit attending conferences that don't align with our key sectors so i guess that
meant for like trade shows if it's not one of our it's not one of our target industries we don't
need to go to it it's just going with what but i'm saying it still makes sense like for something
that's not going to bring it up right we don't need pursuing you know person so who is going to
trade show conferences right now our team um so we typically go towards this in the disabilities
conferences if it's related to aviation manufacturing we're going to um the u.s drone
exo this year so we typically we typically try to stay in line with what our um existing industries
are in our target okay are y'all seeing much interest from south korea here yeah that's actually
yeah there's a reading a big delegation of economic did you go to south korea recently
no there's a big delegation of economic developers from texas that just all went to south korea last
year and now i'm seeing i just asked that out of the blue but i'm seeing a ton of south korean
investment in texas just because i think it was like 30 economic developers went over there last
year or how's the beginning out because we're getting a few calls different yeah that's
interesting um okay so not not going to trade shows that don't align up with our existing
industry or our targets uh it's a waste of time encouraging businesses creation that haven't
produced results programs encouraging business creation programs that haven't produced results
any idea what that is programs that encourage i guess it's like entrepreneurship
i guess like we have so i don't know how many employers have come out of that that employ people
it's been around a few years but i think it encourages entrepreneurship that's when i never
as far as who has started business and then hired people but i don't i didn't write it i'm guessing
that's my else contracts right contractors so yes what i mean they're supposed to help people get
started yes they do um and they it's more like a they're tasked with building a ecosystem and
they have small business pit competitions and they work with twu on a few accelerator programs but
and they also have like a full-time co-working spot too so um i really want to but we don't know how
many businesses they produce or they send reports i just don't know the total i haven't told you
um their reports are normally kind of explaining like how we people work in their co-working spot
or how many businesses working there so their reports don't just lead to like businesses created
or llc's lists have them whatever they have like program participants for the flip side of the
business model that is the accelerator and all that but it doesn't have that job in that
team of defenders is an example of one that came out of stoke what founders team of defenders
what is that so say it one more time team of defenders team of defenders what kind of company
is that they actually were a recipient of our first entrepreneurial tech grant as well
so they are a hub and spoke company um they have different offshoots but their storage defender is
really taken off so they um do these um units they deal in storage units but they do the uh like the
it technical thing they have these little things they put on to each unit they're magnetic they have
a patent on a battery that lasts an exorbitant amount of time and they can communicate so it's
it's security basically but they on the site visit they they um walked us through it like we own one
and we had three different cell phones and be like you're the primary you're the backup and
you're x and then ran through that whole system so maybe that's what that math is about 18 now we
started to so they've grown in employees that's fabulous i've not heard of that company it's just
one of those things it's it's it's uh it's like venture right like how much money do you want to
put in that it's probably part of your portfolio whatever you just don't go crazy with it at the
same time if it's kind of breaking even or making your phone right look yeah it's probably something
that you're going to get you're just hosting eventually you're getting uniform right i mean
that's really what that's all about and all of this is a policy concern that's just like
is this eddie is this economic development partnership going to be focused on
entrepreneurship or is it going to be focused more on bre and recruitment stuff like that okay um
and then a lot of you said nothing's wrong nothing needs to be cut i'm cool with the current
direction okay what's working so well that we need to put the accelerator on we need to put the
accelerator on our chamber partnership and business retention efforts so we've covered that a lot
our tours expansion covered that our stakeholder university coordination with industry recruitment
covered that lead gen and bidding on opportunities uh what is that lead gen
is that y'all securing leads otherwise i think it's maybe i didn't write it but maybe
it's just picking specific industries and say let's go lead generate on leaks maybe that's
and don't tell me any ways to direct leads
you know because this will accelerate on it yeah it sounds like you're already doing some of it
um don't tell me you do have a good solid tia right now or not that's how it is
it doesn't work on it um and some of those actually have a lead gen component at the back of it like
once you you can buy a ta and you can buy a tag with like lead gen at the back um so uh okay
what else the pr the citizens and council on storytelling again
um talking to existing business owners bre again uh creating irresistible package
that goes back to this competitive edge schools correct business all that in there um anything
anybody want to comment on either okay what do you think need to be the top two goals
so as we're kind of thinking about goal packaging here and i mentioned you know we need three to
seven goals which we're not going to write the goal this minute but i want you to think about
this is the compilation and then on the next page is your actual word for word i did want to capture
all the word for word on this one uh but what do you think needed the top two goals uh several
of you said unified one economic vision so goals that we can all get behind and that way everybody
in the room can believe in infrastructure investment utilities extension even though
y'all might i can control that it sounds like you feel pretty confident y'all can influence
that some of that increased competitiveness that already rose up here uh so a lot of this stuff's
already coming out from all these other pieces but this was just putting it together rebuild
trust and clarify the city's role in economic development so um i think that could be from
city's economic development department but also other partners like development services is that
what this means and what is the story going y'all refresh my memory what is the rebuild trust part
was that like past situations here that aren't great i would just say the city council celebrate
the things right bring the lens to attention which tell the stories all the time look this work
just like okay streamline incentive processes erica's already working on that
community engagement telling the story funding improvements we got that managing expectations
that's what's achievable you know what can we realistically do in the next two years
um cast a larger vision with ideas sharing mechanism uh which kind of goes the same as
number one then review comparable uh comparable cities and compete better only i didn't write it
but i like it yeah and i think this right here speaks to a lot of that but i think it's also
healthy to say who are competitors and if you do a target industry analysis it's crystal clear
and it might be some town you've never heard of in idaho or north dakota north carolina you really
don't know who you're you might know who your competitors are in the region because y'all work
projects and you lose one to another neighboring community uh but i think knowing who your texas
competitors are is different from knowing who your long list competitors are on the on the you know
the global marketplace so um and then here's the actuals on the next page so you can actually see
y'all's word for word um i'm not gonna read all this i'm just gonna let's read this for just a
minute and then you tell me if you see anything here that i didn't do a good job of summarizing
on the previous page some of these stood out to me though so i wanted to kind of work for
you
uh we're reading the back page on the board oh the word these were y'all's word for word responses
i didn't know what that meant utilities in a circle that is not
i guess it's a utility getting utilities to places where there aren't utilities that people want to
build and i want to turn around fast i mean that's my guess there are a lot of parts of town
they're having issues up with the existing facilities in like the town property they were
just outdated that when someone comes in and we develop they have to replace them is that still
probably in some areas at all i don't know i'm aware of
i don't know a question oh uh for some a business comes in and to get up to code they have to
replace a bunch of utility infrastructure like in the downtown like elm and locust things like that
that was an area where we may not now that we did the rows and all that
and you're gonna be able to settle down and produce some projects that i saw in town
okay so is there anything on that list that you saw that i
didn't capture on the compilation i just wanted to always see somebody reporting on that okay so
let's switch over to the uh staff swat it's gonna go faster because it's a lot of it lines up with
a lot of y'alls so they did their own smart analysis um so i'll let you read through
let's look through strains first and we'll cover that just while i was ready for you
person it's been since 2020 since 2024 and then since 2020 between 2020
i always say more there and increase
these improvement and advice projects downtown working relationships what stands out to y'all
miss a lot of the same that y'all mentioned right yeah i really appreciate our all of our efforts
that are filling towards the downtown uh community uh you know that's that's part of our reputation
and when we hear people coming in and just hear be you know a straight line to downtown
with conferences that are not as easy you know those folks want to have a place to go that's
wrong you won't go after dark though no they won't go after dark because they won't they don't have
if i were to come to them and go to a conference and i want to go to a place and have a good drink
and this is just music whatever i would go out to my issue is how am i going to get there
especially if i flew in and have the uber or i'm talking how am i going to get back maybe if i
had a belt or too much so there's that this can lead for me to all of our in all of our
hotel areas you're telling the outskirts of i3 top so people have to come in and we have to
do a better job of pulling some of that interest over to where our visitors come i don't know if
that's an issue like yeah transportation new group everybody's got it on their phone if you're
traveling in for a conference i mean i think you expect that okay i'm going to uber wherever i'm
at and that's pretty fun and i think i don't look that's outside the world well and the city y'all
have y'all have the hotel occupancy tax right the city can decide that they want to earmark
certain dollars for uh transportation for hot dollars during events so anytime there's any kind
of big event the city can say hey we're going to earmark uh shuttles or we're going to pay for all
the ubers we're going to pay for all the lifts they can be in any form whatever but y'all can
use hotel occupancy tax dollars for transportation during tourism events and they have to go to all
the hotels and come back to the downtown it's just a matter of policy if you want your hotel
occupancy tax dollars to go to transportation but you know it has to be tied to an event it can't be
year-round so um okay anything else that's very much in line staff's response and very much in line
with board responses here what about weaknesses same thing shovel ready sites funding incentives
high rent housing median family income limits some of the retail
development services regional perspective that we're not super grandly to business or
polarized politics and then several organizations and city departments kind of duplicating efforts
and promoting conflicting missions so a lot of the same stuff that we're said here
like the air lord about the duplicate several organizations what's that who can speak to that
i think when i first got here i realized that since the economic development department had
had so many directors there was a lot of just i guess lack of focus and it wasn't really a
strong department and there were other departments that i think were focused on they were doing the
economic development director's role essentially so you had a development services they influenced
development sometimes which is great but sometimes it completes with our mission
um i think our religious got better but um that's the the one i think department that maybe had
conflicting missions uh because sometimes we would be working with the business we'd be working on
development and then uh the plans would change midway through the project so that was one of them
okay a lot of what y'all identify to okay opportunities building a tech ecosystem
targeting startups and mobility ai and life sciences uh do y'all have a lot of water capacity
i think that there's other cities that probably have a little bit more we have our own limits
per se key response to our advice she works with our water department i want you can probably answer
to that i think it's it's moderate moderate amount i mean for specific projects like could we do a
sign probably not but we can do a few right well that's just one thing to remember y'all that
controls that you really can't target high tech if you don't have an ordinary water capacity for
geeks right now that's why so many communities kind of in east texas can't entertain any data
centers because they don't have any water um so um i would say just be be careful with i think
water's fixing to become the hottest commodity that they're they already is the hottest commodity
so that sounds sexy to say we're going to go after tech but there's only a handful of communities
that are really going to be able to do that and survive being able to take care of their
residential part too uh retail recruitment opportunity airport uh recruitment get an
opportunity to have the airport niche tourism sports film music business-related outreach stuff
like that in-field development incentivizing make-up building stuff for creative uh private
public partnerships with the universities and up-skilling programs so i would say some of
the council members i've talked to faster or about some of the ones that have been perceived as
anti-development are more about in-field like how do we go higher or dense and the in-field
the problem is is this construction cost it's best to spank the utility sizes spring yeah our
spring version you know i think it's since we got a big spot on the square is the perfect example
um but i so i think if if that is a something we want to do to say hey we want to have
dense in-field development we have to incentivize things as far as demolition of buildings as
west as a basement you know to be able to get that land basis cost i have a building right now that
i actually an office user needs a 20 000 foot office user you know they want to go on a site
that has an existing pretty crappy building one and uh by the time we run the numbers to all that
it was our land base i said like almost 70 bucks a foot you know and they're not gonna pay 52 dollar
rent to get texas for office building right you know uh so that that if we want to incentivize
those are like i'm working on that project like this one and it's not going to work but uh so
i i i like that idea just it's so much cheaper than our rents will support support that so if
that is a one bucket like what you said earlier when it comes to startup we want to say let's
allocate the buckets that may be a piece of what we allocate i think this is exactly right that if
you if y'all say hey in-field development is going to be one of our goals it's going to have to be
what this person wrote incentivizing it's going to have to be city dollars going to pay for
those things like asbestos removal mold remediation spring wear installation all that cost i think we
have an opportunity in our downtown because our downtown is on the decline everybody wants to say
yeah oh our downtown is great for guys who own buildings downtown our rents are going down
our buildings are staying vacant longer i got the 6 000 foot building right now that's really cool
building we can't build those you know the homeless problem people are like i don't know i don't want
to really open a business downtown so some opportunities are maybe we i'm i'm gonna have
to leave early tomorrow because i'm meeting with the police department at 11 o'clock for this exact
issue so we have a opportunity to grow those rents and make our downtown safer um there's an
opportunity everyone has vacancies i think you're right i mean downtown area apartments rent houses
they're all as um they're all rents are dropping more than they've ever seen and i've got vacancies
as well for less you always hear people don't have less than a thousand dollar a month rent
units i'm like i do yeah and they're in yeah there's a real opportunity and that's working
with police department towards me yeah and that is worth i have to tell you because you know the
police chief and city manager saying we're we're gonna solve for this homelessness
well and kind of take council members that are on board with that that's part of the problem
so say again it's gonna take council members that are on board with that
right so so y'all have council members that are not on board with homelessness
um problem solving i know y'all did mentioned it today already but i think there are different
uh different ideas of how things uh what is the solution that solution
thank you all right well and maybe that's a discussion i mean is that a discussion that the
this economic development group maybe i've parted of several times now today is that a discussion
that this board needs to talk about is safety concerns as far as economic development it would
be helpful uh i think to way people that make those things are y'all are y'all tackling that
in the chamber we hear about a lot um you know historically we've said many people say you can't
arrest their way out of home right well we know the police department is a key partner to us
people likely telling us that they can't fill current properties but they don't have a solution
for it we've done small roundtable discussions with large scale employers to talk about what
they're seeing um that's the greatest way out of homelessness it's an errands opinion not the chamber
um it's a good job and an education of the sort that you want whether it's a career or technical
training so having all of those assets in the community readily available um but we don't have
a solution for it but we'd love to be a partner we don't have to control it to be a part of the
success of it yeah i can tell you just so you know my business partner walks out of the little sushi
place down there that's big block and then there gets attacked on friday night and with his two
high school blonde cute girls guys still into the rainbow called police innovations so i'm having
that conversation tomorrow that's the kind of problems we're having and he was sleeping on one
of my apartment complex properties and 45 minutes later gets called back to the police officer and
says oh i'm the only one down there yeah this is a problem and i'm pretty passionate and uh
especially when it's people i love to hear that you know so this this is why we imagine my daughter
as a 25 year old living in an apartment downtown walking out of her apartment there would be somebody
that's strict yeah i mean attacks my dog and that's happened here in our city somebody got
shot homeless person and it's a real problem and the other thing um the other thing that goes along
with that is that we have also telling ourselves to be the place that provides the services
we are we have a great night away we have a great serve big number of that all of these 19 non-profits
and help you from beginning to the end those folks out there in the community that all those
communities hear about those things and then have a train that comes right up here and just drops
everybody off free passes go to dig um draw the shelter the more services you have and it is true
them yeah the more i mean what less than a quarter of the people at the shelter are from the city of
dentistry the last that's brought it so wow and then up here on this corner of 35 and 380 on the
northwest corner i know we're looking businesses there that's where they're coming in so that is
so this has to be solved somewhere yeah this is a big enough issue i mean this is a big issue
we have the downtown safety committee that's meeting i think quarterly and so they have
their own initiatives and i know council member jester you're working on a few uh works too
potentially so yes um it's being talked about more i don't want to say it's going to be solved
today but i think it is being worked on and so who's doing a good job of this hopefully
acceptable is part of it too i shouldn't have the answer to this but i don't who's doing a good job
with comes there's just a lot of um you know
it's such a gray area i'm doing no lectures and trying to learn about it they're just not
one right way but i have some friends that work at the counter right now hang on hang on here he's
got the floor saying i don't think erin really has the floor uh i i think that they terminated a lot
of it i i wouldn't say that maybe the most public facing friendly situation but i think from their
association of commerce what they call it there they stopped offering some of the same services
to change their job job yeah right who else any other towns cities i think there were there was
an initiative a few years ago to look at cities who were implementing programs to assist and the
ambassador program was done from the end and as a result of study of other cities it was basically
but it was just eliminated the funding cuts due to the budget shortfalls so um you know it's like
you took a step in my direction but then when it came time to fund it permanently there wasn't the
will to do so given the choice that hadn't been made in budget this year so that program was
ended it was a downtown ambassador program that's been intended to help with cleanliness and safety
and hospitality it was called downtown ambassador program does anybody have any other best
practices from other i'm a little bit of research this a little bit well best practices are you know
just grab that zero tolerance you know i had a property manager last week you know showing the
tenant manager guy back in middle of lunchroom building sleep naked and while we're walking a tenant through the
building right i mean so we just gotta have zero tolerance to say look i know we can't rest our
way out of it but whatever the solution i think part of it is we all we're we're a very kind loving
city and that is a benefit and is also kind of a deter because you got to keep park that's right
but our our city's a loving city they're proud of that but i think we've gone so far the other way
if it was taking care of people from them and then we could have just probably solved it
no time but the problem is so there's a lot of outside people who are not from them you don't
know people come i'm ashamed to say i i had a city manager tell me about three years ago
a suburb of austin they had a serious homelessness
issue and i asked him what are they doing i said what did you do get this all cleaned up now and
he said we literally put all of our homeless people on a bus and give them a ticket to the austin bus
station it's like i don't know what happens so never they get there but they're not in my downtown
and that's probably what's happening to y'all probably some other cities are just shipping up
here so there's a lot of ramifications that we also don't have a county funded hospital
right so then that impacts their i'm just going to see but yeah yeah so it's a quality of life
initiative okay okay so i'm going to do a work strip on this tonight so it's if i can see some
settings that are going to be wrong okay so uh anything else on uh so what about threads real
quick and it's a hot market land is selling developing quickly limited available ability
to influence development for visionary projects so all of how built out are y'all so a lot of our
good guys are this is another problem with our what that i have compassion for our city planning
and services because all the tracks that are being developed now have issues right they got
flood plain they got e.s.a that got trees covered up with trees so that's why amy is so successful
what she does because she knows how to navigate these projects right and it's an old city that
that a lot of the sites left are problem sites right and so that takes more time to get them
through both services and it takes somebody like amy to know how to manage that that's why she does
such a good job because she knows what takes an SUV what takes a pd and do that and and that
bogs down the process so that's a threat and you a lot of projects you work on they're not just clean
yeah absolutely i mean we are not super built out then has a lot of undeveloped land but we also have
false smart growth policies that prevent that stall for the clearing so where there's infrastructure
and sometimes where there's not you're right it's it's the land that's difficult to develop
and i i agree with the comment that there's not a lot of opportunity to
influence development for visionary purposes and i think some cities do a really great job of being
proactive about development like let's get the infrastructure and the vision there let's have
some elevated standards for this particular area that we want to attract the 200,000 square foot
class a office user you know some cities do that really well and i think that this
tends to be more reactionary like okay it's here it's coming and now we're going to try to manage it
rather than being intentional about it okay um okay so that's what they mean by the meditability
okay increasing industrial lands utilities insurance fishing companies to other cities
uh so rising costs uh current local global economy tariffs affecting expansions in texas
um i'm hearing my chamber clients all across the country are saying that the businesses are
saying i think you're hearing that as well through the other
state it's really not it's just a threat in general um i think so everybody's able to grab
every every chamber economic development client i have is talking about their businesses
suffering with chairs this dreads like serious that's mostly the ability to recruit a bit
succinct to because some just aren't expanding but there's also some that are um you know
complete onshoring but the right term right or racial it was actually it just depends on what
type of business it is depends on what their cost drive record yeah so they're cost drivers raw
material they're they're highly automated right they they're hitting the top of care for example
make sense for them to move their costs or other so it depends on your business so business by
business everyone's different yeah i think shipping is about to change too the straight
up review stuff i think that that's fixing to affect some not necessarily tariffs but taxes on
some on fuel too uh lack of local funding to assist with retention so y'all work hopefully
y'all working on retention incentives too erica yes we've done a number of expansion projects here
recently and prior okay uh and then as population increases infrastructure is costly to build out
upcoming city council elections and new city management is anybody doing a candidate form
y'all got five spots open yeah that's 30 oh good okay the chambers producing that okay
is everybody going to the candidate forum that the chamber's producing
who's writing the questions the chamber y'all taking um our government relations completed
good so there's your opportunity to go support some initiatives that are economic development
phase right talk to different candidates there that's a big deal for a chamber to put on
uh i try to talk a lot of my time clients and the non-gaming forums because chambers are moving
into the advocacy role and that's a good way for y'all to say we support our chamber as they're
asking hard questions um okay so next page there this is very similar y'all see here what do we
need to start doing certified sites i think y'all mentioned that several times that we need to make
sure that we get sites qualified with utilities ready to go shovel ready updating incentives
tech ecosystem uh improved data reporting workforce development upscaling in the bill
what do we need to quit doing board administration frequency
city manages and reports do more ed boards and to indirect 52 board members so
speak to that sure so we'll have multiple boards you know the economic partnership board
the government economic development committee uh we have two tourist boards and then we have
which one am i missing we have an indirect board with the main street association sorry what
indirect board the main street association and so christen really participates on there but since
um since we brought on christen again in 2024 there are still things that are being the scope
of works being defined and so a lot of they meet frequently and it takes up a lot of our time
because it's mostly the administrative process it's the getting the paperwork together the
presentation getting approved and then like for instance today we have a meeting that's
needs to be posted or approved today right for duncan economic development committee
so every week we're turning over the presentations and so now that we have
active projects in our pipeline we have over 25 projects um we need to be spending time with uh
boss building those projects and making sure they're moving out the door because we also
have two incentive proposals that we have to work on right now too that we need to put on the
meeting schedule so really just kind of figuring out when we're meeting and how often that we're
meeting okay so um so how can y'all how can y'all lighten your load with four boards six boards and
52 board members that you're helping like what what does that look like it's a good question um
in your dream world what does that look like somebody to handle all the paperwork
or not so many boards or what's the answer yeah i think it's just mostly
well i did get approved for a new position which i've been very excited about so i think they're
going to be able to help with um manding all of our board because i want to be able to talk to each
of our board members and listen to your concerns more right when i could be one-on-one um so with
that new position i think they're going to be able to help um but so i got anyone on my team want
to contribute to that well we did alternate the tourist one board and the dex so that they could
meet they meant alternating months so that really helps hold on it's okay so we have done some things
make some strides we have to have a tourist board uh it's required but tours too is the same edp
board except the two uh the developer representative and the county representative so that is very
streamlined to process just once a year right yeah that's typically once a year this last year
was twice because we had a big reimbursement but typically it's once a year right right so we'll
we'll think about that as far as goals if that's something that is that something this partnership
needs to address or is that more just internal department stuff right probably internal department
and then we'll take it to the board at some point okay so what do we need to put the accelerator on
marketing promotion of them to site selectors brokers do y'all do a developer's day here
do a fan tour developer then you know okay i'm on a mission i just had this conversation friday
with a economic developer in your region i'm on a mission to bring this back um almost nobody in
texas is doing this do y'all know what i'm talking about when i say a developer's day
yeah he does something adult spam tours familiarization force for certain things but not
a developer not for developers so um i don't know why this has not caught on in texas but um
louisville did the best job i've ever seen um and um cedar hill is doing this right now
and uh i don't know who else but what it is huh so life is doing it okay so it looks different
like different places but looks different things different places but basically it's a bus
that the economic development group says we're going to charter a bus and we're going to invite
all the area business developers builders brokers real estate agents we're going to put them on a
bus and we're going to take them to all the industrial sites commercial sites residential
whatever we're going to take them all around the town and we're going to show them all the
available property and we're going to give them a little cheat sheet book that has all the property
the prices the square footage who's listed it and it's just to show everybody what we're trying to
get in certain places so maybe it's a vacant building in downtown we're trying to get a
bakery in here we're trying to put a manufacturing facility in this industrial park uh but it comes
with a tour a meal q a and a take-home booklet of science you know project like others really the
perfect definition of what the public private partnership is supposed to do yes yeah that's
like the definition textbook definition of the the website and the public side coming together
collaboratively that this is why then yeah you're describing it like and you don't have to recreate
this there's other cities and other states that are doing fantastic jobs of this and you just go
copy one and recreate it like is that something that but that answers this question right here
promoting death in separate groups leave what's your perspective from uh you already know i don't
think you're going to get guys to come with that right they're going to the guys who are really
you're going to get the junior guys you may be doing somebody says hey go i think it's something
that was put together digitally for that and said specifically looking for you know i just
but somebody called me to go down so yeah we've looked at and map right and aerials or street view
you can walk the side if you want to walk back and sit in my office i have three screens and a 16
screen in front of my desk look at everything i need to look at i think it's maybe figuring out
a way to communicate what the needs are like for example selfishly like melon mushroom buildings
they've been out of business for a while so really pulled out a tough building you know
getting that you know the public private the city says hey we got an idea we'd love to have
this kind of user downtime we're open to this building right and you just host it right there
yeah we'll just get it out digitally building those kind of things i just know the brokers
that we did with our vows that are marketing our big industrial tribes they're not they're not
in front of me yeah you know so it's got to be a new creative way to get that out there some kind
of visually in front of them where it's not just what it's massive yeah so i don't know the answer
but i just we've done those bus tours christina remember we used to do those years ago and how
was your attendance on those um so yeah yeah and i think it really does you're right it really
does depend on what the product is okay when i flugerville did the best i've ever seen but
that was 2008 yeah and it was all rolled nothing was built in flugerville yet and they had just
finished the 130 you know toll road so that was a different product and secret hills a different
product too so um okay that is a little bit different maybe business round table
but uh it's where they have a panel 82 panels and they really get a heavy hitter panelists and
and it's a ticketed event that you're in and out of an hour and a half and then you sign up
for the bus tour afterwards if you want oh okay excellent spaces and then you can get on bus
but the panels are talking about all the properties what side conditions what's exciting that's
happening and community what developments are coming in how many housing starts
and then yeah that's cool if you want and then the bus tour isn't really we're going to show you all
the available properties we're going to take you around we're going to show you what all is happening
what's under construction right and big projects that are underway and that really builds excitement
around investing okay they started it during covalent events were okay what are y'all calling
that business roundtable i wonder if we could do that after the day county press up and that
were in houston with the dallas business journal and city it's very nice it's got a similar feel
to it as that event will have i think um so you could tack on it's going to be like august
details aren't out yet sure y'all we'll get that yeah
okay who's hosting that yeah business journal and unity and then partners at city and then dallas
business journals and oh that's the number one news out probably we'll stick guys
so gals please just turn forward because it's the most problem y'all are co-hosting that
you and you and just the paper yes okay that's another good example of collaboration
right that's something august the 26th
okay and a city sponsor actually there's also a biz now and the county summit that's going to be
in may and so the judge judgy is going to be the keynote speaker so that'll be that's the way we're
trying to get our name out and but mostly we also building relations with this now on the dvj because
they've been featuring business more often so we've got more leads from um those articles
okay all right so a lot of good stuff on um on marketing uh what's working so well with
the big celebrator on expanded bre or bre program has been successful with several expansions
um but putting the gas pedal on that they also providing senate to peterville um for a supplier
in gentau uh opportunity to incorporate improvement of suppliers and their current
strategy retention uh and then entrepreneur support our chapter 3a policy includes an
entrepreneur grant there's an opportunity to update and expand that what does that look like
so mckinney has got a really great program called the innovation fund so it's fun it's like a matching
grant for businesses that one sbr sbir grant for sense of small business innovation research grants
so the federal government has like seven branches where they're uh constantly looking at new
technology that help with new technology in those sectors and so um mckinney that will provide a 50
minimum 50k matching grant for the sbr grants so um i think that was a catalyst for mckinney to
actually how many businesses did that i wanted to be sort of small i remember this was back in the
day i haven't done research over the past year but um it was pretty successful i think they had 25
businesses they recruited within the first three years so 25 businesses split up the 50 grand and
they're all kind of startups but i think it really put mckinney on the map and that was back in 2016
when i was with the city of arlington because i remember being a little bit envious of what they
were doing but there's ways that we can be creative to do something similar okay all right what are
what do y'all think about is that something of interest not an entrepreneur when you can't do
everything so we got to be thinking tonight when we leave here in a minute you're going to be
thinking about what's going to make the cut for tomorrow and you just have to be smarter about
the stuff so how's that tied to like the research that universities are doing right it's not just
anyone that's like hey i won't start business it seems like more of a gamble yeah it should
be tied to the research and be like how do i commercialize some research at one of those
two universities that's right yeah that's really what you're people yeah exactly yeah
that way you're leveraging what they're all doing but all this just a little separate stuff yeah i
mean i can actually i could actually embed in a competition where the university is presenting
r&d stuff i use with your logistic stuff too and then a competition of you know who can build
something that uses this technology and r&d that we already have we just thought tough funding so we
bought back more money for research and development so that is so that we can locate in today yeah i
know we do some of the things when we present our business ideas you know people can invest in those
things but i think if it comes with some backing from my pro texas i'll say look this has proven
there is a marketing plan here i'd love to be able to be the best in this business you know but for
me it can't be just the way i got this idea right kind of like sharp thing right but if you had
something that came out of the university and said okay here's the marketing plan together it's been
tested you know it's in those categories that's right when just it's in five okay oh yeah that's
brand new time they shouldn't be tied to those yeah yeah but that's a that's a great uh tie-in
right there too and another one i mean i know this is for like you know smaller newer entrepreneurs
but another great tool is well i'll tell you more about tomorrow but a chamber actually created in
south georgia uh called the flex program it's like a shark tank but for high school seniors and
it's a now the whole state has adopted governor said we want to make it called statewide there
but it's a shark tank for high school um seniors and one more idea just because i read about it
yeah i don't know how big a problem it is that i notice there's a lot of small businesses people
are retiring they can't sell their small business yes it's the great tsunami right so how are we
selling those existing businesses with existing contracts everything else to the entrepreneur
instead of them thinking they got to create something totally new to make like it's like a
the maximum so to your point i know a guy who just bought a company business from a guy who had a great
company for years i thought scared me goes oh my gosh he's immediately making money
right i mean he's he's 28 years old that was bought this business but that's a great
challenge isn't their attention they got all these businesses they're about to buy them
they're seeing i'm not trying to talk to my dad about this right now there's some things you know
one university but there are others because my former institution was larger than the one on that
but that was done the stated up basically helping take over the city's piece of that
venture because between the partnership between business school and the law school
that helped the city that structure and because of what we did spending out research we did the
other side i mean thanks to the woman's been helped a lot to the women's leadership institute but that
has to figure folks we are not a research institution but you know having a structure
we're already doing that for faculty because we're spreading out business it's not if it's what you
need to do it's not the bigger job because we do one for other parts of it becomes a partnership
and you know it can be very well suited those kind of ventures to the city especially somebody
else to help us on the button and stuff and we tell you know it's very specific what it has to
go to you can't go to buildings and you know salaries and stuff like that it has to go to a
researcher so interesting you could say that because i went to a seminar two weeks ago about
somebody my work is that's three five years and it is a problem oh yeah and then a lot of lucrative
businesses out there that uh baby members don't know i'm sure what to do with i love that i love
that idea i think we can explore that tomorrow too and it doesn't have to be a university i mean
that's a great opportunity you can have a lot of times the dental practice or veterinary practices
but i did the rural state side and i had a smaller setup
there's no rule that says the edp can't be the matchmaking service so you know
yeah so i love that i think that's a strike while the iron's hot kind of thing so
opportunity there okay bre expanded bre entrepreneurship board and then same thing
what do you think need to be the top two goals certified sites tech ecosystem recruitment funding
updating us in our policies everything y'all already said so oh and they're so nice to put
definitions on the back okay so the good news is a lot of the staff have the exact same perspectives
as the board so that's always a good sign that they have that same idea so in order to prepare
for tomorrow so i need you to come in the room tomorrow we're going to start at eight o'clock
and i need you to come here with what you think your top two goals are we're not going to be able
to do everything so i want you to be thinking about uh improvement goal or retention goal
anything that you said take home your uh take home your handouts if you want to reference this
tonight but come tomorrow your top two or three or whatever you think are the top things you can
take pictures of the plug charts on the walls we'll make sure everything's represented i think
everything's open so you can take pictures of all this um but just remember y'all have limited
resources limited time money souls to get to work here and so if we're gonna we're gonna narrow this
down to three to seven goals tomorrow i want to hear what you think they are i know you put them
on the handouts but uh i'm prepared tomorrow to make some decisions and argue for your opinion on
some of those things any questions last night questions will be uh suspend the meeting for today
if you use the proper terminology
we will adjourn that we posted to you okay oh they did those two okay okay well then you will
adjourn okay so closing comments uh dean you candidate for this evening six thirty or seven
start time of senior what senior rec center candidate for okay in a form should be crazy
okay anything else so what let me tell them on thursday please credit happens that's where
we're going to try to build a techie because the first step for us
all right no other comments i will adjourn this meeting at four fifty