Economic Development Authority Meeting   1/19/2021

So, can somebody put up the electronic meeting notice that I need to read?

Thanks, J.T.

All right, I got to move my...

Okay.

Notwithstanding any provision in the EDA Bylaws to the contrary as permitted under Albemarle County's Continuity of Government Ordinance Chapter 1283 of the 2020 Acts of the General Assembly and the resolution of this body adopted on April 21, 2020

We are holding this meeting by real time electronic means with no authority member physically present at a single central location.

All authority members are participating electronically.

This meeting is being held in accordance with Section six of the county's continuity of government ordinance.

All authority members will identify themselves and state their general physical location by electronic means during the roll call vote, which we will hold next.

This meeting is being recorded and will be uploaded to the county's website.

The public has real-time audio-visual access to this meeting over Zoom and real-time audio access over telephone, both as provided in the Lawfully Posted Meeting Notice.

is also invited to offer a live comment during the meeting's public comment period.

Comments are limited to three minutes and must be germane to matters on today's agenda.

The public is always invited to send you questions, comments, and suggestions to the authority through the county's Economic Development Office at any time.

All right.

No, no, no, no.

Director Munson is not here yet.

And Director Munson just popped in, so if you let me just put it in real quick.

There he is.

Yes, unfortunately, I have a really, really bad internet connection.

Yes.

Hi, this is Stuart Munson.

All right.

Thanks, Stuart.

All right.

So we have a quorum.

Do we?

Next is matters from the public.

Do we have any

I do not have anybody signed up.

And at this point, nobody has raised their hand.

No, sir.

All right, then we'll proceed.

And I think before we get to the approval of the minutes, this will give Jennifer was able to get us a

Sent out some additional minutes just a couple minutes ago.

Yeah, and if we could just quickly go around the room and explain who you are and your role on the EDA and where you're pointed from, that would be helpful as well.

I'd like to take a minute to introduce Nelsie Burch.

She's our Chief Financial Officer.

Nelsie and the Economic Development Office have been having conversations about what the EDAs do across the Commonwealth.

She sees this as being a partnership between finance and the county as it relates to bonds and relates to complex financial transactions that could happen in the future.

So Nelsie decided she'd like to be part of this group and listen in on what we're doing so that she can advise us with our long term strategies, as well as just provide financial support.

So Nelsie, if you would introduce yourself to the team here, to all the directors of the authority,

Awesome, Roger.

Thank you.

Hi, everybody.

Nelsie Burch here.

It's really nice to meet you all.

I have been with the county now seven months, I think, seven months.

So I've hit the ground running.

I've worked in larger cities, DC being the largest, Baltimore, Greensboro,

and Alexandria.

And I have some pretty decent experience with economic development.

And now that I'm in this capacity with being the CFO for the county, I really felt, and Roger and I, as he shared, that there's a greater connection that can be made and really leveraging the strategy behind both the county and the EDA and what can we do differently and potentially

Yeah, what can we do differently?

I want to see better because I don't know everything.

I'm fairly new to the inner workings, but it's really nice to be here and listen in and help out where I can.

So thank you for that, Roger.

Thanks, Nelsie.

I'll start off.

I'm Don Long.

I'm the chair of the authority.

I'm the at large member.

of the authority appointed by the board as opposed to a specific district.

And then I am a business lawyer here in Charlottesville for my day job.

So let's see.

I'm George Ray.

I am a real estate developer in Almora County.

Oh, I was appointed by Ned Gallagher.

Yes, hi, I'm Dave Shreve.

I represent the Jack Jewett District on the EDA appointed by Board of Supervisors, Diantha McKeel.

I serve as the secretary and treasurer on the current EDA.

Sure, I'm Kat Imhoff and I'm from the Samuel Miller District.

I work as the Senior Conservation Fellow for the Piedmont Environmental Council, but you'll hear me talk a lot about planning.

Back in the early 80s, I ended up, my final job as a planner for Albemarle County was head of Housing and Community Development, very different structure back in those days, but I'm always talking about the history.

I've moved in and out of Albemarle County a couple times, served quite a few years as a planning commissioner,

and I just returned to Albemarle County a year ago after being the head of Montpelier for seven years.

James Madison's home up the road, which is getting a little talk, a lot of talk these days about the constitution.

So I'm very interested in a very holistic and integrated economic development.

And this group is very impressive to me.

So look forward to working with you.

Sure.

I'm Steve McNaughton.

I run an investment firm locally.

I'm a UVA grad.

Stuart?

I'm Stuart Munson.

I was appointed by Donna Price and from the town of Scottsville.

I've worked in corporate product development for 25 years or so and currently working at UVA.

Good afternoon.

I'm Diantha McKeel.

I represent the Jack Jett Magisterial District on the Board of Supervisors.

And then our outside counsel, Jim Bowling.

Try it again, I'm Jim Bowling.

I'm in private civil practice in Charlottesville.

I represent a number of local government entities, including not only the EDA, but also the town of Scottsville.

All right.

Well, I think I assume you don't need to be introduced to the rest of the economic development team that you know all of them.

So so we'll move on from there.

Thank you for joining us and let us know if there's anything we can do.

So let's move on to the meeting minutes.

We have minutes from the November 17th meeting, the November 20th meeting and the December 15th meeting.

Is there a second?

I'll second.

All right.

All in favor?

Aye.

All right.

Second?

I'll second those.

All right.

All right.

So all the minutes are approved.

Thank you, Jennifer.

for putting those together.

And then the financial report, which I believe also went out with the last set of minutes.

Is that correct?

Yes.

Yeah.

So, Dave, if if you had a chance to glance at the most recent financials, we have a position relatively unchanged from the last meeting.

Our net revenues currently are thirty one thousand three twenty four thirty two.

We have two interest, on the revenue side, two interest, accrual of interest in our accounts that haven't been recorded yet from November and December.

It's likely that they'll be similar to recent accrual of interest, approximately $250 each, but those have yet to be recorded.

Our cash position,

Ending 12-31-2020, 7-19-409-34.

Yeah, I do know a little bit, George.

We connected Castle Hill Gaming with a developer who was building apartment complexes behind the Hyatt in Stonefield.

In fact, Supervisor McKeel was with us on the, I believe, the initial visit, and we were able to work with the developer to get them to not build just solely apartments, but to create office space.

As it stands now, the office construction and the apartments are being built.

They are nearing completion.

Castle Hill Gaming still has plans to move into that space and operate their business in an opportunity zone, which of course, gives them some tax breaks.

And if you read the footnote, we have made one payment to them thus far.

OK, any other questions or comments on the financials?

All right, thanks, Dave.

So on to the

Our annual meeting and election of officers.

I emailed earlier today.

I had intended to email earlier than today, but finally got around to it today.

And it looks like all of the current officers are willing to continue serving.

I did not have any

One else who jumped at the opportunity to step into an officer's role.

So in an effort to move things along expeditiously, I would offer the following slate of officers for

The board, I would be the chair, George would be the vice chair, and Dave would be the secretary treasurer.

Are there any additional nominations?

Hearing none, is there a motion to approve the slate of officers?

All right.

Any further discussion?

I don't know if you can have discussion on a slate of officers, so we'll move on.

So all in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed?

Hearing none.

All right.

Thank you.

Alright, so new business.

Thank you, Chair and fellow directors.

While J.T.

's getting the slide up, I'll just mention a couple of things.

One that may be of interest to you is had a little communication with some representatives of Holistic Industries, the folks that you voted to write a letter of support for, and they are expecting the state to make an announcement sometime in March.

We don't know who the actual recipient of the license will be, but Holistic Industries said they expect to hear something in March.

So today's director's report is a little different than what you may have experienced.

We're not asking for any action today, but to be completely transparent, we are setting you up for action in the future.

We're gonna provide a little history about what's happening at the global level, the national level, the state level, and locally as it relates to the economy and what our plans are to overcome some of those issues and how we're gonna continue with Project Enable, one of those strategies.

But I think at the end of this, you know, we'll have a calling for support and I'll explain what that means at the end.

But the general idea is we want to set the stage so that you see how everything is in context, where we're going as a community, why we're going that way, and then ask for the EDA director support moving forward and we'll kind of explain what that is.

So J.T.

's going to kick us off.

I'll talk about Venture Central.

And then next month, Steve Allshouse is going to come by and share with us his economic forecast.

Yeah, and before I get started, can I just confirm everybody can see the PowerPoint presentation slide?

Okay, great.

So like Roger said, next month Steve Valshouse is going to be coming to the EDA meeting in February.

Tomorrow, he will be giving a presence that

Same presentation to the board.

That's something you could stream online if you're interested in seeing that.

And the economic information we're going to look at is kind of just a very, very light version of the kind of detail that Steve's going to get into.

So we will very quickly go through this information.

This is just kind of meant to give us a quick look at what the past year has been and where we could be going in the future.

So just quickly looking at the global economic forecasts.

These are two

tables that show globally that there will be a, it's projected there'll be a long road to recovery.

And so on the left-hand side, you see a forecast from the World Bank about real GDP for the entire world.

And then the information on the right-hand side shows some of the world's largest economies

And while the rebound to real GDP growth rates that are more common, there is a much longer road to recovery for levels of employment.

And so if you look at the very far right hand side of the screen, you see that the expectations to reach pre-pandemic levels of unemployment for most of the world's economies reach into the year 2023.

And so that's a theme that we'll be seeing as we go through this information.

Another thing we wanted to point out that seems to be consistent around the world is impacts both within sectors as well as across sectors.

So on the left-hand side here, you see within the consumer goods, within the tech industry, different levels of impact for different types of goods.

On the right-hand side, you can see that not all economic sectors were impacted in the same way.

There are some sectors that have had relatively little impact, whereas others have had a much higher impact.

And so some of those higher impacts around the world are manufacturing and wholesale and retail trade.

But, you know, within those specific sectors, you have different impacts as well.

So I'll come back to that theme in just a second at the national and state level, but I did want to talk about, you know, shortly after the last CDA meeting, Congress passed and the President signed the latest COVID-19 relief bill.

And this slide comes from one of our partners, Retail Strategies, who did a really nice summary of this bill.

And if the EDA is interested in this presentation or the next one, be happy to send that out.

But in dark green,

You see the levels of spending that were included in the original CARES Act.

And then in light green, you see the latest relief bill.

So that latest relief bill was $900 billion.

And the biggest buckets of spending were the same as the CARES Act from back in March.

Unemployment benefits, direct payments to Americans, support for small businesses,

It was different in some areas in education.

It more than doubled the amount of funding there.

There was relatively more for broadband access and rental assistance.

But it's a great presentation, just wanted to note that and you all have probably heard that President Elect Biden has proposed another relief or stimulus bill that's much larger than that $900 billion

It totaled 1.9 trillion.

And so we'll be keeping track of that.

This last bill did not include any aid to state and local governments.

So the authority is very familiar with a lot of the grant programs we ran through the end of last year.

There's no additional funding coming from this last bill, but perhaps there may be more coming in the new administration.

So really quickly, looking at the state of Virginia, here are some slides from VEDP, our state level partner.

This is a slide of the monthly unemployment rate, showing that Virginia fared relatively well as compared to the rest of the United States.

A similar impact and recovery, but not as large of an impact.

Statewide, each region had some variation in the level of impact.

Central Virginia, their unemployment rate is negative 7.6% between February and September.

The statewide average was very close to that, negative 7.8%.

Some of the hardest hit sectors are shown here, and indeed,

You know, the state has been ringing the alarm about impact to these sectors.

And this was a big part of our first lift grant to businesses in our area.

But tourism, restaurants, hospitality, they've had a significant economic impact and that's reflected by their employment impacts.

So leisure and hospitality down over 20%.

since February 2020.

There have been a couple of sectors that have increased construction and retail.

Hey J.T., can you go back a slide?

Let me just add a little tidbit that may be of interest.

One of the things our Chief Financial Officer did, Nelsie, when she came in, is took a look at some of the information we shared with our rating agencies.

I think it's Standards and Poor's and Moody's.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Part of that work included looking at our hospitality and tourism sector.

So we worked with the CACVB director and actually chair that board to determine what the actual economic impact of the tourism industry is in our community.

And the most latest numbers as created by the Virginia Tourism Corporation, the VTC, was over $400 million annually.

Repeat that.

The leisure and hospitality sector in our community has over a $400 economic impact on our community.

That's a lot of money coming from outside our community into our community.

So the return of the tourism and hospitality industry is critical to our long term economic recovery.

Yeah, absolutely.

Really quickly to wrap up this section before we get to Roger's presentation.

The VEDP, similar to the World Bank and S&P Global and Oxford Economics, which we were looking at earlier,

They're forecasting the same long road to economic recovery in terms of employment.

Virginia is expecting it will be the latter half of 2023 before we reach pre-pandemic levels of employment.

Their presentation does include these four strategic areas where they see opportunities and what I want to draw attention to is this third bullet here that talks about telework transition opportunities with a special focus on small metro areas.

This is referring to that same macroeconomic trend that we've heard about from some commercial real estate research firms and people who are expecting some substitution effect for workers that are currently in major metro areas that may be looking for a higher quality of life, perhaps a lower cost of living in a smaller metro area.

Charlottesville, Central Virginia, certainly being one of those within the Commonwealth that may experience that shift going forward.

Some of you may have heard of the pandemic referred to as the Great Accelerator, and these are four themes that they're expecting to see

and opportunities that they want to seize as a result of the pandemic's impact.

So Steve's going to talk about the local economy next month, like we said, but just to tie it back, you know, since the pandemic began, the authority is familiar with what we've been doing in response.

Our participation in Project Rebound, which was the community's plan,

to maintain the economy during the pandemic.

We've been doing multiple rounds of lift grants for businesses, community lift grants for nonprofits.

We did safe spaces to help

ensured there were safe built environment for people to engage in commerce.

And then lastly, we've been working on our buy local campaign, which will continue into 2021.

But those were unexpected departures from Project Enable and our long term plan.

Yeah, thank you J.T.

And so a little bit of history for those of you who weren't around when we wrote the strategic plan called Project Enable.

One of the core functions that many economic development organizations do is actively recruit targeted industries.

And that means that we would go to trade shows or locations where they're holding conferences, tell those targeted industries about our community, why they should locate here, and try to recruit them back into Albemarle County.

When we went out and sought community engagement, our community said, listen, we don't really want you doing that.

If a business comes knocking on our door and it fits with what stands for our community, we'll gladly accommodate those businesses and we'd encourage you to provide them information.

But otherwise, we want to help grow our existing businesses and leverage our intellectual capital.

So what we're talking about today is Venture Central, but it's really a strategy to leverage the intellectual capital in our community that's coming from UVA research, that's coming from the large number of graduate degrees in our community, from our craft and technical folks who are in our community, as well as just the students that are produced on a regular recurring basis out of UVA.

Just an abundance of intellectual capital here.

And here is the county strategy to

really take advantage of that differentiator.

You see a couple buildings here from left to right.

The one on the right is 1717 in Richmond, and what these are are iconic places where innovation, entrepreneurship can take place.

It turns out to be a singular location, a front door, if you will, and that will be important as we go into the history of this presentation.

J.T., if you'd go to the next slide, please.

So when we talk about Venture Central, who is it really?

Venture Central is a collaboration between the county, Charlottesville, and UVA originally.

The three of us got together and recognized that we need a cohesive plan as we could accomplish more collectively than individually.

Later on, we invited the chamber to be part of it, and you'll see the role they're playing moving forward.

So in 2017, Go Virginia was launched, and they created a regional plan for everyone.

The plan for our particular community was called a growth and diversification plan.

And it had target industries and a lot of things we should do for economic development.

One of those recommendations was to create an innovation highway.

I don't know if you can hear our Great Danes out back.

I apologize profusely for that.

I don't know what's going on.

Anyway, they suggested that we take advantage of all the intellectual capital, particularly in Charlottesville and UVA.

So in 2019, the Friends of Venture Central submitted a Go Virginia application for a grant as a planning grant.

We hired a consultant group called Camoin and Camoin presented a result that I'd like to cover with you.

J.T., if you would go to the next slide.

So, Des Moines said you need a governance structure.

You need a 501c3 to serve as governor.

They recommended a 13-member board, three advisory committees.

Next slide, J.T.

They also recommended a space for people to meet, collaborate with structured programming.

They recommended hiring three employees.

Next slide, J.T.

And in those three employees, they said it cost about $750,000 a year and they had a complete

business and financial model for us to move forward.

Long term, they say it, or at least in the interim, you're going to need support from the state, local governments, corporate university, and at least $350,000 annually to make this thing sustainable.

So that was what was in the Camoin report.

The Friends of Venture Central got back together and said, OK, here's what the consultant said.

Do we agree with this or not?

And then where we may have nuanced differences, let's talk about those.

So the Friends of Venture Central, sorry, the Go Virginia board handed it off to us, us being the Friends of Venture Central.

Next slide please J.T.

And what we noticed was some nuanced differences between what we thought was important in our community and what the consultant said.

One thing that we noticed in our community is there are a lot of people doing a lot of great things in the innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem.

There's Siebert, there's Charlottesville Angel Network, there's CavAngels, there's Sevo Biohub, there's CIC, there's SBDC, and there's just more.

There's just a lot of people doing a lot of great things in our community, but it sort of lacks a little coordination and a little fragmenting sometimes in how all of those folks work together.

We also agreed that there needed to be a front door, an iconic place.

If someone wants to start a business, they don't know exactly where to go, we thought it was important to create a front door for anyone who has an idea and wants to take it from cradle to grave to see if it can be a business or not.

After the report came out, and while we were studying it, there became a demand by the legislators to focus on innovation and entrepreneurship.

In fact, the Commonwealth created their own innovation and entrepreneurship department, if you will.

And Go Virginia, the folks who gave us the planning grant, said yes, we want to focus on innovation and entrepreneurship, particularly in our targeted sectors.

And then something else that was unique or was new was the university, the county, and the city's economic development functions were all working together collaboratively.

All that being said, J.T., if you'd go to the next slide, we decided we would want what we want Venture Central to be to be defined by widely recognized as the best small community for startups in the US.

So if you want to know what we're trying to achieve, it's that.

It would be really hard for this community to compete with Silicon Valley or San Francisco or Boston.

We just don't have the same amount of resources, but we do believe we have enough resources in our community to be the best in the U.S. for a small community, and that's our goal.

So how are we gonna do that?

We're gonna create Venture Central.

It's gonna be a focused, intentional initiative to spur start-up success, job growth, and investment.

Next slide, J.T.

We agreed with many things the consultant said that there needed to be a front door.

We believed it needed to be at a convenient preeminent location.

We believed it needed concierge services.

There's a lot of other service providers in our community.

We don't want to be redundant with those.

We want to tell them where to go to access this information.

We'd like to have a connected network, which includes entrepreneurs and residents, co-location of support organizations, shared meeting space.

We also want some targeted programming, such as incubators, accelerators, mentoring, and pitch nights.

That last portion is where we may get an ask for this particular authority.

We know that there's a lot of skill on this particular board, and we'd like to tap into that, particularly as it relates to maybe participating in some of the events we're talking about.

Next slide, please, J.T.

So now we have this idea and we wanted to share it with the community.

We socialized this concept with many folks, all the folks in the ecosystem we mentioned, folks who were involved with equity and inclusion, other nonprofit organizations.

And I'll just characterize this by saying all of the organizations unanimously agreed that this is something our community needs.

They were some caveats to each one of those folks that we spoke to in terms of their special interests.

For example, if you're a nonprofit focused on diversity and inclusion, they wanted to know more about how are we going to target communications and how we're going to make sure this is an inclusive place.

If you're an existing nonprofit, they were concerned about competing for the same levels of funding.

If you're already working in the ecosystem, is this something that's going to be like an overall umbrella for the organization?

So they had some concerns, and we listened to those concerns.

And I think we've designed a program that acquiesces all of those.

So if you'll hit the next slide, J.T.

In 2020, we met with the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce and asked them to accept an important role in Venture Central.

We asked them to form a committee to look and study what we were proposing, and ultimately asked to use their 501c3 for Venture Central governance.

They agreed to do so.

So what does that mean, J.T.?

If you go to the next slide, it means that the chamber is going to serve as the governing body for Venture Central.

They're going to allow the use of their 501c3.

They're going to create a private sector led board of directors.

The executive director search is going to start soon.

In fact, you'll probably start hearing about this in about a month or so.

And the reason is we received a $300,000 grant from Go Virginia to launch this program.

It required city and county contribution, which the Economic Development Office has created or is contributing to.

And then next, we're going to seek private funds.

The goal is not to make this thing

contingent on public funds in perpetuity, but we wanted to have a sustainable business model.

And so we're gonna ask the executive board at some point for Venture Central to create their own funding model.

It doesn't mean we won't have to contribute over the coming years.

It just means we expect to wing that off until it's ready.

So here is kind of how we see the overall space.

Venture Central is not being redundant or duplicating anyone's existing efforts.

So if you're a nonprofit organization or you're a community partner, we're not duplicating that.

If you're an education like PVCC and you already have existing training, we're not duplicating what they're doing.

or founders if you're an existing founder of companies.

We're asking you to be part of this.

We're not asking to duplicate what you're doing.

If you're part of Cav Angels or Charlottesville Angel Network, keep doing what you're doing.

That's great work.

We've just got a place for you to conduct business now.

The point being is it's additive, not repetitive, and it is intended to serve the glue to sort of catalyze all of these folks working together.

And up in the top left hand corner, you'll see I highlighted incubators and accelerators because I wanted you to see the types of things that are happening in our community now and where you may get involved at some point as a director for the Economic Development Authority.

J.T., if you just go to the next slide, please.

On the top side of this, you'll see a picture.

J.T., if you could just hover over that to make sure we know whatever we're talking about.

That's just a picture of inside the License and Ventures Incubator.

This is located next to Cardinal Hall.

I don't know if you've been there yet or not.

This place today is primarily meant to serve folks who have a relationship with the University of Virginia, meaning if you're a professor, you're a student, if you're a graduate, those types of things, you can use this space with right amounts to free.

They give help with intellectual property patents and so forth, and they provide some other support services.

But if you're outside the university system, there's a rental fee associated with that.

But that's the incubator we currently have in place in our community.

We would expect that Venture Central will have also meeting space that incubation can take place as well.

Now I just want to pause just a minute and talk about the difference of incubation and accelerator programs.

An incubator is not really a business yet.

It's an idea that needs to be vetted, determined if it's financially feasible, go through a proof of concept before it can be expanded into a real live business.

An accelerator program provides programming to an existing business.

meaning you've gone through all the incubation, you've got some finances behind you, you have an employer too and you need some mentoring, you need access to venture capital, you need some coaching, you need some folks like attorneys who need to help guide these folks on the best way to set up their corporations and so forth.

And so we have an existing accelerator program today and it's called Catalyst.

Catalyst provides $20,000 in grant funding.

It provides nine months of programming, and it also provides mentoring, coaching, and counseling from funders and founders who have done this before.

The way you get into Catalyst is going through an application process.

That application process is vetted by investors.

They listen to your business plan and they determine whether or not in their mind if a company is successful, it's investment worthy.

If it is investment worthy and there's enough room and enough funding, these existing businesses go into this mentoring program and nine months later the idea is these businesses will be in better shape to be a viable business and turn into a brick and mortar business in our community.

On the bottom, I just wanted to give you a spattering of the types of businesses that are in this program.

You'll see Cardboard Live.

Apparently, their Twitch TV and YouTube TV and streaming is pretty hot in today's world, and people watch other people playing games.

Cardboard Live provides analytics for existing games on those types of streaming activities.

The best analogy I can provide would be when you're watching a football game, you'll see the third down percentage for third and eight is

of accepting it is like 28%.

Or you'll see the likelihood of making a 50-yard field goal is 48%.

You'll see analytics of that nature.

Cardboard Live provides that same level of detail for card games that are being played live on stream and being watched.

It's a growing area and it's one of the folks who have been in the Catalyst program.

Data Classroom provides data from macro level data, really just consolidates that and provides information to teachers so they can provide better education.

Icarus.

It was founded by a gentleman who had bad knees.

He was tired of bad knee braces.

He created his own knee brace.

Apparently this knee brace is better than what's out in the market and he's now trying to figure out how to scale it up and produce it and see if it can be financially feasible.

The last company you see at the bottom is Litos.

Litos creates bio-fungicide.

It's a non-chemical way of treating, you know, things in our community like grapes and apples and so forth.

It's still being tested, but it looks like it has high potential.

So you may not have heard of any of these businesses today, but the general idea is they're in our pipeline, our county, our city, and University of Virginia are helping grow them.

So next slide, if you would, J.T.

So what do we want Venture Central to do for our community?

We want it to foster startups, we want it to attract funders and founders, and ultimately we want to create companies that can stay in our community, grow here, and create jobs in Central Virginia.

So why did we spend the time talking about all this?

Well, because this concept has been two years in the making, and now it's coming to fruition.

Some of you may remember pre-COVID that you were involved in some of these activities when we were just talking about them.

And we would like for the EDA to be involved moving forward once this has passed the pandemic and we launch Venture Central.

Specifically, we would like the directors to consider connecting startups to people.

Many of you are well connected.

Many of you know folks that can help these companies.

We would like you to consider providing mentoring and coaching.

Perhaps as we go through this process there's a business or two that interests you.

You are very experienced folks.

We'd like you to consider doing that.

Our team brings to you all plans and strategies and you all provide feedback to us.

We'd like you to continue to do that as it relates to Venture Central.

We may ask this EDA for financial support.

We don't know what programming's fundable, what's not, but we may come to you at some point and ask you to contribute some funds to this innovation and entrepreneur ecosystem.

We'd like you to actively participate, meaning that there are gonna be, there are meetings, there are networking events, there'll be pitch nights, there'll be, you may wanna be a judge on some of these events, those sorts of things.

And lastly, we just ask for your visible support.

Meaning that if you think what we're doing is a good idea, we'd like for you to maybe write a letter of support when it comes time for the board to decide on finances or at the Go Virginia to provide additional funding, or it may just be speaking at an event and invisible support.

So you're very important and influential people in our community and we'd very much like you to help support Venture Central as part of the county strategy for economic development.

Again, we're not recruiting businesses, we're growing our own.

We now have a system in place to take an idea from ideation to proof of concept.

to acceleration to a full-fledged business.

And hopefully, as many of you are aware, J.T.

and our team is working on creating site-ready locations in the county so these businesses have a place to directly grow into.

So that is sort of the system that we have in place.

And I'll just pause here and see if you have any questions for me and J.T.

I've got one.

That's me, Dave.

Thanks, Roger.

One of the things you said caught my attention and that was that regarding the effort to avoid duplication of services provided by other entities in the community.

It strikes me, however, that one of the key steps in transforming this kind of an effort

at growing things here at home and keeping that growth in some ways here at home would be to connect any new ventures with potential employees who already live here.

And therefore, I immediately thought of an entity like PVCC as having a critical role in that.

Is there a recognition of that

Yes and yes.

PVCC has representation on the Go Virginia regional board.

So they were part of the vetting process as we received the plan as well as approving this particular venture central business plan, if you will.

Yeah, I think hopefully, I think we called them Workforce.

I can't remember what we characterized them, but there's more than just PVCC.

There's KTEC, there's UVA.

Yeah, if you will see

Maybe it's under education and perhaps talent development.

Maybe that's why it's not so clear there.

Okay, yeah, I see why that question came up.

Yeah, the short answer is they have been involved in it.

At this juncture, though, it's been all about conceptual ideas.

We've not invited them, quote, to the table, if you will, Dave.

It's been, until we had funding, there was really nothing to talk about in that regard.

It is.

In particular, for one reason that typically entities like that in the education sector do best when they have a little lead time on what lies ahead and what's in the development pipeline instead of reacting to it when it becomes a reality.

And then it takes them a couple of years to catch up and

Yeah, and David, I should share this with you.

We met with Valerie Palomanto way back a year or so ago when this was just a nugget of an idea, and she's leaving the organization, and we just met with her replacement, and I just can't remember her name.

Doctor or somebody.

Maybe someone can Google that and help, but so we have made her aware of this particular program and a desire for PVCC to be engaged, but I just can't remember her name off the top of my head.

I'm a little embarrassed by that.

But we'll do more if you think that's appropriate.

Roger, where do things stand on a location?

It sure is.

And the plan as it stands right now is to create the board first and then immediately start looking for the executive director and let the board be part of that hiring decision for the executive director.

And then the first charge for the executive director

Yeah, that's a really good question.

And it's been a combination of things.

Primarily, we're seeking funders and founders.

While government does a lot of things well, moving quickly is not necessarily one of those.

Everyone is in agreement this needs to be private sector led and public sector supported.

So we're seeking folks who have private industry experience as either a funder or a founder primarily.

They've either been through this process and know what it takes, or they've helped other organizations through there.

So there's no ex officio members, if you will.

And we don't have a number on board size or anything of that yet.

In fact, the Friends of Venture Central plan to get together next week to begin talking about what's the best way to create a board.

The only thing that we know that we agree on is that it needs to be a diverse board.

Other than that, there's been, hey, we don't know, 7, 9, 11, 13, we have to see what best fits our community.

We all agree to.

It's a long-winded answer we're saying.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a really good question.

And you may have noticed that we have tried different strategies from an economic development office perspective.

We're working with existing developers to create space for these folks.

You may have saw the Albemarle Business Campus and what was created in that particular opportunity zone.

We also

are working with a developer in downtown Crozet to create a Class A office space.

You may have heard about some recent purchases.

We're working with different developers to talk about the future of those places and what we may be able to create.

So, you know, generally speaking, when a company gets funded, it's usually

They're asked to relocate to where those funds are.

Like if you're funded by Silicon Valley, the funders usually want you in that particular area.

So what we have to create here, Stuart, is a complete ecosystem where we have funding here locally so that these businesses can stay in our community.

So it's not just physical space, it's also local funding so that these folks can stay in our community.

Roger, can I add just really quickly to that information, I would just want to plug, you know, Jennifer, as a part of our business retention program meets with businesses that are

All the time.

And to Director Shreve's point about having a little bit of lead time, I think we have an advantage in finding out what the issues are for companies that are growing and at a high potential to leave and then figuring out how do we put our best face forward to keep them here, whether it's space,

whether it's workforce, whether it's other types of support and just want to make sure that the authority knows that Jennifer does that on an ongoing basis.

I guess a question about the Center for Developing Entrepreneurs, how this fits in

Yeah.

Yeah.

In fact, we've been in contact with Rob Archer, who is the one who's overseeing.

So if you know it, let me back up just a minute.

So the code building from about the fourth floor up is going to be occupied with businesses.

The first couple of levels, however, will be sort of open to the public.

They're creating space where they can be co-working space, if you will.

One of the more difficult things about this is they're asking about $40 a square foot and when you're bootstrapping as a business, it's very hard to afford that level of

of rent and leasing.

So there's some things we need to work through about the ultimate location, but that's one location that would be considered for Venture Central, Kat.

When we met with Wil Fashay many moons ago, the original idea was that it was gonna be for Jaffrey's Companies, if you will, at the code building, but now they've sort of opened it up and said, we're gonna have coworking space.

And interestingly enough about that building is they're gonna have space that can be used for

For the public, it's going to be both theater, conference meeting space, and a lot of other cool things.

We're getting a private tour a couple of days through the chamber.

And so that's on the radar screen.

We're in touch with those folks.

And I don't know if that will be the location.

There's just a lot of expense associated with that building.

Hey, Stuart, I cut you off.

No, no, sir.

Oh, thanks, Stuart.

And by the way, J.T.

found the name is Dr. Christy Hawkins.

Any other questions for Roger?

No, this is it.

This is what we wanted to show you was happening, and I know you may not get excited about this kind of thing, but I can assure you I do.

It's pretty cool.

This is two years of behind-the-scenes work that you never knew was going to happen or not, and it's happening in our community, and we're going to have a system

that can leverage all the differentiators we have in our intellectual capital.

It's really going to provide a continued source of job growth and companies.

Now, you know, our community is not the largest in the world.

So if it becomes an Apple or an Amazon, it's unlikely that they would rest here, but they would be here for a period of time when they go through that, as you can imagine.

And I feel like we've built Steve Jobs garage here and it's about to launch.

It's a great program.

All right.

I'd like to make one general comment about what we're likely to hear from Steve and what Roger and J.T.

presented here.

And that is that my own thinking is that the forecasts are too pessimistic.

I think the softness that we'll see in the economy and you can

you can see this from the charts pretty readily are associated with entities like the hospitality industry that we know a lot about that are frozen in ice, retail that's connected to that frozen in ice sector.

And then sadly, I think avoidable repercussions from austerity at state and local government level.

And I think that's gonna change pretty rapidly.

Sort of along those lines I wanted to bring this up and I don't know, it's not exactly within our wheelhouse but obviously vaccine distribution is a huge part of us getting back to normal and the fact that getting that vaccine distribution

out is an economic development issue.

And I don't know if there's anything, I know the health department is working very hard to do that, but I also know that they are extremely stretched thin and to the extent, I don't know that there's anything this group can do to support that effort.

And I see Doug has joined us, maybe he's aware of something.

I would just say that I certainly would be in favor of

The EDA doing whatever it can if there is something we can do.

Well, I was late to this meeting because I was in a vaccine meeting, so the timing is good in that respect anyway.

There is a lot of work as you would expect is going on behind the scenes to support the work of the regional health district in its efforts to be in the best possible position to deliver the vaccines as they arrive into our community.

Part of that effort is about identifying the volunteers that are needed both to administer the shots as well as to do the call taking and the paperwork.

It's quite a lift.

At this point, I think that work is going very well.

And again, there's a structure that's being developed also, not just in the county, but within the region to kind of help move this vaccine through in the order in which the CDC has provided the guidance, right?

The 1A's and the 1B's now is what's being discussed.

But so I say that just to say that I will certainly, I appreciate very much you identifying yourself as an entity, as wanting to be part of the solution.

That is absolutely what it is that is gonna, I think, make the biggest difference in our ability to be successful as a region.

You probably know the extent to which that BamaWorks has underwritten the cost of the Kmart site.

And they actually have already received donations to BamaWorks for that work that has already paid for their upfront investment.

And so to the extent that that's an economic development lift from this community, maybe it's that type of thing where the EDA, as the situation evolves, we can identify areas where you can participate in that.

A lesson until that comes I think right now is patience, understanding and awareness of how complicated this really is.

Listen to the board meeting on Wednesday afternoon when the health director will be presenting to the board of supervisors.

giving an update on where we stand as a region with respect to our infrastructure to deliver the vaccine and the vaccine itself.

That should be very enlightening.

And then I'll obviously take note of your offer on behalf of all of your colleagues here.

and then keep you posted if in fact that there's a specific thing that we think that the EDA could do.

I'm not aware of it, but this is what's going to make a difference is our ability to come together as a community.

Thanks.

Phase 1B includes essential employers and we've had some small businesses reach out to us and say, am I an essential employer?

Am I included in Phase 1B?

I think one thing we can do is try to provide a referral to the right information and the Blue Ridge Health District does have a quiz that small businesses can take that will prompt them through questions that will help them understand what phase they're included in.

All right so now on to unfinished business.

My screen keeps moving.

I apologize.

So I couldn't find my unmute button.

So this is just kind of a status update in terms of the Woolen Mills Performance Agreement.

And just to bring everyone up to date, this was the million dollars that the Board of Supervisors and this authority invested with Brian Roy down at the Broadway corridor for the purchase of a bridge.

and also public access to the bridge, some parking spots, and so it was a huge contribution to the county's trail system.

The bridge is coming along.

We went in in September and asked for an extension because of some delays that was given.

We had the foresight at that point since it was the third extension to give the authority to Jeff Richardson to make any necessary extension so long as the developer was making good faith efforts and progress.

That has been happening.

So Mr. Richardson did extend the deadline for the performance on that agreement to March 31st of this year.

He does have leeway to extend it till the end of September, I believe, of this year.

In terms of the bridge, it's my understanding they're down to a punch list of two items.

One is handrail.

It has to meet ADA requirements.

and so that I think it came up two inches short so that has to be adjusted.

And the other item is fasteners for the boards on the platform.

I think they have one fastener on each board and so they have to go through and add additional fasteners or make some changes.

So there's some minor things that, well,

I say they're minor, they're important because they have to get done in order to get the permit and we're not going to take a dedication of a bridge that isn't permitted.

So they're working on that.

Other things that Tim Padolino is working on is signage and trail development.

The agreement calls for a Class A trail.

And this is a learning experience for everyone.

I guess there's different types of Class A trails.

So they are working together to figure out what type of Class A trail is going to go where and how that's going to be developed.

But that's moving along.

Our experience with the developer, Mr. Roy is very cooperative and he wants to get this done and it's going to happen.

So we're real optimistic about that.

Just as a reminder, there is a draft deed of dedication to easement that is circulating.

It really is at a point right now where we're waiting to fine tune the details.

So that may take several months and a number of committee meetings.

But again, I have confidence that's going to get done and the bridge will be open in the next few months.

So that's the update on that.

I'll take and answer any questions.

I'd be delighted to do that.

I've been thinking about jumping off the Order Street parking lot.

Any further questions for Richie?

All right.

So on to other matters.

Are there any other matters that anyone wants to raise?

All right, hearing none, then we will adjourn until February 16th for our next meeting.

All right.

Thank you very much.