Economic Development Authority Meeting   6/21/2022

And there's John on.

So all right.

So I'll call the meeting to order.

And I think we have a quorum now.

So I will read our preamble.

Notwithstanding any provision in the EDA bylaws to the contrary, as permitted under Virginia Code Section 15.2-1413 and Albemarle County's continuity of government ordinance, 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.

All authority members will identify themselves and state their general physical location during the roll call, 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 the meeting over Zoom and real-time audio access over telephone, both as provided in the lawfully posted meeting notice.

The public is invited to offer live comment during the public comment period.

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

I would.

So let's see, Director Long.

and I don't know, did Director Mottola, did he make it?

There you go.

All right, so next is matters from the public.

And as I see, J.T.

is the only person listed as an attendee, so I'm presuming that he does not

need to speak.

So I guess we're without any members of the public today at this point.

So approval of the minutes.

All right.

Second.

All right.

Thank you.

All in favor?

Hi.

All right.

Minutes are approved.

Financial report.

Dave, is there anything you would like to you want to give the financial report?

It's the same numbers that we saw at our last meeting.

So there's only one note of updating related to our business today, but I'll just reiterate

where we stood at the last meeting and it's reflected in the current financial report ending April 30th, 2022, which was the same status we reported the last time.

In terms of our expenditures, FY22 through April 30th, a total of 422, 696 and 39 cents.

Incentives, excuse me, loan repayments, bond fees and interest, total 141,564.

Loan repayments include 12,023, 32 cents out of that total, leaving us a net

revenue of $269,108.34.

Now adding the pass-through revenues and expenditures, we have $427,044.71 of pass-through revenues through April 30th, current fiscal year, to go along with $23,425 in pass-through expenditures, leaving a net

Revenue of $3.91, $5.96, and $0.39.

That leaves us adding to our beginning of the year, fiscal year cash balance of 7-31-8-24-27 with a current cash position of 8-38-1-13-62.

Accounts payable are included in that and accounts receivable.

accounts payable $37,561.91, accounts receivable $21,363.21.

All right, any questions?

for Dave.

Hearing none, thank you, Dave.

Appreciate that.

So on to new business and the director's report.

Thank you, chair, members of the authority, as J.T.

pulls it up.

I think the first thing you may notice is we have a new face on the EDA meeting today.

Her name is Megan Gray.

Megan comes to us from Culpeper, where she currently resides.

She's a local there.

She went to school here locally in Virginia.

I'll let her provide some of the more detailed reasons why she was the best candidate and was hired.

But I'll share with you that she was athletic.

She played field hockey, including club field hockey when she was in college.

And she currently teaches, coaches a field hockey team in Culpeper today.

Sorry, I realized I was on mute.

Thank you, Roger, and good afternoon, everyone.

It's nice to virtually meet you all.

I look forward to one day meeting you in person, hopefully sooner than later.

Like Roger said, I'm Megan Gray.

I am a double Duke of James Madison University right over the mountain.

I joined the team about two weeks ago.

Before coming to Albemarle County, I was with VEDP as a Regional Talent Solutions Manager for the Northern Virginia area.

And before then, I was with the town of Culpepper

for a little over six years working in tourism economic development.

So collectively I have about seven years in the industry.

The reason why I chose Albemarle number one is close proximity to my hometown for sure, as well as a step in the right direction regarding growth in my career from a small town to a larger city slash county.

Specifically, the approach the county has taken in being intentional with Project Enable was a big selling point to me because community is very big to me.

As Roger mentioned, I'm involved heavily in the community here in Culpeper, in civic organization, as well as a couple local nonprofit organizations where I also sit on the board of.

I'm teaching high school.

I taught high school as well.

Coached field hockey at the high school level like Roger alluded to for the last three years.

And I also taught recreational gymnastics for a couple of years as I was a former gymnast myself.

I am a big proponent of education, leadership development and creating opportunities for future generations.

Well, great.

Thank you, Megan.

We appreciate you joining the team and we look forward to

Meeting you in person.

Thanks for joining.

Thank you.

Welcome aboard.

I will do that.

So good afternoon, everyone.

As of right now, well, as of May, the Board of Supervisors, they decided to continue the continuity of government ordinance until September.

So that's as the chair read in the preamble, we're still operating under that ordinance.

And that allows us to continue to meet virtually

It's anticipated that that will end as of September 1st.

I don't know if circumstances will change.

The projections seem to be positive.

So my expectation is that come September, we will no longer be under the continuity of government ordinance and we will have to be meeting in public at that point in time.

So that's the expectation.

In August, we will be presented with an opportunity to adopt a policy for remote electronic participation that will allow members to participate remotely for medical and for certain personal reasons.

And then we will also be presented with a policy that will mirror the

Virginia's FOIA statute, which allows totally virtual meetings, which this is a totally virtual meeting under certain circumstances.

And my recommendation will be that we reserve that for special meetings because there are a lot of restrictions on that.

So as of right now, we're continuing under the continuity of government ordinance.

I anticipate we'll do that for July if we have a meeting, and then August where we'll adopt the policies that will allow remote electronic participation.

Again, there's some restrictions on that, but no restrictions for medical reasons.

And then also the virtual meeting policy.

Those are two separate policies, but they are covered under FOIA now.

So that's kind of where we're at.

We would have those policies before you,

This month, but the legal staff is kind of between doing a long form policy for each public body

or a truncated form which will primarily just refer to the Virginia statutes and adopt them as, in this case, the EDA's policy.

So we don't have a recommendation right now.

To some extent, we're waiting for guidance from the Board of Supervisors.

I anticipate we will get that by the end of this month, certainly in July.

So we'll be in time to share that with all the,

And I accept that the debate is over whether we want our, I guess, our resident role.

So the EDA rules for us to be able to look at them and get an answer as opposed to

I guess non-lawyers going and having to take a second step and go to the Virginia Code.

But again, we're gonna see how the Board of Supervisors is gonna recommend a model policy and we'll just follow that.

All right, Roger.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, Roger.

And good afternoon, directors.

This is just a quick mention that the board took action unanimously to approve a rezoning amendment at Albemarle Business Campus last week.

This is a site where there's a

and existing and ongoing public-private partnership.

This particular amendment does not impact our partnership, but it does represent a significant increase in the investment in the site.

And we're thrilled that the developer took this through the process and will be hopefully taking it through the site plan process and having found a tenant, we hope in the near term,

The photograph shown on the slide is a rendering of what the building will look like.

There's a parking structure behind up to a 100,000 square foot building for biotech manufacturing.

And this would be biotech manufacturing that has not the chemical compounds that you might think of with Advil or ibuprofen, but things like the

like the COVID vaccine, like mRNA vaccines and other vaccines of that sort.

Thank you J.T.

and tell me if I misspeak because you've been working directly with Kyle most recently but these buildings, the one that you see rendered here has special HVAC systems, it has certain standards to keep manufacturing processes clean and other things which increase the investment somewhere between $700 and $1,000 per square foot to build on average when a normal build out

That's right.

So a part of the FDA approval process, which the intent is for this to be an FDA licensed facility, requires certain manufacturing processes that specialize engineers.

Once the tenant

is identified, they'll customize that process and then wrap the building around it.

And so the range that you described is in the ballpark of what the developer is expecting.

And the original plan anticipated something like a hotel or a warehousing type of use.

Are those geese?

Some other bits of information that we thought it was important for the directors to hear to make sure that you're well informed when you go out in the community and spread the word of what's going on with economic development.

The Charlottesville Business Innovation Council held its annual gala at Castle Hillside about a month ago.

Chair Price represented the county and provided the Educator of the Year award.

which went to an Albemarle County teacher.

And I thought it may be also of interest to know that Adile Pharmaceutical was named the startup of the year.

And if you're not familiar with Adile, they're going through clinical trials now for what amounts to, I guess, a drug that helps ameliorate issues of alcoholism and other addictions.

And I think they're getting their approval.

Could be a game changer for that community if it is successful.

Any questions about the first three matters before I move on?

No hearing none.

Venture Central is making significant strides and you're going to continue to hear more about what is happening.

In fact, Alexander, the ecosystem builder and sort of the executive director, if you will.

will come to an EDA meeting in the not so distant future.

But currently Venture Central is applying for a capital challenge grant at the federal level in the amount of $300,000.

As you may recall, the county provided a Go Virginia match for the catalyst program as well as the Venture Central program.

As it turns out, the county's and city's contributions that were already previously made can account for the match in this particular scenario, so there is no additional match required for this particular grant.

It was submitted last week, and we hope to find out something in the coming months, but it could be a real game changer.

It's an amount of $300,000, and it sets up Venture Central, positions it to apply for more lucrative grants, including the National Science Foundation grant, which ranged from $1 million to $100,000.

$160 million grant, and then there's also some other additional EDA grants that they may become eligible for if things go well with their initial planning grant and capital challenge grant.

It may be of interest for you to know.

I'll get into details about this later on.

But the premise is, is we want to have an inclusive and equitable innovation and entrepreneurship system.

And so it's all about meeting the stated goals of the county to include diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And then I want to touch base with you about what's going on in the tourism economy.

I know a year or so ago we told you the economy was struggling.

I believe it's the next slide, J.T.

But that's no longer the case.

I don't know if you've seen what's happened recently at the airports and the travel industry where travel has exceeded the capacity of the airports and there have been complications associated with it.

Well, there's no difference here.

So I ask you to look at these two charts.

And the first one on the left is hotel occupancy rates.

And you can see the gray bar in March and April of 2020.

The bottom fell out of the industry and it slowly recovered and got close to normal about nine months into the process.

But I ask you to look if you can see the Carolina blue chart.

J.T., do you have the ability to drag your, thank you, that little shortened chart there.

You can see the hotel occupancy rates have now come back to normal standards of what we have historically seen in our community.

But what has really changed has been the average daily rates.

J.T., if you would hover over what's happening there.

So the highest rates that we had seen in April in previous years were around $133.

And now you can tell it's over $170 average daily rate.

I can't do the math off the top of my head, but you can tell $40 a month is a significant, $40 a stay is a significant change.

So suffice it to say that the hospitality industry and the hotel industry and lodging industry in particular have began to rebound and do so at all time record highest.

Roger, one of the things I had, one of the airport commission meetings, Roy Van Dorn said was that

Some of that is a result of really high rates on the weekends and lower rates during the week or more vacancies.

I don't know whether that's reflected in this.

Yeah, that is an actual and factual statement.

Now, but if you look on the left hand side, you can see the occupancy rates have returned to normal.

So, you know, it's, I don't know that it has to do with less travelers, if you will, it has to do with demand.

And certainly, the weekend has been the

The areas really Thursday through Sunday have been extremely high on average.

I could have brought that information with me had I known you wanted details, but I will just say that's an accurate statement.

And for those who may not be familiar, Roy Van Duren used to be the Virginia restaurant lounge and travel association chair.

He no longer is, but he's still closely aligned with that organization.

Mr.

To jump back to Venture Central, I met Alex last night.

100% it would, Chair Long.

We plan to do that.

Just hoping that we would have something substantial to report when he came.

Right now, what we're doing is, he and the board is doing, is a lot of behind the scenes work.

So there's not been a lot of forward facing activity, but it's been working to aggregate efforts at all the people that exist in this ecosystem space.

which would be Charlottesville Business Innovation Council, BEACON, which is the Black Entrepreneur Initiative.

It would include the Small Business Development Center, Seaville Biohub, CIC.

All of those folks who sort of do similar activities to support startups are trying to clarify roles, responsibilities, and start rolling even more in one direction.

Okay, sounds good.

All right, any questions for Roger on the director's report?

Yeah, thanks, Chair Long.

I will be addressing the next two topics and I believe they'll be rather short presentations and just a quick explanation.

Since the EDA approved the proposed building reuse grant and it went to the Board of Supervisors in June on their consent agenda, where it was approved with no comments, it came to staff's attention that we unintentionally omitted the town of Scottsville through the proposed language.

So the photograph here shown on the slide is an aerial shot of the town.

We regularly connect with

The town administrator, Matt Lawless, and we were discussing this grant and the language at the time suggested that it only apply to commercial and industrial properties in the development area.

And the current comprehensive plan does not identify the town of Scottsville as a development area.

So we're bringing the policy back to the EDA to confirm that there's no

Objection to making it clear and explicitly listing those properties that are commercial or industrially zoned or designated within the town of Scottsville.

They have their own land use planning and zoning ordinance.

So we would work with Matt to administer that.

But the proposed language change in the attachment for the EDA today simply adds

Okay, any questions for J.T.

about that?

We have no resolution prepared or anything.

It was really looking for consensus head nods today.

We'll take it back to the Board of Supervisors for their meeting in July.

So any non-head nods?

All right, thank you.

The next item that I wanted to discuss is also somewhat housekeeping in nature.

Board of Supervisors and the EDA approved the Commonwealth Opportunity Fund local match back at the joint meeting in October of 2021.

There was an acknowledgement that coming in the future would be a match agreement for the VJIP portion of that package for Bonamos.

And so that's what is proposed today.

It's, as a reminder, it's a match to the Virginia Jobs Investment Program of $700 per job.

Their agreement calls for 64 jobs, and so that's a total of $44,800.

I spoke briefly with the CEO of Animos, head of our meeting today, Ed Rogers, and he just relayed that

The upfit of the state farm space that they're in continues and they're really excited about finishing that and appreciative of everything the county's done to support them in their expansion.

We don't know for sure.

They're currently working with Dominion Power on getting additional power to their portion of the building.

OK, it'd be great to see when they open.

Okay.

And that Dominion work, that was the principal component in the upfit.

That was one important piece of it, a critical piece of it.

I believe the other parts are falling in line as they anticipated.

They ran into a little snag.

Great.

All right.

All right, so seconded.

Any further discussion?

There's no further discussion.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

No opposed.

All right, and the adoption is

or the resolution is adopted.

So Virginia Match.

Chair Long, you mentioned Venture Central earlier and now we're circling back again to them as a way of providing some historical context to a couple of the directors who may not be have been here when we originally launched Venture Hub, which became Venture Central and now is intended to help startups.

Part of that programming

included a Go Virginia grant to launch a program called Catalyst.

And Catalyst is an accelerator.

And people define incubator and accelerator differently here in our community.

Once a company creates a minimal viable product and is ready to maybe scale or seek additional capital, they go into an accelerator program where they go from really what amounts to research and development into scaling, hiring,

improving its market size and really proof of concept usually in a smaller area to make sure that the new product or process is going to be adopted.

And so the catalyst program provides that level of support for those companies that have received a minimal viable product or service and is ready to provide it.

Along with that came a $20,000 grant and nine months of service, which comes from the Batten Institute.

That program, Two Year Pilot, was so successful with companies that the city, the county, and Venture Central agreed to continue there.

As a result, we had set aside economic development investment pool money some two years ago to continue this program.

So today we're asking for the director's authority to transfer $37,500 to Venture Central to continue with the long form accelerator program called Catalyst.

It may be important for this authority to know that the city is also transferring the same amount of money and has already, their EDA has already agreed to do so.

So in effect for this year, we'll have $75,000 set aside to fund four, maybe five businesses in the amount of $20,000 to go through this particular program.

And this program will be administered by Dr. David Tovey and his team from the Batten Institute.

Well, the $20,000 goes directly to the business themselves, whichever businesses are selected.

And it's a competitive process and not all the businesses make it, whether they're not at the right stage or whether they, the, uh, the, the selection panel feels like this company is something that should be supported or not.

Yeah.

But usually it's it's meant to add staff, you know, people have been working for free, if you will, or for equity or whatever the case may be.

And now they're ready to leave their brick and mortar job or they're ready to do something.

And you said that

They met with such success.

How did they define that?

Was it more businesses applying or was it evidence at the business level of

It also includes job, venture capital raised, and some other metrics in terms of adoption rates and so forth.

There is a website where we can pull that up.

I don't know if J.T.

has the ability to do it.

Now, I'll just talk for a minute as J.T.

may be able to pull up 434.co, 434.co, and we can take a look at the types of businesses that they've been supporting and their success rates.

But suffice it to say, I think the biggest

The biggest success has been the connectivity that has occurred as a result of these folks entering the program.

They have access now to greater access to like Charlottesville Angel Network have angels groups, other venture central, and then there's the licensed adventure group at UVA also offers some CEO and residents type support.

There's workspace that they can now utilize on the downtown mall.

So just having been selected,

It does.

And there are the selection committees made up of investors.

It's not, you know, bureaucrats like myself, if you will.

It is folks who would actually invest in these companies.

And the criteria that is asked through this process is whether or not you would find this company investment worthy.

Meaning once they go through this program and get to a place where they're ready for investment, would you as a local investor invest in them?

If the answer is no, because it's not a good fit, whatever the case may be, then they don't get selected into the program.

You may have heard of Icarus just because this is on the, J.T.

if you could hold on right there.

This is an example of a local guy who had knee problems and got tired of the restrictive nature of how knee braces were created a brand new knee brace now they

They manufactured knee braces that are being adopted by orthopedics all around the U.S., can't keep up with demand.

They've opened up a brick and mortar shop on the downtown mall and they got a handful of folks working.

That's just one example of how we would measure success, where they took a minimal viable product, one specific knee brace that they showed worked, and then they turned it into a production facility.

Interesting name choice there.

Which one is that?

Icarus, yeah.

Those are great questions, Director Shreve.

We'll get Alex Andrew in here and we'll even invite Dr. David Toovey to talk about the Catalyst Program.

It's much akin to what you've heard

Dr. Nicky, I've drawn a blank on her last name right now.

Thank you.

Dr. Hastings come in and talk about what's happening in the life sciences world.

Venture Central and Calis is doing this for the non-life science world, if you will, technology and other sorts of services.

Well, it's

Certainly at the moment, it may become a somewhat more challenging environment to raise money.

All right.

So do we need, I guess we need to approve this resolution.

All right, so we have a motion and a second on the resolution to provide matching funds to Ventral Central.

Is there any further discussion?

Hearing none, all in favor say aye.

Aye Any opposed?

No.

And the resolution is adopted.

Thank you, directors.

This is the county's economic development strategy to tap into the intellectual capital here and just appreciate your support.

I have a quick question for Richie.

You mentioned that we'll be going to live meetings.

So my understanding is it would be the September meeting that I can't say off the top of my head if the

If the end of the Continuity of Government Ordinance is self-executing or if the board has to meet and repeal it or rescind it, I believe it might be self-executing as of September 1st, so our September meeting would be in person.

Our August meeting, we should have, at that point in time, we should adopt a remote participation policy, meaning that if a director is unavailable for personal reasons, and the best example is traveling out of town for business or for family matters, then that member would be able to participate

remotely, there's a limit to how many times you can do that during the year.

All right.

Any other questions by any of the directors?

Yeah, Chair Long, you had mentioned something about the necessary, I can get this out, the necessity of a July meeting.

Yeah, I was gonna do that.

I wanted to see, Jeff, Doug, you have anything you see both are on?

Anything you want to add?

Nothing from, Mr.

Chair, nothing from me and I appreciate your asking at this time.

Yeah, thank you.

Don, did you see the note from Malou regarding the Meriwether Lewis, Lewiston Clark Center?

I don't think so.

Okay, yeah.

So,

So for the July meeting, we have had in the past some difficulty getting a quorum for the July meeting.

I don't know whether we want to leave it on the calendar and make the call closer.

Maybe the members who were I guess we have everybody here.

Refresh my memory, Don.

I think we were leaning towards skipping that, but we were going to wait.

I think Diantha gave us some recommendations based upon what the Board of Supervisors was doing in July.

Yeah, so I guess

Well, we canceled our first meeting.

We're having our, you know, we meet the first and the third.

So we're having our third Wednesday meeting, but we canceled our first meeting.

Just because there is a lot of vacation travel in July.

Yeah.

I don't know that we have anything in the pipeline that's going to require specific action by deadline in July.

So any sort of agreements that need to be signed or other activities could certainly be moved to August without there being any harm.

So I think we will then, unless anyone feels strongly, we will cancel the July meeting.

And if something comes up, we can obviously reconvene virtually and act on anything that requires prompt action.

But otherwise, I don't see any reason to have that meeting.

The 16th.

Okay.

Well, thanks, everyone.

Appreciate everybody being here today and very efficient meeting, which is always nice.

Oh, yes.

Welcome.

All right, great.

Hey, Ashley, can I ask you a quick question?

I'm going to email you and copy my assistant, Theresa, so that when you send things for me to sign, she can do the DocuSign so they don't sit in my inbox for weeks as we wait.

I will not argue.

That sounds great.

Thank you.

All right.

Thanks, everybody.