Economic Development Authority Meeting   11/15/2022

Yes, I can.

Yes, I can.

Well, I will say the synopsis of what you missed is placemaking activity has resulted in capital investment in the downtown area.

And we could consider that for our community.

You'll go to the next slide.

Yeah.

Some just general demographics about the city itself, 71,000.

You can read those on the left-hand side.

Obviously, the home prices are less than you have here.

I will also mention that the Metropolitan Statistical Area, while the city itself only has 71,000, is open to 1.4 million.

So it is a much larger community than what we actually have, some probably seven to eight times if you look at it, because that includes like upstate South Carolina, but I guess Greenville proper

On the right-hand side of the screen, you will see one of the common things that we noticed.

They have a water feature that kind of runs through their city, but instead of just letting it be natural, they turned this area into a park.

You can see that it was water that was actually used for a purpose, not just flowing through the city.

And they decided to use it as a feature and attraction.

You can see the capital that has been invested on both sides of the river.

What's that?

Well, actually, this is just one of the smaller tributaries.

We're going to get to the mill later on.

Director Shreve, so this is a larger, you'll see a different version of the one you're talking about, but you're right on, it's in green.

Next slide, please.

Some of the things that we saw that we're not gonna dig into detail, but everywhere we went with different speakers, there was some commonality that was being said.

The first was they have significant race-based inequities throughout, including both employment and healthcare and income.

They have an astronomical growth rate.

I don't remember what ours is, Dr. Walker, about 2.5%, but if you see by 2040, they're expecting growth of 40% and we don't get to that number.

but we don't know if there's a single factor.

I would say what I heard most frequently is they are a center for employment and they're also a center for entertainment.

And so they've become an attractive place to live.

Is that a fair thing that you say?

Okay.

And then they have some of the same issues we have here with housing inventory and they also have a lot of nimbyism.

And they just, those were common things that we heard that I share with you.

Now, if we'll get into the little bit of the details about economic development stuff,

As you know, we've been working on firing up something called Venture Central and trying to turn ideas into brick and mortar places.

I'll share with you that Greenville has their own version of that and it's called Next.

And it's the next opportunity, it's the next opportunity to grow and they measure the results of that.

It's their version of an innovation and entrepreneur ecosystem.

They're a couple of years more advanced than we are in building an ecosystem, so much so that they actually have a 60,000 square foot space that's kind of shared space and subsidized rent for folks who have startup businesses and looking for a less expensive place to run their business until they can stand on their own two feet.

I will say that their executive director, a guy named Eric Weissman,

spoke to us about what's happening in our community.

And there are similarities in where they were three to four years ago, what we're facing today.

And that would be some of those similarities include nonprofits being concerned of cannibalizing the amount of resources.

So they're not necessarily working together as best they can.

They're more interested in their own self-survival.

It also, there's some understanding about the roles and responsibilities of their existing ecosystem operators.

You know, we call them the alphabet soup here.

You know who they are.

But if you ask the folks around here, do they provide an incubator space or office space, you might get a yes.

But then when you go to investigate, you find out it's a single office next to a copier in the bathroom.

There's not really shared space.

Dr. David Shreve, John Mottola,

And I don't have all of those prepared for today.

I'll be happy to share that with you.

But in essence, this is incubation space, which means generally when you've been there long enough to get a minimal viable product and start producing it, you're still eligible to be an incubation.

Once that product is time to scale,

meaning that you're going from producing one widget that's unique to thousands of widgets that you're going to sell in an area you move from incubation to acceleration and so it's time for you to move on like at some point you got to get out of the nest and go grow on your own and when you get into acceleration that's the general idea when you're no longer eligible to to work there.

So I don't remember the details about timing and number of employees.

I think it's more of where you are in the process.

And I'll check on the terms, but there were terms associated with it, Director Shreve, like no more than X amount of years type thing.

Like if your business is not moving on, then you're not for us.

That was my other question.

Yeah, it sounds like they would, given that criteria, they would have to focus.

and growth companies and high tech.

And I don't think we're going to get into this much, but one of the other things that's happening in Greenville that's not necessarily here is they have an 85 quarter that is just lined up with large businesses, BMW, 27,000 employees, AB&B, Michelin.

And we'll get into how that's important in public private partnerships later.

But it's a unique paradigm shift on how we do it here.

There's two universities down there that impact the Greenville proper area.

It's the University of Clemson and Furman.

And we heard mostly from Furman.

But before I get into Furman, I'll just mention that the University of Clemson has their MBA program located in downtown Greenville.

And it was noted by several of the speakers that

That town and gown relationship was healthy for the downtown area, that although there wasn't a large presence of students associated, the types of students that go through that program were good for the downtown commerce, not just

Case studies and cocktails, as they say, right?

Yeah, I'm not sure if it was in that order.

It might have gone with cocktails first, but to your point.

And then Furman University, it was real interesting for me, and I don't know that we've ever talked about this, but there was a dichotomy of how Furman was seen by the downtown folks and how Furman saw themselves helping downtown.

In particular, we had several speakers who said Furman's campus was six or seven miles removed from downtown, and they might as well have been 100 miles removed.

They're not part of the network and those students don't really come downtown.

And then we heard from leaders at Furman who said, we're actively participating in helping the downtown area and our students are helping with the nightlife.

So I'm not sure which one's true or not.

What's that?

I'm just saying that it's interesting that we got polar opposites and opinions there.

And I'll say that the common theme, though, that we heard was both Clemson and Furman had a seat at the table when it came to innovation and entrepreneurship.

And in different ways, Furman is creating an innovation campus, I think they're calling it RAIN, it's still in the idea formation, but they're going to build a place that's near the campus, but it's also community facing, so anyone can participate.

It seems to me it's still more of an ideal than a thought out plan, but that's where they are in the process.

And they're gonna plug into the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, I'll just call it umbrella of next.

And it's gonna also connect with venture capital funders and others that already have a presence down there.

And we mentioned earlier about the issue of inequities as it relates to race demographics.

And the Chamber is trying to provide one solution for that.

And they created a minority business accelerator some 10 years ago, and they have had over 100

businesses go through that particular program.

And some of them are some of it's expensive to go through the program.

So the chamber subsidizes it through through philanthropy.

And then some scenarios, they just automatically give the whole the whole scholarship we go through the program.

I'm going to say no, not in the way we think about venture capital where people raise funds and invest in exit strategies.

There does seem to be a lot of institutional investors which are related to all the industry down there who sort of invest in not necessarily companies, but the mission of certain organizations that support these startups.

Right.

And the mayor, I'm getting a little bit off here, but the mayor has been in his position for over 20 years now.

So they have a continuity of leadership that's much different than our community.

And it's understood part of the mayor's role is to raise funds for what is in the best interest of that community.

So we're not going to get into art.

We're not going to get into parks and so forth.

But the parks that we visited, for example, there's the you know, there's the ABB children's playground and the, you know, BMW swing set, if you will, and XYZ hiking trails.

So it's a different system.

One time that had a naming rights to their stairwells.

And so some of these companies invest in missions so they will invest in like these startups and angel funds to help proceed money.

It's not venture capital the way we think of it.

And the connectivity with venture capital doesn't seem to be mature is how I would call it.

I mean, are a lot of the startups sort of automotive related or related to that area?

There are, there is some of that.

So the main BMW factory is in Spartanburg, right?

Well, it's called Greenville Spartanburg, I guess.

So it's all one.

I can't tell you where the line is, the political lines are.

So it may be actually in Spartanburg to your point, but it's all part of the same local economy.

I'd say the biggest takeaway I would want you to hear is the way they engage the community to help solve public problems in a way that our community does not.

If you think about some of the larger employers that we have here, we just that we've not tapped into the resources that they may have to promote economic development.

And economic development also being classified as bringing new wealth into the community.

Interestingly, in the downtown Greenwell area, they have what's known as the Peace Center.

And the Peace Center came from the Peace family.

It's not named after peace itself.

And they were given a $30 million gift to launch a fundraising campaign.

And then they funded what you see on the right-hand side, which is the Peace Center.

It has a 2,700 capacity seating in the main area.

And it has several smaller areas, which are half in size or quarter in size.

And so it's designed to handle more upscale type of venues than our community generally can host.

And it also has the ability to scale in a way our community does not.

And the reason I tell you that is from an economic development perspective, when you think about places like this or the Durham Performing Arts Center, it has a huge financial impact on the community.

and in fact, they did a study and it has an $80 million annual estimated impact to the local economy.

Just by having acts there, people come in, see the acts, spend a lot of money in that area and then go home.

Just a fuel for thought for what may be important in ours.

I thought this may be the biggest takeaway for me is just about everything you see in the skyline on the right and throughout,

Not all things, but most things were built through public-private partnerships.

That was their primary tool for building their community in a dense way and having everything being served by infrastructure in a more effective way.

And they had some unique ways of doing it.

You know that we have the ENABLE grant and we have some tax increment financing, or synthetic tax increment financing.

But they did it in a couple other ways that may be germane to our community.

One example is the public-private partnership is not always tax increment financing.

It's also having

those big industries bring money to the table.

The private part is not just in what you see the buildings themselves, but the BMWs of the world giving philanthropic donations to make a public good happen.

In fact, I'll jump to the Hyatt Hotel because I thought this was unique.

They had some property that they owned and they turned it into a park and it's in the downtown center city.

and they decided that as a park they had the ability to put in infrastructure and then they let the Hyatt Hotel build on it and when the Hyatt Hotel did that it included like some urban parks so it was a brick area you know we had tables outside where people could grab their coffee and go see it and read the newspaper or do the downtown area and it's a way they turned a park into a an attraction for capital

So they still I believe still own the land and Hyatt I think has like a 50-year lease or something of that associated with it, but it's still a park in downtown.

But the reality is it was a unique way of using an existing asset to attract additional capital.

Before we go to the next one, Megan, can you come back?

I wanted to make one more statement.

They, being the city, had a vision created some 30, 40 years ago.

And we talked about the continuity of leadership, but it was also the continuity of planning, much the way this county plans very well with its comprehensive plan.

By staying true to the plan, they found greater success.

And one of those in the downtown area was requiring new developments to have some kind of housing component.

So most everything that you see downtown

has not only like the retail on the ground floor, commercial office space, but a couple floors up, there's housing associated with it.

And now they have over 5,000 residents living in the downtown area, which helps feed the vibrancy of what's happening down there.

And if you include affordable housing, they just have a sort of a set agreement that will include tax increment financing if you'll put at least 20% affordable housing into it.

And Roger, just to add to that, it's mixed use everywhere and PPPs everywhere.

What I found fascinating was with the stadium, the Red Sox stadium, they require residential apartments in that stadium.

They didn't even remember.

We're not going to build, we don't do apartment.

Fascinating.

And let me just add this because I found this fascinating.

No parking for that stadium.

They said we will not, we're not building any parking, no big parking area.

The churches around there rent out their parking spaces during

Ball Games make a lot of money.

So they built a stadium with no parking, but with residential in.

Thank you for that.

And then I think the biggest thing and the biggest takeaway I want you to have are the next two pictures.

If you would, Megan.

So what you see here is a road built by the South Carolina Department of Transportation that goes over top of a river.

And this is the river you were mentioning.

Upstream from this river was a mill, Director Shreve, that used to feed down.

And they would say, as they changed the color of the dye upstream, the river would literally change color.

Well, that mill

Eventually went defunct and then it just became normal, you know, sort of greenish bluish water, not the greatest in the world.

But before we get into the next picture, there's a story that goes along with this that I found fascinating.

So I'm going to share.

There was a garden club in Greenville, South Carolina, who said, hey, we're covering up this beautiful waterfall.

Let's let's see if we can uncover it.

And so the community can enjoy it.

and she went to meet with the mayor at the time, same mayor that we were talking about today, I guess.

And he says, all right, well, we'll take a look at it and we'll go talk to the South Carolina DOT.

And she goes, the garden club lady basically said, oh, well, she's one of my best friends.

She had just taken over the South Carolina DOT.

I'll call her.

And so they, the South Carolina DOT came down to Greenville to take a look at this bridge and fast forward a year or so and they,

the South Carolina DOT said, we're just gonna tear down this bridge and we're gonna abandon the easement.

So I'm not abandoning, you can have the easement.

And so what that resulted in is what you'll see in the next picture.

And so now you see how that waterfall's uncovered and you'll see what was a roadway is now a suspension bridge for pedestrians.

and you can't from this angle you can't tell but there's park space running all underneath sort of the suspension bridge and all of the development that you see sort of in the background to your left and you can't see to your right was a direct result of those folks finding their faults, right?

It was a South Carolina DOT owned street.

And there were complaints, the mayor said there were complaints everywhere about how will I get to work, how will this, and as soon as it was shut down there was never a complaint.

People found another way to go, there were no traffic issues, all that noise went away.

And that's one of the things about having not a strong mayor in the way

Strong mayor means that they run the city.

Strong mayor means he has a strong voice in what happens because of his legacy.

And he would just power through those types of things in a way that's not easy for our politicians to do.

He didn't really have to worry about the fear of not being elected the next cycle.

It was understood that he was going to

He was going to be able to go through that.

And I think it allowed him to be more candid and more forward in a way that is very difficult for local politicians here.

And I'm speaking from my perspective.

Well, as somebody who spent probably 50 years in the VDOT world, in Virginia world, VDOT, it was amazing to me that they convinced VDOT, their dot, to take down the bridge, right?

The other thing I will add, and it was all about networking.

Right, relationships and networking.

The other thing I found fascinating was that the city went through, within their city limits and picked the roads that they wanted control over because they wanted to control the way they looked.

They wanted a landscape, they wanted trees on them, they wanted wide sidewalks.

And so within the city limits,

They have a mix of DOT owned and maintained roads and city owned and maintained roads which is very different from any model we have.

It's kind of interesting.

Now, expensive.

It seems South Carolina, structurally, there's a county and then the city sits over the top of it.

Yes, that's right.

It's not Virginia.

And I'm still close to it.

No other state really is like Virginia with transportation either, going back to the Byrd administration in the 1920s

That was the thing, you know, and the state took over and hasn't relinquished control since.

So I think J.T.

was the one that suggested we clarify.

So we're sharing this for informational purposes in hopes that you will think through what you just heard today.

And as we move forward with Project Enable 2.0 update, if you feel strongly about some of the things that you've seen that you'd like us to do for our community,

We gladly welcome that feedback through the process.

And that concludes what I had to say about our benchmarking trip.

Well, I'm just looking through my notes.

I thought it was a couple of comments, and I'll just let them stand on their own.

The mayor, one of the city councilors we talked to said, we don't make any changes for tourists.

Don't do or make changes for tourists.

You have to do it for your residents.

And then the tourists will come.

I thought that was really, cause we, you know, we have CACVB and we're very focused on our tourism.

And I'm not saying that's bad, but it was a different way to look at tourism.

He also, a couple of other comments that I hadn't known.

The chamber president said, there's been a significant investment in the postcard of Greenville, but there's a flip side to every postcard.

We have a world-class city, but we do not have world-class systems.

The other thing, a couple of just other, and I'll be quick about this because I know we have to get, but they were very clear that several decades ago, economic development was a dirty word.

Their community did not want economic development, it was a dirty word.

City leaders now describe an ED culture where businesses succeed and people prosper.

City has gone from surviving to thriving.

Now, they may be on the cusp of too much growth, I don't know, but I mean, it was very interesting to hear some of these comments.

And let me just see what else I had here.

They insured at least 10% of all new housing was income restricted.

Preserved as much as 35% of their vacant land is open land or park land, getting to kind of what we're trying to do here with, you know, with our rural areas.

And then let's see what else.

There was something here about gentrification I was trying to find that out because of my district I was interested in.

Oh, here.

Affordable housing trust and tax incentives for developers reduce parking requirements equal more density.

Well, we'd have to get down into it, but yeah, exactly.

I'm just, we're just taking a couple of my takeaways here.

Eight or 10 blocks, something like that.

You could walk down their Main Street and not even see a parking car.

They were there, back in the back.

Oh, but you didn't even see them, which was lovely.

Were they free or did you pay for them?

Free on weekends for public parking.

I'll just add, though, they don't have any parking meters.

And one of the things they did in Baton Rouge when I lived there was they had, as part of some development schemes, they put in parking and they did that.

They tucked it on the perimeter.

So it was in the middle of everything.

Expecting people to park and then walk.

So encouraging pedestrian use, putting in wider sidewalks on.

Right.

Yeah.

And the parking that they put along Main Street was not parallel.

It was pull in.

So you get more cars, you know.

Yeah.

So you can get more cars, obviously.

I also thought that the mayor said you can get you can do density without it looking like density.

The conundrum they may face and this is just impressionistic because I've only been there a handful of times in recent years is that when they do all the good stuff in the city and for those few blocks and reserve public space and install parks and all that, the conundrum they face is then

They have sprawl in the suburbs.

I mean, just based off of what I saw, that's accurate.

They already faced sprawl and they were talking about the issues the county were facing associated with ingress.

And so there's a real dichotomy in character between

This is not for economic development.

They sort of have a homeless issue downtown.

It would be much worse than what we face, I would say.

So they have a professional worker.

Collin, for lack of a better term, who spends all their time downtown dealing directly with those folks.

And it required, the feedback we heard was it required a minimum of five engagements before any of those folks who, mental health, housing, whatever the issues they were facing, could they then get those homeless folks to get

Go find the resources that are available and help them get to those resources.

It's just an interesting model.

Like, hey, you've got to go where the problems are.

You've got to go trust.

They're not going to come to us.

We've got to go somewhere.

Anyway, that's not necessarily directly economic development, but you understand how that is related.

And with education, of course you know me, so I went and looked at the education piece or took some notes on it.

They have partnerships between their public schools, their technical college, and businesses, and they really had an effort of trying to prepare students for the world of work before high school graduation.

Their chamber coordinates over 100 juniors and seniors annually in paid business internship programs, which is really different.

I'll stop.

I think you mentioned this already.

One of the legal parameters on this that affects the strategy is the city-county relationship.

In your visit, you're mostly talking about urban design and urban economic development.

And in our setting, much of that would be done

near where we're working now.

So what I want to ask for strategy formulation is, do you think in terms of helping to deploy or encourage our city partner to deploy these kinds of things?

I would say, for example, the Broadway Blueprint.

Some of these strategies could be the Broadway Quarter.

It could be emphasized.

Some of the, where is our falls, I don't think would land in the city.

There's probably some riverfront areas and or some other areas in our community that we could

Not turn our backs to an accent.

I don't know exactly where they are.

Hopefully you guys may know what the hidden gems are in our community.

And when I say falls, it could be a mountain.

It can be I'm just using that as a generic term that we could use to.

What's that?

I feel like what I've talked about is applicable to the county.

There's some other things that are city-based.

When you think about parking and those types of things, there's ways we could incorporate into what we're doing.

Whether it's downtown Crozet, whether it's the Raya Road area.

It makes it harder strategically to have to deliver all of this at the county level with the powers that we have and without the smaller layer of incorporation.

I'm thinking, you know, I have not been to Greenville or Athens or Burlington, but some of the other kind of Annapolis, Newport, Rhode Island, Asheville, North Carolina, Huntsville, Alabama, that I think of as tiers that I've been to, or internationally, Cambridge, Dubrovnik.

There's a layering of government that lets you zoom in and be more accountable and focus those investments, and then the county or its equivalent,

and do other things.

And just to do that without the town or everywhere else except Virginia City structure just makes it a total order for us.

And you may be aware that the city recently hired someone to rewrite their strategic economic development plan and that the UVA Foundation is currently doing their master planning.

I think Don's going to talk a little bit about that in a few minutes.

and the county has a seat at the table.

So I don't think it's an either or proposition.

I think we're going to have to, we'll be able to talk about how do we partner together and have the same, maybe it's the same public-private partnership policies and how are, you know, our housing things are aligned and those things so that we're working concert.

Like, as you know, the economy doesn't care about political boundaries.

The money travels back and forth.

So, you know, oftentimes what's good for the downtown economy is good for us and vice versa.

and so we work closely with the city on many of theirs and we'll continue to do that.

We're going to have a seat at the table when they're writing their strategic plan.

They'll have a seat here and then we're also working with the foundation on their redesign and the UVA economic development.

So that's a long way of saying I don't think it's all, you know, either more it's more a collaborative approach to, you know, what's good for one can be good for all.

All right.

I wanted to give you a little bit of an update on Venture Central.

It's a big part of the county's economic development strategy.

Things are still going well.

As I mentioned last time, they received a $300,000 grant for some DEI work, and we're working through the process to see how to make that come to fruition.

I will say that the existing executive director was Alexander

He was on loan, for lack of a better term, from the federal government.

And he is now going back to Sri Lanka.

And so we've hired an interim executive director.

Rahul comes to us.

I don't know how this happened, but somehow he's an attorney and he got through the hiring process anyway.

But he's, he's, I guess, a professor, adjunct maybe at UVA Law.

He owns his own firm.

And he's also spent a healthy portion of his life helping startups, particularly with nonprofits, but completely understand also some for-profits.

So he had a wealth of experience as it relates to helping companies

not only form but also find funding.

So he's agreed to be the interim executive director while we either put out a search for a new director and or you know maybe rewrite the plan for what's needed for our community.

But I wanted you to recognize the name and the and the role that he's playing that's important for our strategy and eventually bump into him in your travels around the county.

Yes, so on November 1st, the UVA Foundation had a, what do they call it, a community engagement session with a variety of people throughout the community.

The foundation is trying to come up with a strategic plan for North Fork and also with some other properties that primarily was related to North Fork property.

And they've got their own strategic plan

their own board members, their own sort of strategic planning group, but they invited a number of folks.

And it was at the Boar's Head in the big pavilion and big room over there from the county.

I was there.

Something performance optimization strategic.

And I had no idea how a meeting with 100 people for strategic planning was going to go.

I know if I had been in charge of it, now it would have gone.

I did not have high expectations, but they did a really good job of

engaging people and we won't talk about all the different things they did, but they got ideas in different ways, got feedback on ideas both from big picture sense.

In fact, one of the things that we talked about was placemaking and ideas and a lot of the things that came out of the discussion that Roger just brought up were things that came up.

Two very little ideas, you know, what can we do right away?

And one of the tenants says you need to bring back the soft pretzels that we used to have.

So that was one of the immediately implementable ideas.

So I think it was I think it was good.

I think we had a chance to to share our thoughts.

I think it's

You know as we think about the areas in the county that placemaking can happen and that we can have a role to play and that the county can influence

there are obviously different places downtown Crozet and other places but this is an area that can be shaped in a way that working together I think could make something happen where there's not much there now and they're really trying to figure out what they're gonna do.

So I think it, I thought it went well, I thought it was good, gave us a chance to meet folks.

We had an opportunity to meet the new dean for the school of

Continuing Professional Studies who has just recently moved here, who's got a lot of experience.

She worked at Virginia Tech and at JMU in the sort of university economic development world with building those relationships.

So I think that's a good opportunity.

UVA obviously has some interest there.

So I think it was a good session.

We'll see what they were meeting afterwards, the actual group.

So I think that, I think it was good.

And I think we got a lot out of them.

Not in the specifics.

I think, you know, there was discussion about if you want things to happen, you know, having cheaper rates.

To include the sale of land and to include strategies of allowing for an anchor tenant which you know you subsidize right for the first big one in there and then

Those were different strategies.

Yeah, I agree that the design was effective in mixing people up and moving us around and I think getting a diversity of thought to the extent that there was diversity in the room, which I didn't think there was a whole lot, frankly.

but I didn't think the design was good.

I guess the biggest takeaway for me was how different my language was with regard to what it takes to develop property from an infrastructure standpoint, roads, water, sewer, and the UVA are much more- Superficial?

Well, yeah, or internal looking.

They're talking about faculty and staffing levels and things that kind of make- The assumption is that stuff

Just going to be there.

And it was just a very interesting kind of juxtaposition.

And then probably the value, I would think, of putting us all together where we're kind of talking past each other to a degree.

But again, if it's effective, then they're going to capture all of that and kind of do a mashup and come up with something that speaks to all audiences.

We'll see.

That the university people are in a different world than we are in.

I guess kind of what you're saying, I'm just saying it a different way.

And the discussions were about how can we break down those silos and work together and have everybody understanding

I was just going to say, but I thought it was worthwhile.

I agree with Doug.

I see what you mean.

It was beyond just UVA people, but beyond that.

Let me bring this up soon.

And when with the discussion, just to get to your point, the discussion certainly came up several times about the cost of their space, you know, and that was met with sort of, and that's okay.

I mean, I get it, but it was said numerous times.

So a real world example of what I heard Deputy County Executive Walker, Supervisor McKeel say would be some of the ideas that we were putting forth were how do we leverage this university for the public good at the same time people at the table were saying hey we got all these spaces we're renting for our back office people let's just move them all up to

So the rent goes from here to there and we fill up the buildings.

Or UVA Medical's building something, maybe we can move that there.

It was just very, there's a real world example.

Very transactional.

And we at Perm Robotics have been running an autonomous shuttle service.

Nick Bilbao can say, yeah.

It's going to start on December 12th.

December 12th.

So we had a lot of interest from, you know, other constituents at the

Exciting, John.

That's going to be expanding.

Monorail is also mentioned, so you want to put that.

Yeah, you must be careful.

Well, I was born in Morgantown, West Virginia.

They had a successful monorail.

Remember where they tried that in this community from the Genetical Center?

Yeah.

Yeah, we'll re-engage again, I'm sure.

This group will in particular.

All right, any other new business?

No, sir.

Any unfinished business?

Did you want to make any comments about Lewis and Clark?

The Explorers, etc.

And then other matters, the 2023 meeting dates, which I guess they came with the meeting packet, all of the dates for next year.

I think what we'll do is

Vote on those at the next meeting to approve the calendar.

So if everybody can just take a look at them, confirm that they look okay, we'll approve them at the December meeting.

Anything else?

All right, thank you everybody.