Economic Development Authority Meeting   12/5/2023

Hi, David.

It's nice to meet you.

Can you hear me?

Hello guys and girls.

Hello.

Hello.

Good to see everybody.

You are a mighty serious, quiet looking group right now.

So I have a question out of curiosity.

Hello everyone.

Hey, and I think I have time because I don't think we've officially started.

We have still people joining us.

When we do the Zooms like this, do our two a year, is it a rolling calendar?

Is it a fiscal calendar or is it

just on the yearly calendar.

Hey, Richie, just curious.

I don't know that it's entirely it's not clear.

It hasn't been designated.

So I treat it as kind of from our annual meeting there on.

So I do calendar year.

We do calendar year here, I believe.

OK, so like twenty four.

That's all we needed to know.

Yeah, I was just thinking about that today and I thought, well, it's good because at least we managed to get through.

And then I thought, well, maybe not.

I wasn't sure what the calendar, what the year was, the timeframe.

All right, I think we're at, let's see, do we have,

One, two, three, four, five.

I guess I think we have a quorum.

So I will call the meeting to order.

We do not.

It's already been called and it's a special meeting.

It's complying with Virginia statute and also with the rules of procedure that this body has adopted.

So we have a quorum present electronically and we're recording and it's been noticed.

Okay, great.

No, sir.

All right.

Then on to

New business.

Oh, I'm sorry, I skipped.

I wasn't paying attention to what was on the screen.

Yeah, thank you, Mr.

Chair.

We have two important introductions to make to the EDA this afternoon.

First, let me say happy holidays to everyone.

I hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving.

This is a special meeting rescheduled from our November 14th regularly scheduled meeting.

The actions we take today will help us take care of the

The business that we need to take care of in order to move forward on a couple of different projects.

We are still scheduled for our regularly scheduled meeting on December 19th.

And with that said, it's actually really good timing for us to get together because we can now welcome

our newest EDA Director, David Storm from the Scottsville District as well as our new Director of Economic Development, Barry Albrecht.

Thank you.

I'm glad to be here.

My name is David Storm.

I'm in the Scottsville District.

I have just finished three and a half terms, seven years on the 5th and Avon CAC.

So I've been involved with a number of items that have come through this part of the southern part of Albemarle County.

I am a legal analyst currently with LexisNexis.

I am a former owner of the Wine Guild of Charlottesville, which has sort of bounced around its locations within the city over the last 15 years.

I have been an adjunct recently with the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, dealing with governance of collegiate athletics, primarily an older career of mine.

And I've been a resident here in Albemarle for over 20 years with my wife, who is currently a senior project manager in the facilities and environmental services division.

And we have three young boys who are in elementary and middle school here in Albemarle County.

Thanks, David.

Welcome.

David, one quick follow up question.

There may be folks on the call that are unfamiliar with CACs.

So, goodness, I don't know how long ago the Board of Supervisors created citizen advisory communities, or CACs, which most recently have been a place where

Projects developments in the growth areas of the county.

There are seven across the county.

We'll hold community meetings that are required.

It's also a way to share information back to communities in the county when they have some.

We've been very focused recently on a couple of bigger projects.

A development project, of course, the Southwood Development Project, the Albemarle Business Campus that came through here, and then Biscuit Runners are the ones that have really been sort of the biggest over the last, say, three or four years.

It's a good place that we're able as citizens to provide feedback to the developer, to county staff,

and to anyone who's interested in what's going on in terms of development in primarily in the growth areas in the county.

David did a great job on that one.

They've been around in the current reiteration.

Of course, they've changed a little bit over the years, but about a decade, I would say probably.

All right.

Mr.

Chair, can we turn it over to Barry to introduce?

Certainly.

Yep, yep, I sure was, I was muted.

Okay, no, I'm really excited about being here.

I'm just in a nutshell, 30 years of doing economic development, primarily with big, with cities and towns that had a military presence, aerospace and defense, and also have a reputation in developing some pretty cool strategic partnerships, public-private partnerships with universities and with industry.

I'm already hitting the ground running.

Thanks, J.T.

's keeping me in between the lines.

So feel free to call me if you ever have any questions.

Thanks.

Yes, I can affirm we have been keeping Barry very busy, and we are very glad he came back to work today after his birthday.

Normally, I would say we should go around and introduce everybody, but maybe we do that at our actual full meeting when everybody's in person.

Great, thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Under New Business, we have two action items today, and New Business will tackle the first action item, and it's an overview and discussion to prepare for a joint session with the Board of Supervisors in 2024.

It occurs to me that we have some EDA directors that have not yet participated in a joint session with our Board of Supervisors, so I wanted to give a quick overview of some of the history of our joint meetings, particularly since the adoption of Project Enable.

As

The EDA knows Project Enable is our strategic plan.

It guides our work.

And we use joint meetings with the Board of Supervisors to historically we've used them to add tools to the toolbox.

So many of the action items we bring before the EDA are grant agreements associated with grants from the state.

They're also public private partnership agreements.

Most recently in 2021, we worked through our building reuse grant policy.

That's not a grant that has been used yet, but we have been discussing it with a number of different projects and think that it will

will come to fruition soon.

Another topic that got a lot of discussion very recently, in fact, yesterday, is the discussion of the EDA controlling land and helping the county facilitate its goals with ownership of land.

The context yesterday was around affordable housing and

We also have another very important project related to the Economic Development Office, which is Rivanna Futures.

The board will be getting an update on that project on December 13th, and I look forward to updating the rest of the EDA at our full meeting on December 19th.

But that gives you a sense of the flavor of how we've used these meetings in the past.

And if we look ahead to 2024, what is it that we want to accomplish in our time with the board?

These two columns show just kind of the broad, big topics that each of our respective bodies work on.

In the Economic Development Office, we'll be focused on Rivanna Futures, Project Enable, updating Project Enable to something we've been calling Project Enable 2.0 and support for the board's strategic plan.

On the right-hand side of this slide, you see a lot of the activities that the EDA has been doing consistently over the past year.

I'd like to focus on these last two bullets.

Our finance department has informed us that we need to establish a fiscal services agreement with our finance department.

We previously had one, the EDA did, back in 2015, but it has expired and the finance department has advised us that's something they want to update with us.

Another topic that may be relevant for a board meeting is our memorandum of understanding between the EDA and the board.

That included some language that said after the board adopted Project Enable, we would review that MOU and update it.

So those are those are two ideas that we might think about bringing back to them.

Thinking about the schedule to prepare for this meeting, the board typically spends the first quarter of each calendar year adopting its budget, and there are many, many meetings, town halls and work sessions and public hearings associated with the budget,

We won't be scheduled for a joint session during that time, but in early Q2, we would like to

We would like to work with the clerk to schedule our time with them.

And since the EDA only meets monthly, that really gives us about three or four meetings to work together to come up with what it is we'd like to accomplish with the board.

And that's captured up here at the arrow at the top of the slide.

So the first bullet here shows

The topic of our first action item, which is a training offered by Virginia Tech on economic development authorities.

And staff would recommend that the EDA take part in this training.

This is a virtual training that will be on Monday and Tuesday of next week.

And it will give us all a common understanding and a shared foundation of

what the most current enabled activities are of economic development authorities.

We can review that in December through March.

And we can then, after we have topics identified, staff can go to the Board of Supervisors and get some early feedback on what those topics are.

And we can be prepared to take, to further that discussion and take action at the ultimate date of our joint meeting.

This is just a little bit more about that training through Virginia Tech.

I believe that the enabling authority for economic development authorities around the state provides a lot of flexibility to do a lot of different things.

And so as this board has shared with us and given us feedback on what are the priorities that it wants to pursue and an interest that it has,

This training will help guide us on what best practices are and what those opportunities are to consider.

And so we have a resolution included in today's packet that would provide funding for us for staff

to register everyone on the EDA as well as staff in our county executive's office to join us in getting that most up-to-date education on the abilities of EDAs so that we can be prepared for that discussion, that joint meeting with the board in the early to middle of next year.

And I'll just add, I think J.T.

and I are, well, I will strongly encourage everyone to do this as the

Slide said, even if you can't attend, there will be recordings available for people to watch.

And as J.T.

I think it sounds like a really good opportunity.

I last attended this training in person back in 2019 and it was a great opportunity in person especially to get to interact with other EDAs around the state and hear how they operated and bring back some best practices which we've implemented.

J.T.

would you, you're planning to

Okay, I do have some, you know, I've already had some meetings scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, but I'll make it work as best I can.

So that's great.

You can spend your weekend before Christmas watching the VITA training.

And I do, Diantha, one thing I'd be curious about, and this is something you don't need to answer now, but I'd be interested to hear what you think, having now been through a number of these joint meetings, what's the most effective way to present them and to run those meetings so that everybody gets the most out of it?

Yeah, and I guess let me think about it a little bit.

I'm happy to get with you guys.

Yeah, the agendas are obviously critical anytime you have joint meetings, right, and how you structure it.

I have to think back over the last couple of ones, but I know that the board really would appreciate the opportunity or appreciates the opportunity and is very interested in

and just to think about really, and I'll just say this quickly, going into the comp plan and some of the, you know, the comp plan, it has a focus on economic development.

You know, I mean, we are talking about that, J.T.

I don't think we've gotten that.

Nice segue there, Diantha.

Supervisor McKeel, we couldn't have scripted that any better, but coming soon to an inbox near you is the goals and objectives, the draft goals and objectives for the update to the comprehensive plan.

Community development staff will be attending our meeting on December 19th to do the same thing they did with the planning commission in terms of soliciting feedback and getting input from this body around the economic development chapter of the comprehensive plan.

I'm a genius.

Oh, good.

That's great.

Any further discussion?

Hearing none, all in favor of the resolution?

Aye.

Aye.

Any?

Sounds like all.

Any opposed?

All right, the resolution passes.

So J.T.

and the staff will take care of getting that and send us out the information that we need.

Yes, thank you.

Mr.

Chair, the next item on our agenda comes under unfinished business and that is the widget performance agreement for atmospheres.

Just to give a quick recap, this agreement is one of two agreements resulting from

An expansion of a local company called Agrospheres.

They're in our biotech space.

And they held the governor's announcement back in May, which included the specifics of their expansion, which was creating 53 new jobs, career ladder

High paying jobs and completing $25 million of capital investment.

The Economic Development Authority has already approved the Commonwealth Opportunity Fund grant that matched the $200,000 opportunity from the state.

The action that's requested today is focusing on the VJIP grant, the Virginia Jobs Investment Program opportunity, and that performance agreement was included in the meeting materials for today.

The authorization of the resolution in today's packet will allow staff to match the grant from the state for the new jobs that this company has already created.

And we don't have any representation from the company planned to speak today.

The CEO who spoke during the EDA's last meeting, he's in Dubai for an international conference on agriculture.

But the information on the slide gives you an overview of what we discussed before and today's

Suggested motion will authorize staff to implement this grant match.

Okay.

So we discussed this before and we have ample funds for this.

This is not above and beyond what, when they presented last meeting, we saw we have ample funds for this, correct?

And Ashley is muted, but I think she will answer as soon as she comes off a mute.

Ashley, we are still having trouble with audio.

Ashley, I'm happy to answer this question and maybe you can nod your head or

Pop over to the other side of the wall to answer if I mess it up, but Director Johnson, yes, these funds are provided by the Board of Supervisors.

They're appropriated to the EDA for the purpose of matching federal and state grants.

And they are already in the Economic Development Authorities Fund.

So does that leave our balance for opportunities later on, like where are we at financially as far as what we have left for others?

So as J.T.

said, the funding for this particular incentive has already been earmarked.

And just to provide some clarity, we may decide to work with our budget department maybe in the future so that we could have a little bit of a work session to discuss the way that these funding opportunities work.

It leaves our balance.

So we have

$496,000 give or take at our disposal for these types of incentives.

We have a total encumbrance over the next four fiscal years of around $600,000.

But each year, we can appropriate the needed funds for those incentives.

So we actually confirmed yesterday with our budget department that as these opportunities arise, we simply approach budget with the need because the state provides a matching grant.

I'm sorry, if the state's

spearheads the incentive.

We, by practice, will match.

And most often the board has no issues with supporting those types of growth opportunities.

So it is in a scenario where we get whatever we want, if you will, but within reason, within framework, it's certainly not an issue to request that type of support be appropriated.

And just to add, I am working on a,

And I appreciate that.

I know we discussed this at last meeting as well.

It's hard, the CEO in me has trouble just, you know, not knowing where I'm at at any point in time.

So that's a little bit, I struggle with that a bit.

Of course.

Sorry for my unprofessional posture here, and I will do it.

All right.

Is there no further questions?

All right.

Any further discussion?

Not hearing any.

All in favor of the motion?

Aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

I'm not hearing any.

The motion passes.

So the resolution is approved.

Mr.

Chair, if I could just really quickly plug one more time.

Community Development staff will be coming to our December 19th EDA meeting and so I will be distributing.

This is a packet of probably about 10 pages or so of draft goals and objectives for economic development.

And so please

Be on the lookout for that information in your inbox and if you have any questions, please reach out to staff.

The community development staff has been receiving feedback from the community, from the Planning Commission, the EDA, all of that is helpful as Supervisor McKeel alluded to, to the Board of Supervisors.

digesting that information and directing staff accordingly.

All right.

Thanks, J.T.

Anything else?

All right.

Thanks.

That was fast.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, everyone.