Economic Development Authority Meeting   4/15/2025

So are we ready to call the meeting to order?

Yes.

All right.

I will call the meeting to order.

And we have a member who seeks to participate virtually.

So we are here.

Well, it's work, so I guess that would go in personal.

Out of town does it.

The Board of Supervisors being out of town is satisfactory.

So, I will make the motion that Director Johnson be allowed to participate virtually for a acceptable reason under our virtual meeting.

Under your remote participation.

All in favor?

Aye.

All right, that wasn't a great start.

We have a quorum.

And are there any anyone from the public who signed up to participate?

No.

All right.

So approval of the minutes.

So we have two minutes from March 6 and March 18.

Is there a motion to approve the minutes?

Well, first, are there any comments on the minutes?

All right.

Is there a motion to approve the mail?

So moved.

All right.

Is there a second?

Second.

All in favor?

All right.

Oh, that's right.

Sorry, I got so distracted.

Welcome, Bill.

Why don't we do our, should we do quick introductions around the room?

And Bill can tell us a little bit about himself.

So I am Don Long.

I'm an attorney with Florida Pettit.

And I am chair of EDA.

And I'm the at-large manager.

I'm Jeff Morrill from Samuel Miller district and vice chair.

My businesses are lost.

I'm David Storm.

I'm a Scottsville appointee.

Steve, you and I were just getting the coin.

Oh, excellent.

Ryan.

Ryan, okay.

Well, it looks like I'll be representing the Rivanna district.

I'm Bill Mechnick.

I live in the Milton area.

I've been in the Rivanna district quite a bit.

It's a very diverse district.

You know, discovering but familiar with it.

I've been in town for, I don't know, 30 years or so, almost 30 years, since 97.

and I'm a landscape architect by license and education.

Most of my work is land planning for various properties.

So I deal with a lot of real estate and things like that.

Also deal with a lot of economic development related subjects, mainly community development, revitalization, economic development.

It's a passion of mine.

I grew up in a small town in New England, but

So that's something I'm very much interested in, very much interested in economic development, very much interested in quality of life and how we can move the needle in the county with that metric, as well as, you know, attract recruiting and entertaining the appropriate scale and type of businesses in the right mix to obviously support, you know, overall equity and health in our, you know, our economy,

Locally.

So my name is Andrea Johnson and I represent the Jack Jewett District.

And I am formerly the CEO of Vanderland Recycling in Troy, right outside of Moore County.

But now I'm the Director of Operations for the Construction and Demolition Recycling Association.

I have some questions about recycling for you.

Welcome, Bill.

I'm Trevor Henry, deputy county executive.

I work with public safety and economic development.

I've been very active with the defense and veterans sector in the community since 2018.

Next.

I'm not Richie DeLoria.

I am Lauren Bohdan.

I am a senior assistant county attorney in the county attorney's office.

All right, great.

Welcome, Bill.

Thanks for joining us.

All right.

Financial report.

That'd be great.

Yeah, only a couple things have changed.

I added some of the new Go Virginia stuff that we've added over the last couple months.

One thing I'll note that didn't quite get reflected in this one, but has since been reflected since we posted this last week is the bond closing fees and some of the other bonds.

You'll see here the invoice that we sent out for the admin faculty.

We've collected the first round of those for the year.

So next month in May, we'll see that it's reflected.

Any questions or comments on the financials?

All right.

Unfinished business.

Nothing.

New business.

Staff report.

Thank you.

So welcome, Director Mechnick.

As you know, we have a vacancy in the Economic Development Office.

The position has been posted as a Senior Manager for Economic Development with applications accepted through April 24.

That deadline is published out there.

We'll take a look at that point at the applicants and make a decision if we're going to start reviewing and inviting folks for phone screens or if we need to do something different with that posting.

So we'll continue to kind of update you all at meetings on how that is going.

As Avery just mentioned, the PT Hotel bond issuance closed as expected last month, which was great.

The funds from the closing fee will be reflected in your May financial report, but we can confirm that we do have those in hand.

Wells Fargo is to purchase the bonds, and I know at least somebody had asked about the rate, and I was just able to confirm that.

It's actually interesting, the structure of it is it's

A variable rate based on market plus 2.37% and so the rate will change over time.

Right now today it's 6.5% just for your edification.

And then the April 16th board meeting, which is tomorrow, has two economic development authority related items.

One is the Board Supervisor's EDA MOU is on the consent agenda.

If you've not been to a board meeting, the consent agenda is

sort of a package of items that don't anticipate there to be a need to discuss out loud, and we expect that there's consensus from the board to move forward with those.

That said, anything can change.

Board members can at any point ask that something get pulled from the consent agenda.

But its inclusion in the consent agenda is sort of a recognition of the expectation that the board has had several conversations about the MOU and is comfortable with the contents of the MOU.

And so they'll be formally considering that tomorrow.

And I'm not expecting at this point there to be discussion out loud about it.

The consent agenda is considered by the board close to the start of the meeting.

And so pretty quickly into the session tomorrow we'll know what that's looking like.

And then the other work session that they'll have tomorrow afternoon is the thriving economy chapter.

So David Benesch was here at the last meeting to talk about that thriving economy chapter.

You may remember that there's

The staff will be available and are part of the meeting tomorrow and

It's CDB's work effort, so they'll be presenting, but we'll be available to support any Q&A that you might be able to be helpful on.

So we'll keep you all posted on that.

It is, it is.

Anyone can come.

It'll be in lane auditorium.

What time?

Just an update on funding requests related to the Rivanna Futures Project.

Go Virginia!

That's not new news to you that we were awarded funding.

We are heavily underway on the design work that that funding is supposed to fund, which is really exciting.

We really hit the ground running on that.

and so that is putting us in a good position for the VBRSP program.

That's the one that we've been talking about a lot.

That request is for just under $14 million.

Last month, we said that we had completed our March virtual site visit and we're hoping that we would be invited to the final gate, which is an in-person site visit.

We have been invited to that.

That is happening the last week of April.

We'll have a team of folks from the Virginia Economic Development Partnership

as well as they've hired KPMG one of the major accounting firms to help them through their evaluation process and so we've got a staff team that's working on making sure that we put on our best foot forward for that site visit which we're again just really excited to be sort of this far in the process.

Yeah.

So there's lots of paths that we could take still.

And even within the Virginia Business Ready Sites program, we haven't asked for $14 million.

It's not binary.

And so it's not that we would get $0 or $14 million.

There's a very high likelihood that they would say, we don't have $14 million to give to you.

The budget for this round is $40 million for the whole Commonwealth.

So it's probably likely that they would say, what could you do with $6 million or some smaller number?

This is for infrastructure, getting the red bill.

So BBRSP will fund utility work, they'll fund mass grading and clearing work.

VEDP has essentially directed us to apply for the economic development access program through VDOT because they want all road projects funded through the VDOT framework.

The EDAT program is interesting.

The county applies regularly for smart scale funding, for revenue sharing funding.

One cannot just apply to the EDAT program.

The locality has to be invited.

through other state processes to be able to access those funds.

So that's not a program that the county has received funding from before.

So this is our first go at that program.

What's really nice about that program is it's streamlined.

So the application process will run based on when meetings are scheduled.

It should be less than four months to get from start to finish on the application a notice of award, which is very fast when you think about it being a funding program.

And it's intended to be flexible and move closer to the speed of business than the traditional programs.

And then, you know, if we were to get zero dollars from BBRSP, we would look at, there's other potential funding opportunities, there's federal programs that would be a good fit for this, the work that we're trying to do out there.

There's a lot of analysis of who's got funding and what's the right part of the project to break off and apply towards.

And so we'll

of opportunities.

The VBRSP program is just so perfectly structured to support this type of project that we're feeling pretty good about our chances.

Does county have a grants coordinator?

I imagine we do.

All right, I'll do the next one.

It's been a busy month, spring.

There's so many events to attend.

So Ashley and I were at the Virginia Economic Developers Association quarterly meeting earlier this month.

Yeah.

Yes.

In Newport News the theme this year is economic development art or science and so a lot of good programming on how to tell your story and also how to use data to to help you get what you are trying to get after for your community.

Ashley attended a sort of a afternoon of sessions on storytelling and I sat and heard from some site selectors who are the

the firms that companies looking to locate a headquarters or a large facility will hire to help them find the right locality and site for them to understand you know their perspective on the process and how we can be hopefully together you know we can work at how can we put ourselves in the best position for business attraction efforts we also have been the whole county has been at budget town halls last night was the seventh of seven

I think we all breathed a nice sigh of relief last night.

Probably a couple hundred folks in all attendance sessions.

One in each Magisterial District and then one additional one in Southern Albemarle.

Also, the EDA supported, with some grant funding, the Beacon Commercial Kitchen Project.

Okay, so before several of yours time.

But this is a commercial kitchen project that is sort of the brainchild of the New Hill Development Corporation.

They celebrated their opening two weeks ago and it's shared commercial kitchen space for folks who maybe they started off at the farmers market

and are looking to scale their business, be able to produce a higher volume product.

Prep areas and flash fryers and- It's located adjacent to the Belmont, I'm sorry, the Broadway corridor there by Belmont Pizza, right?

Did you say the EDA supported that?

For us newbies, can you just real quickly tell us what the process was to get to that point?

We were approached, again, I think this goes back about three years, we were approached by

The New Hill Project, The New Hill Development Corporation with the concept of this project and like often, often times groups will come and present here with the

the best wishes of the county executive's office and et cetera to present their concepts here with the hope for the EDA to provide support either through the sort of Nestle policy of state and federal grant matching which is pretty much the protocol for how we handle a lot of the state and federal grants but from time to time projects like this that aren't necessarily associated with the state or federal program

organizations will come and present to the EDA for consideration for funding.

So ultimately that would be taken into closed session or determined on the spot.

They approached staff initially who vetted the program and got information regarding

by the scope of work and development and the return on investment and the social impacts, et cetera.

And then we're- We did 25.

How much?

25, it was the grant, right?

Right, right.

I think it was tied into, they needed to have a certain amount of cash in order to get loans because they got loans.

And agribusiness slash food processing is one of the cluster sectors that the economic development strategic plan consultants are looking at.

And one of the data points that they shared in their initial analysis was in economic development, you talk a lot about location quotient.

So at the US average number of any given sector is

Pegbit One, where is your community relative to that?

And agribusiness and pre-processing, we're at 2.3.

So we have way more agribusiness and pre-processing than you might expect in our community.

And a lot of that is

the wineries and the breweries, but also the types of producers or types of businesses that would benefit from this project.

So again, like the farmers market type folks who do granola or tomato sauce or smoothies that they're looking to get on shelves in Whole Foods or other markets that

More often than not, it's cost prohibitive to process a lot of these products.

But we do not have a formal grant process.

Basically, somebody wants to come to us, they come to us and say, hey, here's what I'm interested in, here's what I want.

It's something we've talked about on different occasions as to whether we ought to have a framework for evaluating these grants.

We've never gotten so many that it was ever an issue, but we have talked about whether

As they come in, we ought to have something to evaluate them with.

Usually we do.

I think when a lot of the funds that we give go to match state funds, and so there's a whole framework in which they do that.

It seems like it would be a good practice to require some sort of status report, whether it's six months, a year, or whatever is appropriate, just so we know what they've done with the money and what they've accomplished.

Yeah.

Thank you.

The Piedmont Pitch, if you've been around for a minute, you may have recalled that this has occurred for the last two years.

This is year three, and it's an initiative between the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle County's offices.

of Economic Development.

We work with the Central Virginia Small Business Development Center just across the road there.

They offer some business essentials training for entrepreneurs and small business owners that are interested in competing in a pitch competition for

A total prize bucket of $15,000 and it's comprised of entrepreneurs in the city and the county.

So they meet a certain level of criteria and have access to the business essentials training that the CVSBDC provides.

They submit a business plan and the top six of the 40-odd

applications that we've received thus far for that opportunity to pitch for those prizes.

And you may recall I put Besson out a request for judges for that event.

It's later in May, and Director Hood has offered.

Don really likes to do it.

You're right.

Right.

So if it happens.

It's a lot of fun.

And it's free to attend.

So that's the second.

I'm going to tee Emily up for her.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a lot of, there's a lot of community engagement going on.

Okay.

So take it away.

So on Thursday, as part of the TomTom Festival programming, I'm not sure how I wound up on this panel, but we'll be talking about the 29 North Innovation Corridor.

So this body has had a presentation on that this calendar year.

And this is part of the effort to tell the story as broadly as we can and get as much buy-in as we can.

We're really excited about all the future potential in the 29 North area, and we think everybody else should be too.

And so Nikki Hastings with Siebel Biohub will talk a lot about the Commonwealth Bioaccelerator Project and some of the other work that Siebel Biohub does.

to continue to build the biotech sector.

Dr. Phil Potter will be talking about the National Security Data Policy Institute and the work of the School of Data Science and the Batten School of Public Policy and the work that they're doing to continue to integrate research in the machine learning AI space in the national security and intelligence sector.

Rebecca Ivins is the chair of the Defense Affairs Committee and she'll be talking about some of the work that the DAC does and then I'll be there talking about trying to sort of tie together why economic developers in the region are so excited about some of the opportunities here and the work that we're trying to do to sort of leverage the opportunities that we think are sort of started, the seeds are planted and the work that we can do to try to help make sure that we take advantage of those.

and then, you know, the Chum Chum Festival in general is a wonderful event.

Programming starts Wednesday and runs through the weekend.

Yeah, so this is Thursday.

The session starts at 2.15, but it's part of a whole conference programming day.

This week?

I can get you some.

So you shoot me an email.

It's really good.

I mean, there's a lot of really good.

There's some good civic engagement plans and community development.

So it's a great, they've done a great job.

Most of the programming is at the code building just across the way.

Common House also has some of the programming.

And I think the Vols, which is in the former Bradbury

Online they have an interactive schedule too that explains where a lot of the different, there are a lot of overlapping events and sessions

Sure, just a quick recap since we met last.

Those are our account for our business retention expansion activity.

I mentioned last meeting that we're moving forward for Q2 for information technology and intelligence and national security.

So by all means, push leads my way.

I'd love to connect with folks in that sector and would be more than happy to

have folks join if everyone was amenable, but yep.

All right.

and then a little bit of a weightier strategic plan update.

You all know that we had the consultant team here the last week of March.

And we had two full days of work, 7.30 AM to 6.30 PM, just talking to people.

And so we were with 85 folks in the community over the two days.

We organized,

A series of sector-based roundtables when we partnered with local organizations that work in those areas to sort of convene those sessions.

That worked out really well.

It's one thing to get an email from the county saying we'd love to listen to you.

It's another thing to get an email from a trusted partner to say, hey, the county really wants to listen to us and please come to the session.

So that was the approach that we took.

We think it went really well.

We, that's it for this slide.

I'll take the next one.

Some of the key themes.

What I think was most shocking was we had, when you have agribusiness and Intel national security and biotech together on the same piece of paper, it feels like what would the overlap be among them?

It was incredible, the themes that we heard across, that cut across the sessions that we held.

So these are some of the key themes that the consultant team sent back to us.

Albemarle has a lot of assets, but a lot of them are under leveraged.

Growth is happening, but infrastructures are keeping up, infrastructure being roads and broadband, but also sort of the infrastructure of how development happens, zoning regulations, permitting processes, land constraints,

Space Availability, kind of all wrapped into that one.

We have a ton of talent graduating every year from PVCC and the public high schools and the University of Virginia, but they moved.

They don't stay here.

And so that's a huge opportunity that we can work on.

Can you go back one second?

I'm sorry.

Coal storage.

That was generated by the agribusinesses.

And that's a really specific example that I think you can summarize into a higher level theme of agribusiness at scale requires light industrial type infrastructure that you cannot do when the rural areas are present.

And so we have rural

Agribusiness is located in the rural areas.

Good to do the business part of agribusiness.

Need access to cold storage, warehousing, transportation, loading docks, warehousing.

And those are things that you can't build in the rural area.

Because of our comp plan.

Sorry guys.

I wonder who can change that.

I'm working on it.

Just a quick comment.

Wayne Yancey with Cardinal News just published an article about the retention of college graduates in the state of Virginia.

And if my memory serves me,

including PVCC, 77% are still in Virginia five years after.

So it's worth differentiating rather than lumping them together.

There's a huge difference.

And obviously one of the things that we need to concentrate on in the Talon area is keeping more of the UVA graduates in this region.

for each of the colleges and university.

We can take that the other way, right?

30 and 40 years ago the percent of funding for UVA or Virginia Tech coming from Richmond was a much greater percentage than we see today, right?

So when you talk about, you know, are we getting our money's worth, I would say we might be because that share that's come from Richmond is not where it was.

So there's not an expectation that they would stay in statements.

Anecdotally, however, after about 10 or 12 years, many of them, they want to come back to raise families.

There's a gap there.

This article did not look at that, but you're exactly right.

So I propose an experiment.

How do I get my daughters to stay here and not even skip that step of leaving New York or wherever?

Well that gets to point something that's probably on the next slide.

The previous set of data had the thing about the missing middle.

That was the previous set of data that the consultants gave us.

So this is really just what we heard back from folks.

So there's an economic development ecosystem, there's biotech ecosystem, all the major sectors have kind of groups of folks who work in that sector a lot.

This ecosystem is collaborative, but fragmented.

So there's so many organizations,

people and they're doing similar things but slightly different and it can be hard for an entrepreneur to know where to start.

Once they get to the right group, it's a highly collaborative area and we heard that across the different focus group sessions as well.

Albemarle's identity is powerful but unclear.

We heard a couple of times a similar comment that sort of went like,

Everyone talks about Albemarle County as a great place to live.

Nobody talks about Albemarle County as a great place to do business and work.

And then economic development must be bold focused and values aligned.

So don't lose the things that we all love about this community.

But in the vein of diversify the tax base a little bit more, how can we make some smart bets and some smart investments to be able to really shift that a little bit for the community?

So that was kind of the themes from the focus groups.

You know, everybody mentioned affordable housing, everybody mentioned challenges with recruiting, big career professionals, which we saw in the age data in the first round, that we don't have a lot of sort of the 25 to 45 year olds in our community.

And so that felt like a consistent theme around sort of missing the middle of sorts.

We also received 190 pages of charts related to the cluster analysis work that the consultants did.

So I hope you guys brought your jammies.

We're not going to go through all of it.

These were the six sectors that they analyzed.

They were selected because some folks asked, why is it higher ed on here?

Why is it the hospital or healthcare on here?

They focused on traded sectors, so where you're selling services or goods outside of the community.

And so that was what drove that focus.

We looked at things that her legacy have been part of our focus for several years, and also bringing in some emerging opportunities to take a look at how do you guide that idea of smart investments.

There's a strong regional specialization in food processing and agribusiness.

Bioscience and life sciences has been a key driver of economic growth.

That's the highest gross regional product value of all the sectors that were analyzed.

There's also a low automation risk when you think about future resiliency of any of these sectors.

Next slide.

The intelligence and national security cluster faces some workforce challenges.

The population is high retirement age eligible.

And so that can just create some uncertainty when you have such a high proportion of that here.

A benefit of that sector is that their supply chain requirements, the things that they're procuring from other businesses and providers is high.

There was some job losses over the past five years in that sector and so it's just something to watch and I think a lot of the work that we're doing right now with Rivanna Futures and some of the ecosystem work that we're doing is actually part of how do you solve for that.

Business and financial services has been a target sector since the beginning of the economic development program.

It's a diverse cluster, but it faces potential talent challenges.

It has a high automation risk.

So a lot of those services are provided differently than they were before.

A lot of them are remote type positions now.

And so you don't have like an office need like you did in the past.

And so it's a sector that has a lot of transition

based on kind of the world around us.

And we're not super competitive right now with wages in that sector, although it has a lower educational attainment of our workforce than national averages, which suggests that here there's a lower barrier to entry into that space.

Clean tech and renewable energy is a fast growing cluster.

In Albemarle, it's primarily building or building trade.

So solar installers, solar maintainers type jobs.

Charlottesville has a lot of energy innovation jobs with some of the companies that are located in the downtown area.

So clean energy is in the city's economic development strategy.

The picture in Albemarle looks a little bit different than what we're seeing in the city.

And then IT has really high earnings and growth potential.

Our cluster isn't strongly competitive when you compare us to other places yet.

There's been some really key investments made

at Virginia Tech and UVA as part of the broader state strategy to attract the Amazon HQ2 project.

We are, right now the consultants are working on a draft framework.

We'll be meeting with them, looks like the very first week of May to get sort of a first pass at that.

And then we'll be working on what sort of next steps look like.

We'll be doing a work session with the Board of Supervisors in May.

to make sure that we're still kind of on the right track with the feedback that they gave us at the front of the process and some of the conversations that we've had with the board throughout.

And then you all have on your calendar an August 13th joint meeting with the board of supervisors where the consultant will come and deliver the report and it's the board's action to take.

Okay.

Yeah.

And then I guess,

Yeah.

That's the staff report.

Any questions on staff reports?

All right.

Okay.

So I moved with the Ocelot County Economic Development Authority.

Enter a closed meeting.

Approve a closed meeting.

I'm not sure what the word is.

Go into a closed meeting.

It's authorized by the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.

Thank you, Ashley.

Section 2.2-3711A of the Code of Virginia under subsection 6.

to discuss and consider the investment of public funds related to an economic opportunity fund performance agreement would find the most ink where bargaining is involved and where if a public initially would adversely affect the financial interests of the county and subsection 8 to discuss and consider consultation with legal counsel regarding specific legal matters

related to Bonumos Inc. performance agreement which requires the provision of legal advice by such counsel in subsection 29 to discuss and consider the award of a public contract related to the performance agreement Bonumos Inc. that involves the expenditure of public funds, public discussion of which would adversely affect the negotiating strategy of the EDA regarding the terms of the performance agreement.

Is there a second?

Second.

All in favor?

Hi.

Hi.

Hi.

All right.

Well, it's such tricky work.

Yeah, that's right.

And if you were in the way of history, you've also done them all up.

How old were you?

You wanted all these things because yes, they were in the way of my construction.

All right, I think we need our motion here.

I moved into EDA-certified.

Oh, we're sorry.

I recorded the vote.

that could invest in each director's knowledge only.

Public business matters lawfully exempted from the open meeting of the Freedom of Information Act and identified in the motion authorizing the closed meeting were heard, discussed, or considered in the closed meeting.

Is there a second?

Second.

All right.

I'm just going to redo it.

Okay.

That's my second.

Director Hood?

Aye.

Director Friedman?

Aye.

Aye.

Alright, so next on the agenda we will

Adjourn the meeting to the solar pollinator demonstration.

I guess maybe we should just adjourn the meeting.

Yes.

So we're just going to adjourn the meeting.

You can keep the meeting open.

You've just got to adjourn it on the parking lot, which is fine.

Yeah, so we will adjourn to the parking lot to see the silver pollinator demonstration.

Our next meeting will be May 20th.

Can I ask you a question?

I'll do a quick synopsis real quick.

So last year, Silver Pollinator Company, they have a farm in Blue Vana and a storefront in the Broadway corridor here in the county.

and they sell beekeeping equipment, supplies, teach classes, educate, do honey processing, things of that nature.

Last year, they applied for an AFID infrastructure grant through the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and were awarded a $26,000 grant that was matched with 6,500 from the Albemarle County Economic Development Authority and the Fluvanna County Board.

and together that was $39,000 to put together a mobile honey processing facility so that she could travel throughout the region to assist other honey producers with producing their honey in a certified facility too.

We were touching on earlier about affordability and cost prohibitive production facilities.

So this was her answer to that problem.

So we're just going to go check out the facility and just show it's down in the parking lot here.

If we'll exit the steps.

This is like, hey, hey, this is what we've done.

Have a great time guys, I'm sorry I can't be there to see it.