Economic Development Authority Meeting   7/15/2025

Okay.

Approval of the minutes.

Any comments on the minutes?

And then the second one,

It was reported that the code sections for the closed meeting weren't in the minutes.

Probably should make sense to include, even though it's in the resolution.

Anything else?

Under number one, you would just need to insert the word by seconded by Director Storm.

That would have been April 15th.

And he's listed as staff president.

No, that's a good job, Lauren Bohdan.

All right.

So is there a motion to approve the minutes?

As amended.

As amended.

So moved.

Is there a second?

Second.

All right, all in favor?

Aye.

All right, the minutes are approved.

Yeah, so we have a new financial year that's rolled over as of July 1st.

So what you'll see here on the first page is again, just a snapshot of just this financial year, not the performance agreements altogether.

So the top half is the starting revenue projections for each of those accounts.

We've added the PT Hotel to the bonds section.

You can read through those.

Some of the tax rebates, we're still waiting on final numbers for those, so we'll have to update those as we get them in probably in August and September.

Some of the other agreements, solar pollinator was finished from this side, so we removed that.

We added some of the Go Virginia stuff and then the legal services and more admin type stuff at the bottom.

Okay.

And then the second half is just an update of the performance agreements.

Not much has changed on this front.

This is just the most recent numbers that we have.

We do not quite have an end of year.

Any questions or comments?

Okay.

So we were moving, we were going to switch things around.

So we want to do

fiscal services, first of all, we're going to do revenge for us.

So regional entrepreneurship initiative, a little temporal grant, a match request.

So I am going to recuse myself from this discussion because I am among these venture central tools.

So I think, well, I can probably

And in the spirit of disclosure, I also mean a member of the venture central board and my capacity of staff.

And so I'm happy to serve as a resource for information, but it's not like Donovan and Fort Clark.

We'll turn it over to Rebecca Hidock, who is the Executive Director of Venture Central and Joe Grice, who's the new Central Virginia Small Business Development Center.

President and CEO, Director, who has just hit the ground running really hard.

Director Hood was present for the small business conference that SBDC held a couple of weeks ago.

Really well attended event, a lot of great energy coming out of that.

Really appreciate all the work that you're doing with the staff and I'm excited to hear more about the full project.

Great, thank you.

Well, hi, nice to meet some of you for the first time, see others you know for a while.

So I'm Rebecca Hayduck, Venture Central, just a lot of folks aren't familiar with what this entity is.

This entity was created, it's a 501c3, so it's its own organization, was housed with the Chamber of Commerce under a different name and was resurrected in 2021.

to work on overall entrepreneurial ecosystem development.

So in a lot of communities where you have innovation and

R&D facilities like we have here, you have ecosystem coordinating entities that work with the many different service providers like the Small Business Development Center, I think we have community investment collaborative, Civil Biohub and others, and evaluate what are the needs so we can create more of the high-paying innovation-based jobs and get these innovations that are coming out of the university, that are coming out of our SBIR recipients,

into the market faster and build our innovation economy in this tech space.

So that's the purpose of Venture Central.

Venture Central was also designed to work on and house programs that didn't fit neatly in some of the other entities that exist.

So it's truly a support organization.

It is designed to support innovation, commercialization,

not do anything duplicative of the other organizations that you all are supporting and that exist here, like the Small Business Development Center.

And Beau Grice, the director of SBDC is doing some incredible things there.

He's going to be a partner on this with Community Investment Collaborative, who is the host of the SBDC.

So this project, which I'll explain, basically half of it is going to

CIC and SBDC to manage the capital project.

And then the other half of the project is what Venture Central will manage.

So the project is called FUEL because we are focused on unifying our entrepreneurial landscape.

Has anybody read the REI reports that came out of Go Virginia?

Well, you all know, there's so many great studies that have happened, right?

The SEDS, Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy.

Obviously, the Albemarle County Strategy is in draft.

The City Go Virginia funds the Regional Entrepreneurship Strategy.

And so that has been published.

There are nine recommendations.

This project is supporting

three of those recommendations that all of the economic development professionals and the entrepreneur service organizations, as well as a number of CEOs in the region have approved for us to start with.

So, I'll give you the ask right away.

The reason we're here is we need $10,000 in additional funding for the fuel capital component of this project.

The piece that SBDC and CIC are managing is pretty intensive.

Charlottesville has also agreed to provide a $10,000 commitment.

That's $5,000 a year over two years.

And Venture Central has a grant from Charlottesville and another one from Albemarle to basically fund my position.

And that's what allowed me to go into Venture Central and start working on these things.

That is a match for this grant.

The project is a total of 690,600.

We're asking Go Virginia for 440,000 or $220,000 a year.

That is divided among these three projects.

Local match that has been provided totals 250,600.

10 of the 11 municipalities in region nine are participating financially in this.

And we're expecting it to start in January of next year.

The problem with solving, one is lack of regional coordination.

Businesses and conversations that we had earlier, businesses have to navigate a lot of different resources, they have to look for different service providers, they have struggle accessing capital, and they also have difficulty navigating where to go.

They may have a headquarters in Albemarle, but they may need to set up manufacturing in Louisa, or they may take off for Waynesboro, which we really don't.

So that coordination and having a regional coordinating committee is one of the initiatives here.

The second is missing professional networks.

We experimented at SBDC and started a CEO group of some of our high tech CEOs that were raising money, basically creating jobs.

Now that group, which is about three years old, has raised about 50 million among them and they employ

probably more than 40 people I actually haven't counted.

They just feed off of each other and we know the peer networks are incredible for companies really building.

So the second recommendation, which is recommendation three in the REI is to support peer networks in these key industry specific areas that are the Go Virginia target sectors.

And then the third one is the number one thing that came across in the REI study was capital gaps.

people struggling to access capital.

So that's fuel capital and that's what we're here to ask you about today.

I'll go quickly through this.

Fuel coalition is that first

Support Project, that's bringing together regional leaders, Fuel Connection is the peer networks, and Fuel Capital is capital education and access to reduce funding gaps and build business expansion.

Beau will give some detail on that.

There's many elements to that from not just accessing traditional capital loans, CDFIs, but also angel and risk capital.

So Fuel Coalition will be managed by Venture Central.

And our goal there is to unify goals for the five Go Virginia target sectors.

Are you all familiar with what the target sectors are?

Okay, so life sciences, information technology, business services.

Yeah, and agribusiness.

Yeah, yeah, thank you.

Food and beverage manufacturing.

What we expect to come out of that, you know, when we are all growing in the same direction and we have a plan, we're going to get there faster.

So we want to get established goals and figure out who does what, what support can we get behind this.

So we have a solid plan.

Fuel connection is the second one.

This is the peer groups.

This is convening C-suite.

Leadership, implementing activities in peer-to-peer forums, letting them connect not only to each other's networks, but to the resources that exist in the localities here, in the state, and federally and internationally.

We have a lot of access to resources.

SBDC has been the house of where is that knowledge and how do they get connected, but

It's not always easy to access for folks.

It's not widely known.

We want to increase the knowledge.

And frankly, a great example here in Charlottesville, we have the number one SBIR recipient in the state of Virginia and number five in the country.

That's Luna Labs.

They have the ability to do prototyping, destruction testing, programming for, it's an engineer's dream over there.

I don't know if you all have been there, but it's incredible.

for other companies.

And so based on discussions about this, and they're part of our CEO advisory board, they're willing to offer those services to other companies, which will help R&D iterate faster.

So just bringing these folks together has a big impact.

So that's part of the connection network.

Yeah, so unfortunately, one of the biggest obstacles to success that we see in our offices, folks come in, they've got a great idea, they've got a great plan, they got a lot of passion, but accessing capital can be a challenge.

So, you know, some of these folks are looking for traditional capital loans, which we can help them with.

We have an excellent commercial banker on this part of our network who really helps folks navigate that.

Out in some of the rural communities, it gets harder, but we also really need some help in getting the entrepreneurs aware of what the access points are, as well as the bankers, the risk capital, the angel networks aware of who needs capital and what their mission is.

Additionally, there's just a lot of folks who could be qualified investors in town who are investing in Boston and New York and San Francisco when there are amazing high-tech, high-value companies right here in Charlottesville that they're just not becoming aware of.

And really part of this goal is to engage some of these family offices, which I just don't think has really happened a lot in El Morro and want to get those family offices, these trusts aware of some of the opportunities locally, as well as just shoring up some of the

The access into CavAngels, into Charlottesville Angel Network, and helping those folks access entrepreneurs.

We also really, as part of this grant, want to go out into some of the neighborhoods that have got a lot of folks who are potentially qualified investors and making them aware of the Angel Network opportunities, as well as, you know, some of the folks in Nelson County, perhaps in Wintergreen, Keswick, you know, Farmington-Borishead, there are lots of places there.

The outcomes for this grant, we're assuming that

Over the first three years, there will be 55 jobs created.

Businesses expanded.

We estimated 15.

We're taking the advice of Go Virginia and trying to be conservative.

Businesses served 50.

Funds raised, we've put it at 6 million, but SBDC in, you know, what was it, 2021, 2022, 2023, helped companies raise more money than the 18 years prior.

and I would love to take credit for this, but it's really, this was done under a two leaf.

We've added the 25 SBDCs in the state of Virginia.

We've been the number one SBDC highest producing office, I think it's six of the past seven years.

So if you look at the impact, the things I'm most proud of in being affiliated with SBDC is that folks who come into our office and meet with a business advisor,

They grow their jobs at 10x with folks who don't come in and meet with an SBDC person.

They go to their revenue 3x.

So these investments are amazing.

And those are the Virginia numbers.

Our numbers are, we're the top performing office in the state.

Yeah.

And then the key really is this is a regional effort.

10 of the 11 localities in region nine are actively participating.

Charlottesville now the moral total commitment, remembering that 50,000 of that is coming from the prior commitment to Venture Central.

would be 60,000 and then another 128,600 collectively among the other municipalities.

All the economic development directors have provided input and helped us select these projects that we're gonna work on.

So why support fuel?

It's building on proven success.

Venture Central, CIC, SBDC have all managed many grants and had all successful outcomes and met the goals of the grants.

The approach is based on the REI.

There were actually over 400 touch points for coming up with what are the recommendations as well as using national studies based on communities that have built innovation communities.

We're early, right?

We've got a lot of R&D, we've got a lot of great technology and great resources, but we haven't built a ton of infrastructure for these companies.

So we've got a lot of great opportunity here.

and the design is sustainable.

A lot of the work that we're gonna do, it marries nicely into existing entities and things like peer groups become self-running over time.

So that's it.

Yeah, I got a couple.

So speaking of marrying, what is your strategy to get the home offices

married up with?

Great question.

I don't think they know it's available today.

So there's some low-hanging fruit there.

So fortunately, we have relationships with folks who live in these neighborhoods.

And we're going to leverage those relationships to identify folks who can, I mean, really, the idea is it would be a lunch and learn or a cocktail party or a breakfast or something where we come in,

We would do some storytelling.

We'd bring in an entrepreneur who said, once upon a time, I was looking for capital, and it was hard for me to find, and I went to Cannes, and they did this, and here's where my business grew, and we had a successful exit, and here was the outcome for the investors.

and doing that in each of these neighborhoods or however we can aggregate qualified investors.

But it's storytelling really.

Would you mind just giving a couple of minutes of successes that you've had maybe, cause then I could get my brain around.

From the technology standpoint, cause I was the,

Like Emily said, I was the person on the small business thing, and it was really no technology.

Well, the first event that day, I don't know if you saw the- No, no.

The AI group that we had, and Michael Pritchard, who was one of the co-founders of Willow Tree.

We had Greg Frank, who's, you know,

Had one in the Felton company, investing companies, an AI true expert.

And then we had someone from Rootstium, which is an automation AI company.

And we've had that one.

I have a technology background.

I have 30 years of implementing e-commerce sites for everyone from FUBU to Ethan Allen to the WWE to Tory Burch, Calvin Klein.

Technology is my passion.

That's what I've done.

We're doing a lot of, in fact, on Friday, I would invite you all, we're doing an AI training on Friday morning.

We're also doing training on AI coding.

From the perspective of the angel networks, I've been a member of CAM for 10 years.

I'm on the board.

And close, we have angels.

We get anywhere from 40 to 60 applications a month.

for funding, they're not all local, but more than a third of our investments are local and have been over the course of 10 years.

And regarding your exit question, we just exited, we had a company go public, it was a 20X return.

I'm in it, what is it?

I'm going to send you the email because I can't believe I can't do it right now, but it went public.

The other one though, Carpe, we just got another check.

We actually got a 4X return on that one and just got a check this week because we still own equity in that company.

That's Carpe.

That's out of North Carolina.

Well, and this, by the way, I didn't mention, which I should have mentioned.

The programming for the peer groups is going to focus on manufacturers and dual-use technology companies because we have identified many of them and they are asking for specialized programming.

We have Gen Edge, we have Apex Accelerator, the UVA School of Engineering is interested in providing support for that.

And these companies, like I mentioned, Luna Labs and what they have, already these

CEOs have been connecting via our advisory board, and now one of the companies in North Fork is going to be using the services of Luna Labs to do some prototyping for it.

Right, so it's just, yeah, making these connections, but we are trying, and we'll work with the innovation corridor on this as well as stack once that gets reformed.

Our role is not to run these things, it's to bring the assets together to make it happen.

So, I have a question related, the opposite side of that, and you kind of answered it with, you're not controlling every aspect of this, but what does a typical failure look like?

Yeah, I mean, it becomes a lifestyle business.

Okay.

But no, there's a lot, you know, where they just tank.

Like, you know, there was a, what's the word I'm looking for, a drone company.

And then all of a sudden there's all these other drone companies and they just didn't get the contracts.

There's a great book, if anybody's interested, it's called Angel Investing.

It's a fantastic book about how it works.

And you've got to have 20 investments and one of those is going to hit.

So that's just accepted as part of the ecosystem.

Well, you get to meet the other investors and these folks, you know, they've got a lot of capital to deploy, can come up with ideas together and find other investments.

And it is fun.

Yeah, sure.

And we're actually teaching at the Americas SPDC National Conference on this topic, so we're well-suited to train people on it.

I know we're taking up a lot of time.

Yep, that is great.

It depends on the group.

So Cav Angels and Charlottesville Angels Network, both

individuals, investors decide if they're going to invest.

So they don't have a fund where, and that's something we want to develop actually in this region is a fund that is a follow on fund.

So when anybody makes an investment, the fund follows on with additional capital.

We don't have

But yeah, that's one way to do it.

It's here, people make individual decisions.

In have and can, the individual decides, do I want to put money into this or not?

The format is that everyone gets together, there's some sort of social moment, and then the entrepreneurs leave, one is invited in, they tell their story, they field questions from the audience, they leave, and then the folks in Cannes would say, I'm interested in this, or I don't know anything about that industry, and there's some discussion.

If there is some interest, there's someone who's appointed to do due diligence, but as Rebecca said, it's not a

It's like a big shark tank.

Kind of.

Absolutely.

I'd love to have any of you as a guest.

Once again, they invest in and say specific problems.

That's right.

Yeah.

Or they may take several.

Five individuals met with five different minds, or all five of them met with one.

All right, is there a motion?

Is there a motion?

I'll move that we approve the resolution by a batch of funds.

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Abstaining.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you all.

Thank you very much.

And if anybody wants to go to a CAN meeting, let Rebecca know, or let me know.

Sure, yeah.

We'll let Andy and Morgan tell us the names of the members.

OK. And maybe on the third?

So now onto the fiscal services agreement.

You are on it.

And just a very quick introduction of Andy using CFO and Morgan Rakes with their grant student.

This is a follow on to the Board of Supervisors and the Economic Development Authority MOU process.

So we have a new MOU in place.

There was, in one of the drafts of the MOU, there had been talk of an administrative fee being applied to funds that the EDA would interact with.

and then there was a determination that it was probably the most consistent with how the county forms agreements with other entities to have that as a separate fiscal services agreement outside of the MOU, so let the MOU sort of stay a whole agreement between the EDA and the Board of Supervisors and then let a fiscal services agreement

deal with more of the sort of the nitty gritty details.

And so that is what is before you today.

Thank you for doing my introduction.

Morgan and I are here for this action item for the Economic Development Authority.

We have just a couple of slides and a brief presentation before we turn it over to the EPA for any questions and action.

Thank you all for having us this afternoon.

Before I ask an authority or board to approve anything, I'd like to provide a picture of where we've been to get to this point and also what happens next.

This agreement really originated almost a year ago with the Joint Economic Development Authority and Board of Supervisors meeting that really recognized that the fiscal agent agreement had not been updated in some time.

And just as we do periodically with all of our fiscal agents, we want to stay on top of those agreements.

So that led to some ongoing discussion with staff and EPA, Chair Long, facilitated discussion to get feedback from the Board of Supervisors that culminated

and that adoption that Emily Kilroy mentioned in March and April with the idea that separate fiscal services agreement would come.

So that is today what we have prepared for the EDA.

And I'll note that after today, if the EDA approves this, county staff will then take that to the Board of Supervisors for approval as the final step in that process.

I'll say that before I turn it over to Morgan for walking through the agreement, this is really based, as Emily said, upon looking at all the common agreements we have

for the partner agencies with our standard practices, and also reflecting the feedback from the EDA and the board in these prior discussions.

If you quickly summarize.

So this MOA proposes a 1% of incoming funds received by the EDA, where the funds are external to Albemarle County.

The MOA also outlines the core services that the county is going to provide.

The County Attorney's Office providing a set of legal services and the Department of Finance and Budget providing fiscal management services.

Uncompanying the MOA is an operational guide which details each of these services meant to be updated from time to time as needed.

In addition, we've also identified additional optional services that the EDA is not currently utilizing in case those are needed in the future.

Of course, this would need to be finalized before implemented and then added to the operational guide.

Any questions or comments?

I mean, basically, these are services

If we were not being provided by the county, we'd have to go to somebody else's.

All right, not hearing any comments, any questions, any discussion?

I'll be brief.

Just by way of clarification, it's almost a conditional approval if the Board of Supervisors doesn't make any changes, then it would become the agreement.

If the Board of Supervisors does make some changes, then it would come back.

On the high level construct of the 1% on the external funds was part of the discussion that was

Economic Development Authority fiscal services memorandum of agreement between the County of Albemarle, Virginia and this Economic Development Authority of Albemarle, Virginia and transmit the same to the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors for consideration if unchanged by the Board of Supervisors if any adoption of this commission will constitute this authority's final approval and adoption of the fiscal services memorandum of agreement.

Next slide.

Any discussion?

All in favor?

All right, thank you.

Appreciate your work on this.

All right, so are we gonna

We'll do a really quick hit on the staff report if time allows.

All right, so on the Economic Development Strategic Plan, you all have a special session with the Board of Supervisors on August 13th.

I know some of you will be participating remotely.

The same is actually true on the board side.

For those who are physically assembled, we'll be here in just a couple weeks.

and looking at a draft document, since the last time the EEA had a meeting, at that point we were looking at goals and objectives.

Now we have goals, objectives, and strategies.

So that was what was sent to you.

ahead of this meeting and we'll step through those this afternoon.

Today I got the draft, like a Word document version.

So we've been looking over the course of this project at what essentially a slide deck that they add slides to as they go along.

and we're now at the point where they're now in a Word document, it's a report format, they're streamlining the language, etc.

I got that today and so we'll be transmitting that to you probably tomorrow and we'll post that also to our Engage page so that that's available for the public to review as well.

I'll say just a couple things about some of the changes that have happened since the strategies were put out and just through the feedback that we've received, changes that we've made that are incorporated into that draft report document, and again we look forward to sharing that with you later this week.

Before I do that, just sort of where we are, this project officially kicked off last August when you had a joint meeting with board supervisors and health handlers.

So this is not a full look back at what we've done over the course of the year, but just sort of where we've been since the last time we were with the EDI in May.

So we reviewed the goals and objectives with you all in May.

At that meeting, we asked, you know, if there are goals that you would like to see amended, struck, added, that that would be, that session was the time for the Board to give that type of feedback.

And they were satisfied with the goals that we had with some notes about how we might do the strategies and actions to come.

In June we held a community lunch and learn.

It's a webinar series that the county runs for major projects and we had a good participation in that, good questions and answers from the community.

We did a second community survey.

We had done one at the start of this project and this one asked us to share feedback on the five goals that we had.

We refined the goals and objectives based on all the feedback that we received from the EDA, the board, and the community, and our stakeholder committee as well, and then drafted strategies on how those might be implemented.

So here we are in July, seeking EDA feedback, and if you all have an opportunity to discuss with your staff on this body anything that you might want to be sure to share when you're seated with the board of supervisors this month,

and then at the joint meeting the board will be in a position to adopt the plan at that point.

Some of the changes that we've made in the past couple of weeks and this first bullet really tries to cover that the comp plan update is happening at the same time as the economic development strategic plan update.

There traditionally has been an economy-focused chapter in the comprehensive plan and so we've been working really closely with the component team to ensure that the two work together to articulate the county strategy and goals.

David Benesch was here at our last meeting.

to sort of share where they are on the thriving economy chapter.

And so we've been trying to work as iteratively as the strategic plan continues to frame up to ensure that the comp plan language reflects each other well.

So we've updated the draft of the Thriving Economy chapter to reflect the draft economic development strategic plan.

We've added the target sectors that have been identified in the strategic plan.

We've also done a refresh where we had that refresh data because that original chapter draft was started two years ago.

So we've got some fresh data with a refresh back.

We also added a clear articulation in the economic development strategic plan report document how the comp plan interfaces with the strategic plan as well as other county plans.

You can see this is a quote from the draft plan that references the comprehensive plan as well as the county's housing plan, the climate action plan, the biodiversity action plan.

as examples of how staff evaluate things holistically.

We try to be robust in our analysis and the economic development strategic plan would sit alongside those other plans.

As the board of supervisors, this body, the planning commission, think about individual applications, they have these other plans to sort of draw from to understand how it fits the big picture.

We also added an executive summary so you can kind of dive right into the goals and the rationale in a digestible way and streamline the text.

We've got a lot of feedback that it's pretty redundant as you go through it.

And so it's a much tighter document in its relevancy.

Any questions on that?

So these are the slides that we provided to you that, again, sort of spell out how we'll go about implementing the strategy.

And so I'll try to hit these at a high level, but if you – so if you want to talk – pause and talk, let me know.

Can I get a – I guess – I'm going to talk about this sort of stuff.

Maybe I can add to what you were saying in terms of the process.

And that is, one of the things, talking about what our role is and how we need to be involved in this, I think one of the things that I wanted to be clear about

because it sometimes gets lost.

This is the Albemarle County's economic development plan.

It's not the EEA's economic development plan.

So what we're providing our input and guidance and suggestions to the board, but ultimately, it's their decision.

They're the ones who are going to vote on it.

They're the ones who are going to make a decision, and it goes beyond that.

I don't know that that was always

Thank you.

So the first one talks about how to focus on the Rivanna Futures Project.

It includes a plan of

I'm used to when you get into strategies that you identify who will be responsible and in charge of doing something and when it will be done, what kind of deadline there will be, and perhaps what level of priority it is.

When I look at this strategic plan that we saw, there must be a hundred strategies.

Well, what's number one?

What's in the top ten?

What has the biggest bang for your effort?

And that's not reflected in here at all.

And as Don mentioned, other than one little segment here that does reference the EDA,

It doesn't say, so what's the EDA's role in this?

What's the Economic Development Office role?

What is the Board of Supervisors role?

That seems to be missing at the strategy level, at least in the strategic plans I've always worked on.

Yeah, that's great feedback.

Don and I were chatting a couple weeks ago about it would be great to have a work session.

So the scope that we've engaged the consultants and help with doesn't dive all the way into implementation.

And so the team is going to do an implementation sort of offsite to sort of work through who's on point, what are the biggest priorities, what are the lowest hanging freedoms,

What do we need to engage the stakeholder committee?

that committee will not meet again as a committee.

But it's comprised of all of the partners that we work with on a regular basis.

And so what can we tap and ask the potential to focus on, see what violence to focus on, and sort of in that same vein, a work session with the EDA after adoption where we can really dig into what are your all's priorities.

We've got a financial report that helps us see very clearly

on a month to month basis.

The uncommitted funds that the EDA has access to and it might be helpful for you all to articulate together sort of the framework for how you would decide when and how and where and at what level to make investments of those funds that are at really your direction and discretion that can help all of us sort of look for opportunities that would be sort of a win from your perspective

and so forth.

I sent you a note.

There's this YouTube video of what's going on with Vanna's social media.

Who made that?

Yeah, so we, as part of the grant, we've had that big grant,

application and as part of the process for that we did a site visit with Thunder and so we put some things out on the property to help sort of show it's such a large property sort of show the chunks of it and what the different opportunities on this land base could be.

and we also staked the road, the future road alignment so that you can sort of see how Boulder's Road would continue on into the future and provide access to those van bays and we thought it looked so good we said we should get a drone video made to be able to capture that and be able to share that out.

So working with a couple of local contractors we were able to put that together.

Yeah, and that's a resource that we can, it's on the county's YouTube page, it was in the latest in a future newsletter, and so it's a resource that we can share out with folks who are interested in learning more and maybe can't get out there, or the entire property was covered in a sheet of ice for the month of January and a big chunk of February, and so it helps them see a little bit more potential on the ground is a little bit harsh.

And that's kind of a core business attraction type effort.

So when I think this plan talks about business attraction and often folks will sort of say, what does that really mean?

It's kind of just putting your best foot forward on why some of our sites are good opportunities and more importantly, why our community is a good opportunity.

So it's not just focusing on

How much acreage do we have in different areas of the county and what the infrastructure opportunities are, but why this is a good place for companies to locate for their employees and their quality of life.

So this is talking about the Central Virginia Innovation Corridor, looking at how we'll work with Go Virginia, regional partners on the ongoing strategic roadmap process and continue to work with APSEA, Central Virginia, which is a defense sector professional organization, as well as the Defense Affairs Committee and others to continue to support that sector's needs.

We're looking at career pathways, looking at work-based learning models.

So making sure that folks in the community know how to access careers in that sector and working with workforce development, public education workers to help sort of illuminate those paths and do some employer educator convenings so that those curriculums don't sit on a shelf and get stale, they'll sort of stay real time and continue to be helpful.

And then this is on the business attraction side, talking about Albemarle County with a brand identity narrative, proactive marketing and business attraction campaign, and leveraging partnerships to continue to make sure that we're aligned with regional partners.

in the life sciences space, a lot of focus on facilities in this section, so looking at a life sciences infrastructure plan that meets the specialized needs of this sector, as we talk to companies in the bios with life sciences space, a lot of them are so small they need a piece of

a specialized equipment, or a specialized room, or a specialized service provider.

But they can't own it.

They're not large enough to run it themselves, maximize that capacity, etc.

And so, how do we look at partnering, matching people together, you know this person has this equipment, let's make sure these other folks know about that.

as a value add that we can provide.

Continuing to really focus on Siebel Biohub and regional stakeholders who are already sort of have an eye on those infrastructure gaps and then looking at how permitting policies could support the deployment of life sciences facilities.

position as a hub for biotech and life sciences to continuing to focus on the innovation corridor project that we've got as well as commercialization support network to help meet some of the needs of our startups as they try to scale.

This is a workforce development partnership that Siebel Biohub is leading, working really closely with PVCC

Is there communication to the students about these opportunities to stay in the area?

My kids were in high school, I felt that that was really lucky.

Yeah, during the stakeholder engagement process, we had folks from the workforce program at Monroe County Public Schools at every single session.

And they were taking so many notes.

And, you know, as the Seville Biohub, BioBridge project, which you all supported, was kicking off, we had a lot of converse, we had a lot of CEOs of small companies in the same room with some of the workforce development partners.

And they were articulating some of the challenges that they faced.

One of them is just scale.

So if you don't know Luna Labs, and you don't know Action Scientific, and you don't know the very many smaller ones that we have, it's hard to know that that's even an option and that that's even here.

And so some of the work is really just how do you make the one-off job placements on these companies' websites big enough that students see, wow, there are a ton of biotech jobs, even though LunaLabs only has two and Afton only has five.

There's a huge opportunity when you put it all together.

And so that's some of the work that the stakeholders are working on.

which has been really incredible to see how quickly folks are able to kind of make those connections and build those bridges.

And so part of that workforce development piece with the high schools is getting partnerships to host interns, to host student interns at companies, have companies come in for career days, mentorship that can happen at the center buildings,

and so all of that work is, it's starting to happen and this is really a way for us to say we should keep investing in those types of activities because they help connect all of those folks together.

And it's helpful when we talk to companies to be able to say the high school has programs that put kids on a biotypic sciences track and so they're coming out of high school, not with a degree, but with an understanding and a skill set that

for non-college bound students are good job opportunities.

Are the school counselors and the college counselors and so forth, are they aware of these programs?

Because if they're advising students, that might be another way also to communicate to students constructively, right?

I don't want to repeat myself, but the next

Most of these strategies say convene a group.

There's going to be a meeting, there's going to be discussion, there's going to bring some people together for whatever purpose.

But it doesn't say what the outcome of that will be necessarily.

It's developing those outcomes that will determine if anything actually happens.

For instance, in the education area that you were just discussing,

Somebody needs to say, okay, we're going to develop an internship program for middle school students or high school students.

We're going to create a biotechnology pathway from high school to community college to university.

There need to be those specific outcome events or accomplishments, and they need to come out of these groups that are being recommended among them.

Somebody's going to have to monitor that and lead that to make sure it happens.

Because having been involved in these same educational discussions for the last 25 years, too often the discussion ends, we all go home and pat ourselves on the back and nothing happens.

There has to be specific outcomes of these kinds of get-togethers.

This is another business attraction item, so design and execute a business attraction campaign, looking at opportunities for flight selectors, trade shows,

even for direct investment.

Coordinating regional economic development partners in mobile hub to align messaging, make Albemarle bigger than Albemarle, make the region big enough, robust enough that people can see up really line of sight opportunities in our region, which bolsters all of the individual localities.

And integrate the brand and marketing effort alongside the intelligence national security work that we're doing on the innovation corridor side.

Expanded access to growth capital.

That's part of the work that Venture Financial was talking about when they were here just a moment ago.

We're moving to the next.

I think that's the last one for this call.

Do we worry that we're putting a lot of, faith isn't the right word, but we're relying on seagull biohumps?

A lot of this has come up a number of times in this school in particular, with running the commonwealth bioaccelerator and everything else.

Are we certain that we've got the bandwidth and the capability to do all those things that the county is suggesting that they're capable of doing?

And if not, who else in the community might be able to take on some of that?

Because if you don't necessarily, and Dr. Hastings is fabulous, when somebody bigger scoops her up,

You know, are we confident that single bio-op will continue in its way?

So there's a lot of, and this is very important, this is an important area for our communities.

So what's, you know, is there another group or another alternative?

Yeah, no, that's good feedback.

We tried not to name specific groups unless there was one that was just already so established in that space and I think that was the rationale for naming Sequel Biohub.

But it's a good point that we want to make sure we provide ourselves enough space if there was a great shift there.

into the agricultural economy.

This one talks about land use and zoning policies and I'll just take a second to point out that the

Things listed in the strategic plan are, this is sort of staff's way of communicating to court supervisors.

These are projects that we can work on every next five years.

Each one of them would be its own then implementation plan.

And so inclusion in the economic film and strategic plan is not adoption by the board of supervisors to enact any of these specifically.

It's just sort of setting an intent to launch things over the course of the next several years.

And so anything in here or any of the other roles would have the full appropriate process to activate.

That's some of the questions that we've gotten from the team.

So I just wanted to take a second to say inclusion on this list is not approval, it is just approval to continue exploring.

So looking at rural zoning and land use and how it can support, you know, sort of small, small scale value-added production, lodging and agritourism, engaging producers and stakeholders in that process, understanding what they need at a more detailed level, and looking at funding for shared use infrastructure that serves small and medium sized agri-sisters.

Again, thinking about

On their own, one company might not be able to invest in a major capital item to support their scaling, but if you put a couple of producers together, they might together be able to maximize use of that infrastructure.

Continuing to have agribusinesses come together, our agribusiness community is very diverse.

The wineries are sort of one body of producers that are producing a similar product in a similar way, but there's a whole other group of agribusinesses that are very different.

and so they don't they don't naturally come together and one of the things that we learned at some of the stakeholder engagement work that we did was that it's valuable for them to come together and so is there a role that the county can play to convene agribusinesses um not monthly um but but you know enough that we could hear um get them talking to each other and then that gives us an opportunity to hear what some of their shared needs are um and then again looking at shared use cooperative models

Rural Business Resource Lab is just another way of providing support, not on the physical side, but more just business support, looking at ways to do, again, a lot of the things that Venture Central and the SBDC will talk about, getting groups together to understand what some of those opportunities are, and any programming around capital access, grant navigation, loan readiness that's focused on the agribusiness sector.

Sometimes time of day is the most important thing.

So you can talk to tech entrepreneurs at one time of day and that's not going to work for your agribusinesses.

And so even just recognizing that is a big help.

Wholesaling and Scalable Market Pathways, so helping understand what opportunities there are to access markets.

You all provided financial support for the Nelson County Line scale-up project.

Nelson County's meaning that it's regional in its nature, and that's a concrete example of what that work would look like.

Emily?

Is your structure and the goals and the details

I could see how you could get some help from the national intel and Biohub.

Who's helping you kind of develop the agricultural?

I mean, I'm a city boy.

I know what a farm looks like.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, so there's not Advising Me specifically, but actually a project that Venture Central is working on right now that is grant funded that falls under their organizational endorsement is working on, so Nelson County is leading this wine scale

process.

Venture Central is hosting a project right now that's looking at the non-alcohol heated beverage market and trying to, right now really just sort of where are all those producers, what are they making, where is their overlaps, how can we again sort of elevate

This one farmer's market stand can't invest on its own in some sort of packaging equipment that they would need to be able to scale to get on grocery store shelves, but are there enough like type businesses where you could say

Gosh, like there really is a market demand for someone to bring in to our market, some sort of packing solution.

And then you can sort of start down that path of engaging.

So the person who's working on that Venture Central grant was a food-based business entrepreneur.

And then there's other resources in the community.

And then the wine industry.

We had great feedback from one of our stakeholder committee members that the wine industry deserved its own strategy.

So this is an addition from the last time you all saw this document.

Really just taking advantage of the fact that there's a lot of attention on Albemarle wine right now, and we should leverage that.

And that that sector is big enough

that they could probably move in a specialized way.

Is there enough overlap between wineries and cideries and distilleries?

Measuries.

Potentially.

That's one of the things I think we need to look at.

I know from a land use operational standpoint under the state code, they are treated as confined.

But when it comes to the specifics, the wineries would say, you know, cideries, apples and hops can have a longer shelf life than

but the wineries have are a little bit different than what the cideries and the breweries experience.

Mostly because the wine industry globally is facing all sorts of pressures.

We're seeing places, you know, wine or vineyards literally tearing up vines instead of planting

or leaving rates on the vine.

It's a challenging global market, not just a local market.

And I get trying to do it, but I, again, if we're looking as broad as we can across the county, I don't want us to be, hey, look at us, we're the boost capital of the East Coast.

But on the other hand, we do have a diverse beverage production and market.

opportunity there.

I've actually talked to a couple of wineries that talk, they said that three companies could do something, which goes, you know what I'm going to go into, bringing in where applicable,

I think I mentioned that before, you go to Jefferson Winery, which I like, but they give you oyster crackers.

If you give me oyster crackers and one glass of wine,

I've been paired.

So I think we need to do something to add something there that will help them out so that they don't fall under, so that they are making money, which is what we want.

We want them to be profitable.

They said that the market is so, yeah, well, competition, and also they have what they call distributors.

So our local wineries cannot sell, they cannot take their wine right here, go two blocks, exaggerating.

Don't put that on purpose.

I don't know about California, well, they may not have to go through a Virginia distributed national market.

So that's why it's a tough business.

It's a legislative initiative.

I'm going to go very quickly through the next two so that you all can get to discussion.

But this is where lodging, cleaning, beverage, and maintenance tourism come in.

And really this one's about partnering with CSEDD.

And then as we get into the talent, we talked about talent in the first three goals, so this is more broad-based talent initiatives, looking at, again, being really intentional about those current pathways for high school students, maybe digging into middle school students, and really trying to orient how we instruct our learners around the target sectors that we have identified.

So that's different ways for us to do that.

This is through creating more of a uniform platform.

Looking at ways to help students understand career opportunities in our community so that they know that this is a viable place to stay.

And then making this a good place for young people to be, for them to have a poor visibility into the social aspects of living and working here.

I'm trying to look at opportunities to improve nightlife, to compete, not necessarily compete against Richmond.

And then looking at housing development and childcare initiatives.

And this plan isn't the driver to lead those efforts, but to really reinforce the opportunity for where we can improve some of the outcomes on these two items that are important.

And then the last one is really around more of the structural things that the county is responsible for that help set the business environment.

So permitting and development processes, looking at ways to modernize our zoning code and improve the permitting process, looking at how those timelines might be reduced in terms of transparency and coordination.

Looking at really just talking to the development community.

The development community touches a lot of pieces.

They touch housing, they touch site development, they touch building.

Excuse me.

And so talking to them more and understanding what some of your pain points are and some opportunities for us to be better partners can look like.

This is kind of a keep doing, so we've formalized over the past several months our business retention and expansion program.

There's still work to do there, and so we should keep doing it.

It's a good way to get an understanding of what some of our existing businesses are confronting, what their plans for future might be, and how we can support them.

This is the EDA.

So how do we sort of define the EDA's strategic investment priorities?

I think it's an important one if you look at how you can help activate the plan as well as understanding what some other opportunities are to bring investment to the region.

And then this is looking at really our buildings and sites.

So in a business, when we're talking to businesses about potentially locating in Charlotte, in the Albemarle region,

Do we have the right things?

Now that we have these target sectors articulated, we can understand what their specialized needs are, and do we have the product that they need?

And if not, how do we partner to get that?

This is looking at utility, connecting utilities, the airport, the other things that the business community relies on to understand opportunities for us to work together towards the same outcomes.

and then another sort of marketing branding initiative to talk about how Albemarle is a place for innovation and a great place to hone in on.

Well, let's see here.

I'm gonna hear what the board had to say, but I realized we've gone on for a while.

One idea I had,

You would be, would we want to have a special meeting between, before the meeting with the Board of Supervisors?

We could do a virtual meeting, that way everybody would have a chance to look at the, and then we could give feedback.

I don't know if that's, do we see any issues with that from our staff?

I mean, do you think that would be helpful?

The board meeting is the 13th.

Well, I think give people a chance to talk about whatever other issues, concerns.

I mean, I think there's two ways, well, there are multiple ways to give feedback, but I think there's discussion amongst this group of people to raise issues, concerns, whatever.

If there is a consensus among the EDA that we think something's important, I think we could sort of, as a group, say EDA thinks this is important.

And then obviously on an individual basis we can all say, you know, I'm against having restaurants and wineries instead of being able to be.

I mean I think we can do all of those ways but I think having at least one more opportunity for people to look at the plan and it's...

I would hope you just would make that meeting with the board, the joint session, much more productive.

We would have our act together and hopefully be on the same page.

There'll be some divergence.

The last time we met, there were some

Very clear commonalities, I think, with how we were thinking about this plan.

One was metrics, measurable metrics, and one is the actual action plan.

The other one was the right size.

This is pretty open-ended right now.

What does that actually mean for community goals?

You know, things like that.

Just maybe so that when we have this dialogue, we at least are categorically organized with thoughts.

So maybe what we should do is send out a poll or when people will be available.

Live count, right?

I mean, is there anything that anyone, because I know we have a number of things we need to talk about.

So the agenda, for example, the agenda for this meeting had matters from the public, so someone could have come today and shared comment with this body online or in person.

The special meeting with the Board of Supervisors, I don't believe has, you know, special meetings don't typically have matters from the public.

A lot of you, even tonight, we don't have, we have a power point, but you know, you're not

All right.

With your permission, I'd like to skip to the closed session.

We have two fabulous interns who are here for the summer.

Celeste Weblot has been in my office since

speaking in Europe since coming back from study abroad for the spring semester.

And this is her last week.

We can't believe the summer session is coming toward the end.

But Celeste has been really instrumental in helping us do research on items, supporting projects that have popped up.

It has been a real pleasure to get to know her, and I can't wait to see where she goes.

And so I just wanted to introduce Celeste.

And Noah's hanging around for a little bit longer, so I don't have to be, this isn't goodbye to Noah, but Noah has also just really dove right into everything out of the wild.

I just had a quick moment.

You know, this is a heavy lift.

And you and your team did a phenomenal job this past year.

And I think so much happens that we don't often stop to thank the people who are doing the actual work.

So well done team.

All right so moving to the closed meeting um

I move that the Albemarle County Economic Development Authority go into a closed meeting as authorized by the Virginia Freedom of Information Act Section 2.23711A of the Virginia Under Subsections 6 and 29 to discuss and consider the expenditure and investment of public funds related to existing performance agreements which probably most agrospheres issue.

and related to a potential performance agreement for a commercial development on Seminole, Hales, and the Rhion Esterial industry, where bargaining is involved and where it made public initially would adversely affect EDA's negotiating strategy and the constraints of interest of the EGA.

Is there a second?

No, it doesn't have both of them.

That's all we need to have.

In addition, Subsection 8 to discuss and consider consultation with legal counsel regarding specific legal matters related to Monumos Inc. performance agreement, which requires the provision of legal advice by such counsel.

and subsection five to discuss and consider the location of respective business or industry or the expansion of an existing business or industry in the vicinity of Seminole Trail in the Riverina Magisterial District where no previous announcement has been made of the businesses or industry's interest in locating or expanding its facilities in the community.

Is there another second?

All right, all in favor?

Aye.

Director Moore.

Aye.

We will adjourn our next scheduled regular meeting.

will be, that's the, that is not the next schedule.

Our next special meeting with the Board of Supervisors will be August 13th.

The next regular one is the 19th.

We have meeting 13th and a 19th.