Economic Development Authority Meeting   8/19/2025

We have a quorum present.

We have one member participating remotely.

OK.

So is there a motion to allow

Second?

Second.

All right, all in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

All right.

So he is approved for remote participation.

Matters from the public if they signed up to speak.

Okay.

Next are approval of the minutes.

Any comments on the minutes?

I had one, I don't know, Avery, if you got it on page four.

This is on July 15th.

Page four, I guess it's matter eight.

It says at the bottom, a voice vote was conducted.

It was a roll call vote.

I suggested that the actual closed meeting motion be attached to the minutes.

Okay.

Is there a motion to approve the minutes with the suggested amendment?

So moved.

Is there a second?

Second.

All right.

All in favor?

Aye.

All right.

Financial Report.

Yes.

So July was the first month of the new fiscal year.

Not much happened on the EDA front.

There were some incurred interest from funds that they had.

But on the performance agreement side, there was a few.

We were working on getting the tax rebates process.

He signed a couple of those, Don.

Any questions or comments on the financial report?

And the performance agreement report?

All right.

The unfinished business?

All right, new business.

You've been running along today.

So,

We have item B is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation bond that we're going to be doing next, but we realized that our policy for fees did not include any discussion of refinancing circumstances.

So we decided that, at least for the purposes of today, since we didn't have any

think in place that a thousand dollar fee would sort of cover the costs that the authority would incur in managing this process, including legal fees and staff time, those sorts of things.

So what we're proposing is that for this bond, we adopt a thousand dollar fee for refinancing.

If that B sounds,

Yeah, no, right here.

Yeah, the one that says

I move that we adopt the resolution to establish an application fee for the consideration of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation bond refinancing and intent to amend Article IV of the rules and procedures regarding bond issuance fee scale.

All right.

Any discussion?

All in favor?

Aye.

All right.

Aye.

So, Thomas Jefferson Foundation bond.

Jim Bowling, our bond counsel is here.

P.W.

Bruno, who is a lawyer for the bond counsel for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and is on the line.

So I'm not sure who we want to let.

Jim, do you want to go first or do you want to let T.W.

I'll go first and introduce myself.

I'm Jim Bowling.

I saw some of you back in March.

It's good to be here again.

I'm going to let TW Bruno take over.

He's the head of the McGuire List Fondle organization, and he's definitely qualified to talk with us.

TW, are you there?

Yes, sir.

I don't know if you can see me.

I don't know how to undo the video.

We're working on that.

That's all right.

I guess better to hear me and not see me than the reverse.

So we are here today on behalf of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

So back in

2011, and really it goes even back farther than that, but the bond that we're talking about here goes back to 2011 and was issued to refinance existing bonds, again, that were issued for the foundation.

and the bond was originally placed with SunTrust Bank, now Truist, and it had a couple of mechanisms.

The first is that basically that every so often the Truist and the Foundation would have to come back together and sort of reset the interest rate.

And so that happened periodically.

And we're sort of approaching that date here.

And Truist has told the foundation, we'll sort of waive that.

We'll reset the interest rate, but continue the credit relationship that we have.

what we're coming to the authority for approval to do, which is amend the underlying bond and related agreement to account for new interest rate and an extension of what we call the put date.

So an extension of the credit relationship between truest and the foundation.

And so the resolution that you have in front of you approves the entering into of the authority of an amendment to the underlying agreement, which is it's called a bond purchase and loan agreement.

It's a three party agreement between the authority, the foundation and the lender.

and it just sort of amends that document to take account of the removal of the put date and make some technical changes.

And in addition, it authorizes what we're calling an amended and restated bond.

The bond isn't really changing significantly in terms of its

terms or conditions, only the interest rate mechanics.

But as you can imagine, that actually takes up a lot of the document.

And so rather than saying like line one is deleted and we've inserted this text in its place, we just thought it was a lot cleaner and less brain damage to say, you know, we're throwing out the old bond, we're putting in the new bond.

It's substantially similar, but it has different interest rate mechanics.

And

So otherwise, there really are no changes.

And the plan is to just continue along with truest as the lender.

And yeah, that doesn't change the fact that, again, it's always the foundation's obligation.

There's no liability on the part of the authority or any of the directors or any of that sort of stuff.

So with that, happy to answer any questions that you might have.

And I should say I have Chris Barth, who's the CFO at the Foundation on the line here as well.

Thanks, TW.

Any questions for TW or Jim at the Foundation?

Hearing none.

So one issue that we have is our secretary is not present at this meeting.

So I think what we need to do is amend.

Should we amend the resolution, DW, to allow the assistant secretary to sign documents, or should we do a separate

You can add that the Assistant Secretary can sign that.

Okay.

All right.

I move that the Board

The Economic Development Authority adopts the resolution approving certain modifications to the terms of its revenue refunding bond issued for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Incorporated, Hazaman.

Second.

All right.

Is there any further discussion?

All right.

All in favor?

Aye.

All right.

The resolution is approved.

Saboon is not able to be here.

I wanted to recognize Saboon, the Senior Manager for Economic Development.

It's the first week of school in the locality where his children go to school, and so he is at a teacher meeting right now.

So we will officially welcome him next time.

There was a request that we received through the City of Charlottesville Economic Development Office to have another joint meeting with the Charlottesville EDA this fall and so wanted just to give you all an opportunity to weigh in on a potential joint meeting.

You may recall or some of you will recall that we had a meeting

with the city EDA, I want to say last May.

It was my first meeting in my role and we had it over at City Space.

I believe that that was the first one meeting like that in a very long time.

Their hope was that we could do that a little bit more frequently.

We can work through the mechanics of the logistics.

I think it's a good idea.

Why not?

Good idea.

Especially if we can, I don't know whether there's some sort of, I mean last time it was because we were both getting a similar briefing.

I don't know whether there's anything like the corridor discussion

Yeah, and they had asked since we have a new economic development strategic plan if we would spend a little bit of time just talking sort of about what's in our plan.

Their plan is not brand new, but it's on the newer side.

Yep.

That's a great idea.

Okay.

Thank you.

Besides the obvious stuff, like the strategic plans and some of the initiatives, are there any sort of discussions about partnership, opportunities, constraints, conflicts, things like that that there's meat on the bone on to talk about?

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I'm just, I know dealing with city and county and the parks and rec side, you know, the athletic field.

The issue, you know, has come up in the past, right?

And the shared resources and who's paying for what and where the facilities are and all that.

Now, that's not really even here, but I'm just curious if there are constructive things that you can talk about and work out in that regard, but there might not be any issues.

It might be all good, but I guess I'll find that out.

You can always talk about what it feels here too.

OK, this is a slide that we show you sometimes.

I've brought it back for this meeting.

Just to show, we've talked a lot over the past several months about the comp plan, the MOU with the board of supervisors, and the strategic plan.

So we are done with the MOU.

We are now newly done with the economic development strategic plan.

And just an update on where the comp plan process is at this point.

A draft document comes out on Thursday.

There's an unveiling event in the auditorium here, if that pleases you.

And then there'll be work sessions with the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors through the month of September.

And there is a desire to look at adoption later this year, right now tentatively in the month of October.

The Thriving Economy Chapter is one of the chapters of the Comprehensive Plan.

There's a call out in the draft Thriving Economy Chapter to

that the sort of the details, the strategies and actions of that really look to the newly adopted economic development strategic plan.

And so it's possible through the next couple of weeks, there'll be changes to that thriving economy chapter.

We look forward to the planning commission and the board and the community's feedback in that regard.

But that's sort of where that last key document that we've been talking about sits.

On the economic development strategic plan, thank you all again for your time last week and meeting with the board of supervisors.

They did approve the plan with minor amendments, sort of finalizing the documents to reflect the discussion.

We talked specifically about adding the county's overall vision to that document.

And then there's some lighter, more copy edit type edits to be done.

Right now we are talking about getting the final edits back to residents by tomorrow and that they would turn the final document around within a week.

So we'll make sure that you are aware when that is finalized and published.

And we look forward to really the work ahead, which is implementation.

And then some of the other more housekeeping type things that we need to do is a refresh of our webpage to reflect the new economic development strategic plan and then working on establishing the metrics and how we'll track those.

And so we're getting started on getting started on those things, I would say.

And then we'll look to pivot into implementation and it's like in the next month ahead.

On the Rivanna Futures project, sort of where we are on funding requests, I think this is the first time we're together since the Virginia Business Ready Sites program grant award announcement came out.

And so at the end of July, we did find out that we were

successful in receiving a $9.7 million award from the Virginia Economic Development Partnership.

We are incredibly excited about that funding award.

The total budget for the program this year was $40 million.

Our application was for $14 million.

$9.7 million is a significant award given the number of applications that they received.

I don't know how many applications they reviewed, but they had $250 million worth of asks for the $40 million available.

And so there were a lot more nos than yeses this year.

And we were pretty proud to be on the list of yeses.

We are still working to refine the scope of work.

Again, our request was larger than what we were awarded.

And so we're working now with the Virginia Economic Development Partnership team to finalize what that scope of work will deliver for the $9.7 million award.

And then also we're in the process of going through the VDOT Economic Development Access Program application for design funding for a road extension of Boulder's Road.

Those applications are reviewed by and approved by the Commonwealth Transportation Board.

They do a first read, second read.

They did the first read in July.

They take the month of August off and they come back for business in September.

And so this will be the second read of our application on their September meeting.

I believe it's the third Wednesday in September.

And so we'll look forward to updating you all soon on how that fares.

Do you know if each application gets a second reading?

I believe they have an option to stop it at the first read.

Our understanding is that there were no significant concerns raised of our application at the first read.

Yeah, it's just under $700,000.

And it's just design money at this time.

This is a great program because there's not a local cash match required.

And so that's just helpful.

Just some recent events, announcements that we've been to.

This EDA, not all these pictures of meetings don't always look very riveting, but the top left is a picture from the BioBridge, the Talent Pathways Initiative BioBridge effort that the Siebel Biohub is leading.

It's a regional project that this EDA has helped financially support, and it has Go Virginia funding associated with it.

They're looking at aligning sort of, they call it the supply side and the demand side, so the workforce education training element that gets workforce readiness together, as well as what are employers looking for now and sort of projecting into the future in terms of skill sets.

and so working both sides of the equation to try to understand how we can better prepare our workforce for the jobs of the future here, specific to the biotech industry.

And this was our first meeting of the steering committee was a incredibly dense data analysis report.

And this one was more fun to receive qualitative analysis based on a number of stakeholder interviews that they've done over the past several weeks.

So that project continues to move forward and is still on track to finish by the end of the calendar year.

Chair Long serves on that steering committee as well, representing Albemarle, and it's been a good effort.

The Central Virginia Innovation Corridor, the Go Virginia funding for that planning grant to look at how to align the Central Virginia region around biotech, intelligence, national security, and digital technologies has kicked off with a July 1 start significantly.

The team that is doing the Biobridge, the consultant that's working on the Biobridge project is the same team that's working on the Innovation Corridor planning work and so they know the community, they're able to leverage a lot of the work that they're doing for the Biobridge project for the Innovation Corridor project and that is just helping with sort of economy of scale on the work that they're able to do and the pace that they're able to do that work at.

And then we were, the Albemarle County team was really pleased to be able to attend the change of command event at the National Ground Intelligence Center, an event that Director Hood knows all too well.

It's a two year post, and so we get to go to diesel with some frequency.

But it was fun recognition from the county to really just attend the event, but also they talked from the stage about the grand partnership with Albemarle County.

About to call for it.

The Commonwealth Bioxcellerator, another project that the EDA has supported, Siebel Biohub's wet lab accelerator program, which is located up at North Fork, that was funded as a pilot, a three-year pilot program by this EDA and other local and regional partners.

There was a successful state budget ask for what happens after the pilot period.

to have permanent space and expanded space for that project moving forward.

and so Secretary of Commerce and Trade Juan Pablo Segura was in town last Monday to announce that $15 million funding from the Commonwealth of Virginia to continue that project which will allow them to expand their footprint up at North Fork and then members of our team participated at the county's presence at the Albemarle County Fair supporting a lot of the four

And really just sort of celebrating the agricultural and pastoral legacy of Albemarle.

Our business retention and expansion work, vacations and the strategic plan and lots of other things going on.

So we were not as focused on BRE this month, but we were able to hit a couple of our target sectors this month.

And we've got a really good plan to tour a couple of different companies alongside the Commonwealth in September.

So more exciting stuff ahead.

All right.

So now we'll move into closed session.

I move that the Outlaw County Economic Development Authority go into a closed meeting as authorized by the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, section 2.2-3711A of the Code of Virginia under subsection 6 and 29 to discussion, consider

the expenditure and investment of public funds related to a performance agreement with Fonumos Inc. and related to a potential performance agreement for a commercial development on Seminole Trail in the Rio Magisterial District where bargaining is involved and where made public initially would adversely affect the EDA's negotiating strategy and financial interest of the EDA and the county and

Subsection 5 to discussion consider the location of a prospective business or industry or the expansion of the existing business or industry in the vicinity of Seminole Trail and the Rivanna Magisterial District where no previous announcement has been made of the business or industry's interest locating or expanding its facilities in the community.

Is there a second?

Second.

Alright.

Any discussion?

All in favor?

Aye.

Sure.

So these are the bonds.

It's straight to the woman.

Gentlemen, just see me for a job.

We're going to see getting it off to TW.

And I talked to TW recently and I

He caught a cold and I kind of threw out to him what was in the ballpark.

He's spreading his number five.

And he said $1,000 certainly in the ballpark.

Then he said $5,000 in the ballpark.

Just by a quick look, Spotsylvania had a good menu, but it was from 2012, I don't know if it's current.

A schedule of fees.

They had broken it down to origination and then refinancing, but they had a fee for everything.

Well, TW's advice, such as this,

Oh, I see what you're saying.

I thought the fees for their application fee for new money was higher than the others.

Really?

Yeah.

But I have to go back.

I have to refresh my memory.

Thank you for all your help.

We'll take you for your offer.

Hey Avery, this is Jeff.

He needs a user ID and password.

I'll see you in a minute.

Here, do you want to?

Yeah, do you want to?

I'll give him my number and you can just call me so I don't have to steal your phone.

Okay.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Jim, thank you, sir.

I don't know what they're using the money for.

What is this for financing?

I think when I saw it, that's a good point.

Yeah.

Thank you.