Economic Development Authority Meeting   3/17/2026

Now I'll call the meeting to order.

We have a quorum.

So the next is matter to the public.

Can I just speak from here?

Yeah, yeah, welcome.

Thank you.

Phil Reese.

Bea LaPisto is actually my supervisor.

She's my representative supervisor.

So I'm from the Rivanna district.

So I don't have enough time to prepare formal remarks, but I just did make a couple of notes myself.

So I want to read from you Article 7, Section 10 of the Virginia Constitution says this.

No county, city, town, or regional government shall contract any debt unless,

quote, such debt shall be approved by a majority of the voters voting in an election on the question.

So you guys are obviously going to get, you know, talk about the bond issuance today.

And I understand that there is a legal loophole.

There is a legal loophole that allows you guys to do a revenue bond, but I don't think it's in the best interest of the county.

And it certainly doesn't go, it goes against the,

the intent of the Virginia Constitution.

Okay, as I just kind of quoted from there.

So why is this not in the best interest of the county?

I'm actually not opposed to what this bond is actually going to be paying for.

But the ADA,

Bond, revenue generating bond is not the way to do all of this.

You guys are issuing $118 million in new debt.

That is a lot of money.

I think it's somewhere close to 150, 160 million because you're refinancing some stuff.

That's all fine.

But why should this not be done in a general obligation bond?

It should be.

It should be done in a general obligation bond, not this EDA revenue generating bond.

One, it doesn't give the voters a direct say on it.

Let it go to a bond referendum.

Two, the EDA doesn't have a AAA bond rating.

The county does.

And if you do a general obligation bond, you get a better interest rate.

That's why it's in the best interest of Alamo County taxpayers to go the general obligation route.

My notes here.

Let me ask you this.

So there's a whole lot of stuff what this bond would do.

Much of it is not revenue generating.

When they created the Constitution, that carve out that lets you do a revenue generating bond, it's typically for sewage, water, that type of stuff.

Is a new school a revenue generating instrument?

Is it truly an economic development project?

I don't think it is.

And I think if the board of supervisors would likely

Follow you guys.

And I respectfully request that at least part of this bond be pushed back, don't support all of it, and have the board of supervisors, if they really want all this money, go the general obligation route.

It gives the voters more of a say, and it gives the county a better interest rate.

It saves millions of dollars over the lifetime of these bonds, 20 years plus, whatever it is.

With that, I'll yield my time.

Thank you.

All right.

So, approval of minutes.

We have two sets of minutes, February 5th and February 17th.

The only thing I noticed was, I think the 5th is the virtual one.

And I didn't see that in it.

That was the only thing I knew.

Anybody else have any other comments from here?

Is there a motion to approve both sets of minutes?

As amended, so moved.

Second?

Second.

All right, all in favor?

Aye.

The only two notes that I will point out is SEVAC under tax rebates and Home Depot has removed their placeholders and put the total numbers for each one, the 105 for SEVAC and 42 for SEVAC, and then the expat on the bond is about to go out, so I expect to see those in the next couple of months.

All right, any questions on the financial report?

OK. All right.

So the next unfinished business.

Emily circulated Steve Hood's memo on the implementation of the strategic plan by the Economic Development Office and by the authority.

I don't know if people have had a chance to review it yet.

I just wanted to

Anybody who wants to have any comments about it have a chance to speak if they want.

If they don't, it's fine.

At a later meeting, we will actually sort of take up the memo and look at it and say, okay, some of the things he suggested, which things do we want to prioritize, which things do we want to use as we go forward and sort of develop this implementation plan based on that.

I know at the last meeting we sort of gave everybody a chance to say anything.

We have plenty of other things.

Oh, I'll need to review it again.

All right.

And if there are no comments, we'll move on to the next item of this new business, which is the bonds.

uh sure yeah i can do it 40 inches right i'm joined by a few of my colleagues um mr um sorry my notes for your background sir mr chris colp he is our bond counsel he is with uh huntin andrews

Kurt, thank you.

Chris has been our bond counselor for several, several years.

I won't go back on how long he's been with us, but his background is in municipal bonds and has been at least, I want to say nearly 30 years probably in that field.

So he's been a great resource for us.

So he's going to walk through a part of this presentation.

We also have our financial advisors Davenport with us today.

So we have Steven Geis, who is

Vice President with Davenport.

He's been with Davenport 2020 and has been in the municipal advising field for his career.

We do have online Courtney Rogers, I believe.

I thought I saw his online.

Yeah.

Anyways, so we have several slides today to go over about the bond issuance that we're requesting, the authorization to issue those.

Chris is going to go over the EDA's role in issuing these bonds.

I'm going to go over a little bit of the details of the bonds themselves.

We have different uses for those funds and I'll go over what those different uses are going to be and Steve is going to go over market conditions because that's important for when we're issuing this debt.

but also he'll go over the plan of finance and what that looks like.

And our role is kind of a specialized legal counsel to give, and ultimately to give an opinion at the end of the financing to the bondholders that the bonds have been duly authorized, executed, and delivered, and are enforced to pull off any interest on the bonds in taxes.

An important opinion is that the bondholders want, but we're working in coordination with your counsel, as well as the county attorney's office, to make sure that resolutions and the documents are in appropriate form.

So that's our role.

So we are before you requesting you to take action as a conduit issuer of revenue bonds.

The plan is for a public competitive sale.

Stephen can get into more of that later, but it would result in the issuance of bonds and a loan of those proceeds to the county to undertake these projects.

This financing framework has been in place for a long time.

It started in 2003.

This would be the ninth proposed issuance under that framework.

Next slide.

So to the gentleman's point, we do have statutory authority under the EDA statute to finance facilities for local governments.

It's mentioned in two particular places about financing facilities for locality in the Commonwealth, and then making loans and grants to governmental entities.

We do have a statutory basis for this framework.

Next slide.

It's important that from an EDA standpoint, you will or not secure the highs of these bonds with any other revenues.

These are only, we're pledging only the revenues that the county, that the EDA would receive under a financing agreement with the county.

So if there was an event of non-appropriation or default, unlikely a circumstance.

But if there were, the bondholders would be looking to the county to make sure there are no other funds or accounts of the EDA that are at risk to this financing.

And it's clearly also in the statute, EDA directors in approving this financing are not undertaking any personal liability.

That will be sent out in the documents.

It's also sent out by statute.

So let's see.

So, as an issuer, we're asking you to consider this resolution, but it doesn't mean to imply that you're necessarily stepping into the role of the County Board of Supervisors.

You're not necessarily endorsing the specific projects.

We're saying that this is the right time or not.

The County Board has done that through their capital improvements program, which is an annual budgeting process, and it's a public process that they've gone through to seek input and to tell the public what projects are coming.

Next slide.

So as the slide indicates, this is one financing,

There's three specific purposes, three categories of use of those funds, and I'm going to go into a little bit of detail on each of these.

The total debt issuance is up to $156.55 million, so that covers all three of these issuances, with about $118 million going towards our normal capital improvement plans and our capital improvement projects.

who purchased the property around Rivanna Station a couple of years ago.

That's right, and I have a little more detail on the next slide.

Sorry, you didn't mean to jump in.

No, no, no.

You're on the right track.

So this is the 118.14 million of our capital improvement plan projects.

So as the Board of Supervisors looks to fund their capital improvement plan, in our budget document, you'll see they're usually funded through mainly two areas, cash, what we call pay-go financing, but also the issuance of long-term debt.

And so the issuance of long-term debt is the largest funding component for those capital projects.

and that's what this part of the issuance is for.

This is not for, if you're following along, the Board of Supervisors, Ms. LaPisto-Kirtley is intimately involved right now in the budget process.

It's not for, this is not for future projects.

These are for projects that have already been approved by the Board and have already been under construction.

We spent

About 70% of the $118 million are for school related projects.

or almost 40 million of this 118 would help to reimburse the county for the Mountain View Elementary expansion, the construction of the upper elementary.

About 20 million would help to fund the construction of ACE Academy, Lamps Lane.

That's over at the Lamps Lane campus.

And then another almost $19 million for school renovations,

Maintenance replacement items.

So those are a large component of the capital projects related to schools.

There's also some county projects that are in here as well.

So the other 30% are county related projects, mainly around Biscuit Run, about $5.8 million for Biscuit Run, and the remaining $12 million for the courts.

The courts project is not total $12 million.

This was the last portion of the funding we needed to, that we hadn't been reimbursed on yet.

The county's practice is to basically front the cash or pay the cash along the capital projects as they're expended.

Let me ask a real rookie question.

He tweaked my interest on interest rates.

Is this the most effective way where taxpayers get the best rate that they issue debt?

This isn't a question I know the answer to.

It's a good question, and Stephen, you can correct me if I'm wrong, because you're closer to the financial markets than I am.

There is usually a little delta between geo debt and these revenue bonds.

Right now the market is not that far apart.

It is very small.

And particularly because it's over the 20-year life of the bond.

One thing that is advantageous about going through the EDA as a conduit issuer is the speed to market.

So as we work on issuing the bonds now, we can't get to the market here in the next couple of months.

We can take advantage of the interest rates that are just a little bit in front of us.

A referendum is a much more elongated process compared to issuing through the EDA.

And so that would have to be several months out in the future.

And the markets do, as I'm sure you all know, the markets do shift quite a bit.

And the delta and the differential at the five basis points, the market can change that much in a day.

On the next slide, we'll move on to the second component.

Back in 23, for those of you that were on the EDA, some of you all were, many of you were not, but we did come before the EDA and borrowed about another $58.8 million to purchase the property around Rivanna Station.

And the instrument we used was called a bond anticipation note.

And so what this bond anticipation note did was allowed us to borrow the funds,

and they're structured on a short-term basis and so the maturity of those bonds were five years.

Interest only.

The interest rate was 503%.

These were issued.

What's important here is these were listed as these were taxable

And so what that means is there's a difference between taxable and what I'll talk about with non-taxable here in just a second is it gives, with non-taxable proceeds, there are restrictions and limitations on how those funds can be used and applied.

And so because local governments and municipalities are in a new position to take advantage of non-taxable bond issuances, that can be used for public purpose.

So there are restrictions on whether non-taxable bonds cannot be used for private industry.

You can issue taxable debt and those restrictions are removed.

And the difference between the two is there's a cost.

So the taxable rates are considerably higher, at least percentage if not one and a quarter percent is higher than the tax-exempt debt.

So we took out a participation note a couple years ago at 5.3%.

And then over the course of the past couple of years, a past couple of years or so, we've looked at the property and worked closely with county staff and looked at what is the intended use for some of the property.

And so by looking at the taxable,

the county had ultimate flexibility on how they could use that property.

Now that we're further along in looking at, okay, what is in the development area?

What's in the rural area?

What is the intent for the area that has been rezoned to light industrial versus what has not and what remains in the rural area?

We've determined that those areas that are in the rural area are gonna be kept for governmental purposes, at least for the time being.

And so I want to show a map to kind of visualize that in just a second.

And so what is happening is we're refunding, refinancing a portion of this $58.8 million into a non-taxable, long-term

Bond, you know, bond issuance.

Well, a couple reasons.

One, we're going to see some interest savings.

So, immediately when you go from taxable to non-taxable, you're going to have interest cost savings.

So, we're looking at going from a 5.3% rate to what we say we would check probably about a 4% rate.

This also will lock us in for 20 years on this level of debt.

Now, what's left is 33.9 million and that is

For the band matures at the end of that five year, we'll come back and address whether we convert that to a long term debt or we need to extend that for another three year band or so.

So if you go to the next slide, I'll show visually kind of what we're looking at.

You probably have seen this graphic and this picture many times, so it looks really familiar.

The only thing I added, Emily, is these areas that say rural areas.

So really everything in green that's on the outside of the property is what's in the rural area.

And there's not an intention for that to be developed.

At the moment, we're looking at these areas, Lambay 50, where AstraZeneca is going to come, Lambay 40 and 25, as those that were really marketing for development.

Those are also in the development area by industrial.

But these green areas,

are really not intended to be marketed.

We're not looking to do that.

So just out of curiosity, if I was a director of DIA and I said, hey, I want to move to a better rural area, would you say, no, I would want you to do that?

That is a good question, and what I have to get back to you on, or if others in the room know, I don't know if the zoning would be appropriate for that or not.

I'm wondering why we bought all this land if it's not ever intended to be developed in the rural areas.

So there's probably two ways to answer that question.

One is that one thing that has been loud and clear from Rivanna Station

is having standoff distance, right?

And so this acquisition of the land provides what has been kind of in the works since probably your time on the expansion, the campus concept, compatible uses, and then the additional area, the rural area is self-buffering that is providing some of that concern around encroachment at the federal government level.

The intended use on that is more of an, think of Ivy Creek area, more of, I mean, there's a lot of work to do in that area.

So that is the why behind the acquisition.

That said, if the DIA wants to expand, you know, what is called Land Bay 40,

is allowable because it is a federal entity.

That makes perfect sense.

And Land Bay 40 is in the development area.

That's a good answer.

Any other questions on this part of the financing?

One more part.

The last one is looking at our 2015 bonds, Davenport has brought to our attention that based on our interest rate environment, and Stephen's going to get into this a little bit more because that's important, he'll get to the details in the plan of finance, that we have an opportunity to see some savings in our net present value and our interest costs if we take advantage of refinancing or refunding some of our 2015 bonds.

And so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail because Stephen's going to have quite a bit of detail on his slides.

Thank you, Jacob.

Can you guys see that?

You are here.

All right, chart.

Yeah.

And so there are two separate graphs here.

I know it's hard to see, but what we're looking at is the 20 year yield on a AAA tax exempt bond.

And so what you see over here is the trend of the 20 year tax exempt maturity over the last 25 plus years.

and then over here on the right is the last year in some change.

And so what you'll notice is you can't see it, but this is right around 4%.

The line right here is right there.

So yields have remained around 4% in the past year or so.

And while they aren't as low as COVID, when you compare it to the historic trend, they are still very favorable in terms of historic context.

Next two slides have a little bit more going on.

So these different lines here are the yields on the various maturity dates.

So the dark green's the one year, light green's five year, and so on and so forth.

And so this will segue into the next slide.

But before I get there, you'll notice right around March, April last year, when there was tariffs announcements and other things going on in the market, the 30 year yield and the one year yield were a lot closer than they are today.

And so what we'll see on the next slide,

as compared to last year, a more normal yield curve shape, if you will.

So the current MMD, which is in this purple line here, as the Fed has lowered rates, short-term rates have come down a bit compared to a year ago, but on the long end, which isn't driven by the Fed nearly as much, they've actually gone up compared to a year ago.

And so that just gives you a general sense kind of how the market has moved and how much it can move.

municipal market data.

So it's yeah, it's the industry standard benchmark for communities.

And so what I was getting at here is this was like a two week span roughly.

So you can see how much rates can move.

And so back to Jacob's point on the GGO versus EDA yields, five basis points.

Excuse me, five basis points is something we can see day to day move.

And so getting into the plan of finance here.

Davenport has recommended to the county that they issue the bonds via a competitive public market sale.

And so what that involves is we will work with staff to go back to the rating agencies and get an updated rating that

Chris and his team can then use in the offering document that's sent around to underwriters.

And so the underwriters will then bid, submit an interest rate bid on the day of the bond sale and whoever has the lowest interest rate wins.

And so the interest rates are not gonna be locked in until the day of that bond sale.

But after the day of the bond sale, they are locked in.

And so

In terms of the credit ratings, this is one point I want to hit before I move on here.

Current credit rating, current issuer rating is triple, triple A, the best you can get.

And so typical with appropriation bonds, we expect a one notch off rating so that the bonds would be issued assuming the county maintains a triple, triple A, one notch off.

And so the difference that our desk is seeing is roughly five basis points on that, as Jacob said.

And so to put that into context, on the 20 year borrowing, it's roughly 700,000 over the 20 years.

of the entire loan on $115 million.

And appropriation means that that's the risk that the county does appropriate the money to pay.

Correct.

That's correct.

And so depending upon what interest rates do between now and the day of pricing, that's gonna drive whether or not we pursue the refunding portion of this.

It's about 11 million of bonds outstanding.

This might not be in your area, but is the main advantage speed to market?

Yes.

yes issue it's cost correct okay that's correct and then you know this is for reimbursements you know if you're thinking about new money projects that you're gonna borrow for ahead of time you also have to take into account inflation would you know into the amount that you're borrowing so that's another thing that could opportunity cost in other words right

And so Jacob covered this, and I'll go through this quickly, but basically what we've done over the next several slides is show the impact on the county's existing debt profile of the 26 bonds as well as the 2028 taxable permanent financing.

And so, go to the next page.

What we've assumed here on the series 26 bonds, which you'll see in a moment, we've assumed that

The debt service payments are as if we issued today at 50 basis points higher than what today is, just for conservatism.

So we built in an element of cushion in these numbers that we're about to show you should the market move.

For the purposes of the

For the 28th permanent financing, as Jacob mentioned, we aren't sure if we're going to permanently finance it on a taxable basis or if we're going to roll it or what the plan is yet.

For the purposes of these numbers, we've assumed that the rest of the ban is permanently financed on a taxable basis, which equates to roughly a 6% planning rate.

And so to give you some perspective, the 20-year taxable borrowing rates have

And is the potential refunding amount, what interest rate is that?

I'll get to it in a minute.

So what we've done here is we've shown what the estimated impact on the profile looks like taking out the refunding, just because if we pursue the refunding, it's going to bring the debt service cost down.

So that makes sense.

Next slide.

And so this is the county's existing tax-ported debt profile, roughly $250 million outstanding.

And I will note that this doesn't include the ban, which is a big principal bullet here, because it's intended to be refinanced.

We've taken that out just for the purposes of this graphic.

What we can see here is over the next several years, the county's existing debt actually rolls off.

And so it declines for about $34.9 million to about $24 million in 2030.

And so there are a lot of numbers here and I realize it's probably hard to see.

But what we've done here is we've taken that existing debt service as we've shown on the previous page,

And then we've added in each component that I previously talked about to arrive at the total projected debt service.

And so this is the estimated debt service on the new money portion, so roughly $115 million.

And then this is the estimated debt service on the Rivanna Station refi portion.

And so this probably gives you a little bit better sense compared to the previous

in graph form.

And so this dark green bar that you see here, bars, is the county's existing profile.

The green is the new money component of the 26 bonds.

The blue is the Rivanna Station portion, and then the orange is the expected 2028 or projected taxable permanent financing of the remaining portion of the band.

And so the refunding opportunity, so the 2015 bonds has roughly 11, almost 12 million of bonds outstanding that we're looking at refinancing.

This is not something that we would likely pursue on a standalone basis, but because we're going to market anyway.

We can take advantage of economies of scale on issuance costs.

And so the idea is if it meets the 3% NPV industry standard threshold, then why not include it and save some money?

And so if you scroll to the next slide here, these are the outstanding bonds remaining on the 2015s.

because this 2026 is coming up so soon that's excluded.

And so what we're really focused on is looking at these maturities as potential refunding candidates.

And so if you go to the next page, this shows

March 5th.

All right so I'll go over just the next steps so we're obviously

Adoption of the Resolution.

I'll be before the Board of Supervisors tomorrow.

It's up to do a very similar presentation and a similar request, asking the Board of Supervisors to adopt the resolution and approve the form and the financing documents.

That really is the driver for us to then go do the additional work to finish out the string of bonds.

We'll be looking to meet with the credit rating agencies next week should the Board approve resolutions tomorrow.

and then in mid to late April we'll be looking at the actual bond sale that Steve mentioned earlier and after there's just a process after you sell the bonds and then you have your your lowest bidder to actually you know do the closing there's a lot of documents that are that need to be signed and finalized and that just will take us through the early pay.

Just one thing I want to point out to Chris Minson, the statutory authority for what you're doing, but there are a number of Virginia Supreme Court cases which have ruled that the subject to annual appropriation method of financing that you're doing here is constitutional.

Thank you.

Alright, then I'll throw it up to the floor for questions.

I was just curious about the status of some of the projects you mentioned.

I can speak to those.

I've actually toured both of those projects in the last month.

They're both on schedule to open in August to alleviate overcrowding at Mountain View, so they'll have

He's taking lunch in the hallway and things like that.

We've addressed some of that earlier.

But both schools are moving forward.

They just announced a new principal for the lower school, who's the current assistant principal.

So they're excited about that.

The ACE Academy is going to be a tremendous resource for the entire county, but in particular for Elmore High School.

in terms of the overcrowding that's there because they will share some of that space with the high school itself.

And the other on the county side of the county projects that I talked about, the court's facility is already open.

So as mentioned earlier, these bonds are on a reimbursement basis for us.

So that project is complete.

Any other questions or comments?

That's good.

I'll make a motion.

I move to adopt the Resolution of the Economic Development Authority of Albemarle County, Virginia, approving a plan to finance certain public facilities, projects, and refund certain prior obligations through the issuance of one or more series of revenue and refunding bonds in an aggregate principal amount not to exceed $156,545,000.

Second.

OK. Any further discussion?

Dr. Storm?

Aye.

Dr.

Hood?

Aye.

Dr. Mechnick?

Aye.

All right.

All right.

Thank you.

All right.

All that bonus.

I'll let everybody kind of clear out.

Everybody with a green suit.

You can do whatever you want.

All right, go ahead.

Sorry.

No problem.

I'm actually expecting Michelle McKinsey with Bella Farm here shortly.

She was running behind, so I'm going to do something.

Do you want me to do the next one?

You could do, yeah.

Let's go to... We may have on the Zoom, if not...

So this is just- I have to recuse myself from this discussion.

I'm on the United Way Advisory Board, I'm also the United Way's lawyer.

Paid lawyer now, actually.

So I'm- Is that one of those new part-time jobs?

Cover your ears.

Cover your ears.

She's in charge now.

Wonderful.

All right.

So there was a memo in your packet on the Envision Enterprise grant.

So I won't go into all the detail, but happy to answer any questions.

This is a partnership between the United Way of Greater Charlottesville, the City of Charlottesville, and Albemarle County to help support small business owners who

who may have a challenge accessing traditional funding mechanisms.

And this was launched in 2023.

There's been three grant cycles for this program since it's launched.

They've distributed $260,000 to 25 companies at that time, $10,000 awards.

In the three cycles, one company was in the first cycle and the third cycle, and that accounts for the missing.

That accounts for that extra $10,000 there.

The program has increased, based on reporting by the companies, has increased revenues by $530,000.

and has created eight new full-time jobs and nine part-time jobs.

This aligns with the economic development strategic plan goal four, which is we will make Albemarle the place where talent and entrepreneurs stay, scale and succeed.

The goal for the funding is that it helps these small businesses invest in their company to help scale and grow their business.

And the proposed investment, so after three cycles, the funds are almost depleted.

There's still a little bit of funding left,

but to launch a fourth cycle, the United Way asked that the partner, the original partners get together and supplement the pool of funding that's available with an additional $25,000 each so that they could run a sort of a robust application cycle for a fourth round and so the proposed investment for you all today is $25,000 that would be matched by the United Way and the City of Charlottesville

and the source of those funds would be the Economic Development Opportunity Fund, which is not the EDA's fund, but as a match, it is within the EDA's purview to approve the county's matching of this grant opportunity.

And I'm happy to answer any questions.

Do we have any data on the 25 companies that have received funding?

Like how many are still in business?

How many have gone out of business?

How many are in the city?

How many are in the county?

Things of that nature.

Yeah, we do.

And some information is included in the memo.

And I'm going to see if Dabney is able to

add anything from his perspective, otherwise I can jump in on some of the data on businesses are still in operation and if they're located in the city or the county.

Hi folks, I'm hoping that you can hear me at the moment.

My name is Damny Coleman, I'm the Chief of Staff and Strategic Program Manager at the United Way of Greater Charlottesville.

All great questions and yes, absolutely happy to share some additional context there.

As far as the split between the city and the county in terms of businesses that have been awarded thus far, it has been traditionally an even split, but I believe in this last grant cycle, a few more businesses were awarded for the city than the county.

And so we're hoping to sort of realign those numbers as we enter this potential next grant cycle.

In terms of in 2023, we had seven business recipients

In FY24, we had 15 business recipients.

And then last year, we had only four recipients.

And part of that was due, we believe, to a change in the eligibility criteria, as business owners that were applying had to apply as with their business being a full time capacity.

So those owners would have to work for that business full time, and not have another source of primary income.

hence just a little bit less of awardees from last year.

I would have to pull the exact number of city and county recipients, but they are fairly aligned as we've tried to keep in previous years.

And absolutely happy to answer any questions.

Go ahead.

To Frank's question,

Just curious how many of those businesses succeeded and failed and just general metrics.

Absolutely, great question.

Some businesses are doing better than others.

And one of the things that we've noticed through reporting is that it's all self reported.

And so we have seen that there have been an increase in full time employees and some part time employees.

And then also we've seen some decreases in some of those businesses.

And we can only attribute some of the success and some of the not as successful businesses to this grant program.

But what we have seen in general is a trend in a positive direction for those businesses.

So

An increase of eight full-time employees, an increase of eight, nine, excuse me, part-time employees, and an increase in that income of roughly half a million dollars.

And some of those businesses are obviously more successful than others are, a lot of those being catering businesses in the area, some of you may be familiar.

with Pearl Islands or blanking on some of the others at the moment, but some landscaping businesses as well.

So there's a wide range of businesses that we've awarded and we've tried to keep a pretty diverse applicant pool as we continue to award businesses.

Yes.

Overall, a net increase in full-time and part-time positions as well as net income for those businesses.

And again, that's a roughly even split between Charlottesville City and Albemarle County.

But I would have to pull those numbers for you.

And those employment numbers are net.

So there are some businesses that reported a loss over the reporting period.

But so still, the number of jobs that are supported by the grant is greater than eight.

It's just because it's a net number.

Any other questions?

This is asking for this year's allocation for $25,000.

So the request is for $25,000 for this year.

If approved, the intent of the United Way would be to advertise in April for the program for the next round.

As Dabney indicated, the last round had four awards.

And I think the number of applicants was six or seven.

So the $25,000 could last one grant cycle.

It could last two grant cycles.

Yes, so this was launched with an initial investment from Albemarle County of $50,000.

So this would make it $75,000 total.

Part of clarification, $25,000 for each partner?

Each partner.

And then us and then Charlotte.

Yes.

Got it.

Thank you.

And then there is some funding remaining from the original sort of fund that was created.

And so it'll be almost.

Yes, so just for additional clarification there, there's still a remaining $25,000 in the current funds that we have from an initial equal partner investment from the city, county, and United Way.

And so this ask would be for each partner to contribute an additional $25,000, including United Way, to bring that total funding back up to 10, excuse me, $100,000 to be able to offer nine to 10 grants this process.

Yes, the last few years I've been able to participate on the selection committee.

We typically sit with a representative from each of the partners and go through all the applications.

And as Daphne mentioned earlier last year, there was a smaller pool of awardees because of lack of meeting the basic requirements that they had tailored to this year.

So as far as tracking, I haven't been involved in the tracking process, but definitely in the viability

And the United Way convenes leadership from the city and the county to go over.

So they're tracking, they're asking for reports from the companies to understand, to be able to come up with those part-time, full-time and revenue numbers.

That's work that the United Way does as part of their administration of the grant program.

So in layman's terms, the last time we did this, it ended up garnering 530,000 net revenue for the county.

The revenue.

I mean, did it take away from somebody else?

I think it's a change in having participated in the program and made the investment using the funds awarded through the program.

The only thing I would ask is, is our approval dependent on the other two also approving?

That's a good question.

It seems like that should be in the motion, that we would approve it if the other two partners approve equal funding.

Certainly.

We're in Albark now.

The resolution is not currently written in such a way.

Can we still vote on it tonight?

I mean, it would probably be cleaner to come.

I don't know what the time constraints are.

It would probably be cleaner to come back with an amended resolution.

We can't vote on an amendment.

You could.

I'm going to push back on this a little bit.

I think that this is run by the United Way.

They've already shown that they are committed to this program.

The program's, while I think, Frank, what I heard you trying to get at was

It wasn't a net of $530,000 in new revenue into the community, rather, that some of it came from other businesses.

And that's probably true.

But I would still think that there was a net increase overall, much as there were 17 net jobs, so eight full-time, nine part-time.

I think the city is going to be committed to this.

I think that throwing this extra step in

delays their process.

I was just looking, they announced their recipients last June.

So they would like to have a full, now that they've had a year under their belt of this new requirements in terms of the full time, right?

I assume that's moving forward the same way.

Yes.

So now that they've had that and

The business community's had a chance to be aware of it.

I would expect more applicants this year than they've seen in previous years.

I'd like them to be able to do this.

When you look at things that we do need in this community, like additional childcare,

because childcare allows other people to get out into the business community and to have those jobs.

Adding this additional step of amending this motion and then having to come back, I think it doesn't help with their planning and it could slow the whole process down.

I'm going to move that the Economic Development Authority adopts the resolution approving funding for the Envision Enterprise Grant Program.

Aye.

Dr.

Dr. Friedman?

Aye.

Aye.

Dr. Cox?

Well, you're growing us.

You're growing us.

Are you the only lawyer in the county?

You're accusing yourself all the time.

Get some more lawyers over there.

They're gracious.

Would you like to come serve?

Can you refer to any facts?

Hello folks, thanks for having me.

I'd like to introduce Michelle McKenzie.

She is the manager of Beller Farm.

It is a beautiful, historic 900 acre farm in Southern Albemarle County.

She'll be able to speak on all of the specifics in particular and I'll share with you the program that they are hoping to receive grant funding for and some of the work that they do.

But as I mentioned, Beller Farm is a diversified, USD certified organic farm in Southern Albemarle County managed by Michelle.

They grow a wide variety of vegetables and fruits using organic methods and they raise pasteurized livestock, cattle hogs, chickens, laying hens.

They use a particular method of farming called silvopasture, which I'll let her explain in more detail.

But ultimately, the sort of Cliff Notes version that I understood was that they rotate the grazing of the animals through pastures and the woods to ultimately benefit the entire ecosystem.

It gives back to the whole cycle, essentially, keeping everybody happy and healthy, right?

That's right.

And you guys saw those hogs the day you were there.

We did.

We had a wonderful trip with the state.

with our business manager from VEDP and our regional workforce representative, so we got to see the farm in person.

And it's a very impressive farm.

They're one of the largest direct-to-consumer producers in central Virginia, and they have an incredibly robust community-supported agriculture program that supports over 650 households.

in addition to hundreds more wholesale, retail, professional suppliers that they support.

They have an on-farm barn store that attracts local commerce.

They participate in local farmers markets all over the region and host seasonal events and educational events too to help educate the community about sustainability and responsible agriculture methods.

Next slide, please.

Oh, sorry, I have the clicker.

So ultimately, as I mentioned, we visited with Michelle and the farm last fall, and discussed some of the gaps and the infrastructure and ways that we could help support the success of their farm business.

and ultimately, like we previously mentioned, they raise whole hogs and distributing those hogs for processing is a laborsome, expensive, time-consuming process and their partner regionally, you may be familiar with stock provisions, they work there in the city of Charlottesville.

They currently require around 100 pigs a year and Bellaire can fulfill that to a point but they have the capacity to scale sustainably with additional infrastructure.

So the opportunity is that the demand exists

with their butcher, local chefs, events, whole animal customers for whole hogs.

Any wedding you've ever been to out in the countryside where they're looking for a pig roast or any kind of catering events like that, they're really preferred in the big whole hog format.

So the current way of processing them

These hogs are coming fresh, which is part of why the refrigerated truck is so important.

are typical when we're processing hogs for direct-to-consumer.

That meat is coming to us in a cardboard box, deep frozen, and so an hour-long trip in the car, really no big of a deal because it's pretty densely packed, the cardboard is insulative, you can throw a moving blanket over it, and it's pretty reasonably kept at a frozen temperature.

But when you're talking about refrigerated temperature,

So we have just started a pilot program with stock, and right now we are outsourcing the transport.

So I'm paying a third party to transport the whole hogs.

We will still be able to use our van to transport the frozen box pork.

And if we were to receive this grant, we would switch to the refrigerated transport for all of the pork, right?

So it would get a lot of utility.

and with the whole animals typically you're wanting to have them in a hung structure so they're not contacting the floor and so that would be how we would be rigging out the new truck.

And right now we're kind of in a pilot program with stock, we just had a limited contract to do six animals and they have

and they've been very very happy with the product and mainly we'd love to kind of eliminate this expense of this third-party thing.

Next slide please.

So ultimately, the project development team of Michelle and I came up with the cool name Coldlink Collaborative Central Virgin because what this project intends to do is connect three regional professionals to bring their products together in a collaborative spirit.

And as we all know, the state really enjoys to support collaborative regional.

Projects.

So the goal here is it shows you the project benefits that I have illustrated there at the top.

Ultimately, Michelle and her team are looking for a refrigerator truck, as she mentioned, seeing the budget there, the estimated budget for that refrigerator truck.

They are intending to have a mechanic look into research selection, installation of upfitting the truck for

getting it up to where they need it to be for $1500.

With a total project cost, obviously ranging $45,000 to $87,000, there's a little bit of a spread there.

But with the funding request, Bellaire is prepared to match the grant request at $22,000 at a minimum to bridge that gap rather.

The AFID Grant and the AFID Infrastructure Grant will do a one-to-one match here.

So the total request from the county would be $11,000 to support the purchase and upfitting of the refrigerated truck to complete this project.

So I will ultimately leave any questions up to Michelle because she's the expert on her farm.

They come from the Economic Opportunity Fund, which is that that fund pocket that is

Is there anybody else who might use other other farms that would get some benefit out of this truck?

Certainly I would say that that is a possibility.

I would also say that it would go a long way to professionalizing like our entire distribution system.

So we're currently transporting all of our vegetables unrefrigerated and we move thousands of pounds a week.

And especially in those summer months and going to Richmond,

We would, an existing partnership that we have that would immediately benefit would be, that is another farm, is our relationship with Agraberry Farm.

We run an add-on CSA share with their berries.

And right now it's been a big challenge, again, to get those quickly from Richmond to our farm.

And I think Agraberry, you know, they really value

The quality, of course, and with a raspberry, you know, three hours, it's done, you know.

So it really is critical and allows us to maintain the quality of those things.

And then the third business that's the primary business in this partnership is T&E Meats, aka Honest Meats, located in Kieseltown, Rockbridge County.

and they really, really love this because essentially this is filling kill slots and generating income, but it's a very like less labor intensive style of processing than they're used to.

And the one more clarifying thing, the capturing the extra yield, it might be a little bit confusing about how that's happening.

Essentially at the slaughterhouse,

They have like standard SOPs for if they're going to butchery and there's just like a flow to their process where they are going to be skinning the hog because it's easier.

I gave them the G version of this and they're probably not ready.

But basically, there's a pretty significant up to 6% by weight that is very desirable to stock, also desirable to those chefs.

During this pilot program, we added one hog, so we did seven total, and one went right to Tucker Yoder

at the wool factory.

And so he will probably be a regular client.

That's right.

And I bring back packs of sausage and I sell them out of the farm one by one.

That's correct.

Yes.

Best case was somebody from Northern Virginia and now we're still having local, but maintain that.

This is a really important question for me.

Tucker Yoder.

I would imagine.

I'm excited to, yeah, I actually need to get down there and I want to try some of our pork.

Quick question.

The meat is transported in the van, in a refrigerated van,

Does that also transport?

Either you understand or not.

That's a very important note.

So the other thing about this truck is when you're getting a refrigerated truck, they are already outfitted to be fully sanitizable inside.

And so also hanging the pork.

Really?

It's not contacting anything?

It's just contacting the hook.

That's the only thing it's touching in there.

And that's part of why the hanging is important.

There's no direct contact.

There are people that are going to use all the bits, the head, because you can, I mean, I know people that need the ears.

This is his thing, man.

You mentioned gels.

That made me happy.

He's going to follow the truck.

Because this would be going to Harrisonburg weekly or bi-weekly, it'd be going twice a month at least on the schedule.

and basically everything's like ready to rock.

Pretty much we're just waiting to extend our pilot program to permanent.

We have the hogs, you know, the piglets ordered.

All right, so we're gonna, I'm sure we could go on forever.

I know somebody.

There will not be any further discussion Director Storm Aye Director Hood Aye Director Friedman Aye Director Mechnick Aye Director Cox Aye

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate all this time and I think I owe you guys some pork.

Well, the application is due at the end of April and then I think we find out in May.

So we're at the ICS market year-round on Saturdays and then in May we open up a bunch of different midweek locations.

We have one on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings.

The other two are just us in a parking lot.

So we're at Sojourner's Church on Thursday and we're at Trinity Presbyterian out on Fontaine on Tuesday.

And then the Barn Store is open Friday and Saturday year round.

We have tons of stuff going on.

Our Farm Animal Day is Saturday, April 4th.

If you want to see the hogs for yourself, we'll have them out there.

And I think possibly the most exciting part about this, and I will leave it at this, is the impact that these animals are able to have on the land.

and they are really truly beyond just livestock and beyond food.

They're tools for us to manage the ecology and my dream of developing native warm season grasslands on Bel Air Farms.

Mostly we are in some Berkshires right now and really enjoying those.

The Bacon Hawks, the Tamworth is known as the Bacon Hawks.

Thank you so much.

Yes, you're free to go.

Absolutely.

I really appreciate every time.

Thank you so much.

Bye.

Just go quick and then we'll go super fast.

All right.

I'll just hit a couple of high points.

We were out doing some business retention and expansion visits.

And I'll just say that Ashley started with this, but the value of these is that we can talk to businesses, understand some of their challenges, and then work to bring resources to bear to help solve them.

So the value of the BRE process is exactly what we did with the AFID application that we just approved, that you all just approved.

I added a new section, just a couple of like high points.

It can be hard to follow the breadcrumbs.

And so for the three target sectors that we have in the economic development strategic plan, I just have a quick sort of here's some things that have happened lately, or some things to have on your radar in the sector.

So for national security, I'll just highlight there's an event later this week, the National Security Data and Policy Institute Annual Conference.

It's the first ever annual conference, but they are coming in hard with, we'll be back next year.

It's at the board's head.

It's free to attend.

You can find registration information on their website.

There's a great, there's a really, it's a really great, and I would say accessible feeling agenda.

So it doesn't, I don't think you have to be in the sector to understand what they're going to be talking about.

On the Biotech and Life Sciences sector, I'll just highlight that I emailed last week, probably, the BioBridge Talent Pathways Initiative Report.

That was an effort to, when Afton Scientific's expansion was announced, there was this idea that we need to do some more to make sure that we have the right talent pool to work at the Afton Scientific's facility.

That was well ahead of AstraZeneca announcing their location here.

but put us in a really great position.

I sent you the report sort of as an FYI, but I expect there'll be some implementation projects that come out of that to enhance some of the programming and some of the efforts already underway at both the public schools, PVCC, and potentially the University of Virginia.

and all of that is just sort of getting ahead of what we know will be some demand coming soon.

There was also an announcement for the, the Commonwealth announced that Eli Lilly, Merck and AstraZeneca had committed funding to create this Virginia Center for Advanced Manufacturing, pharmaceutical manufacturing.

That is still being, the details of that are still being worked out and will be posted as we learn more about what that will entail for us locally.

Agribusiness and Free Processing.

Again, these are a lot of things that you already know about.

Just wanted to highlight Beacon Kitchen, which was a project that the EDA provided some seed funding to early on.

Just announced in the past month, they've been awarded over $1.5 million in private sector or private foundation and also state funds to continue to build out their facility, which is just a wonderful asset for our agribusiness and free processing businesses.

These are some regional study work underway and events.

I'm gonna kind of skip over that in the interest of time.

Charlottesville, Albemarle Regional Airport, CHO, is working really hard to try to get a direct flight to Boston.

It's a short drive.

There's a lot, it's spring so there's a lot going on.

I'll just highlight two things.

One, the chamber is leading a chamber to chamber trip to Chapel Hill, North Carolina in the month of May.

A number of city and county staff and elected officials would be attending that to learn more about how they work.

There's a lot and how their community sort of works to support the priorities that they have for the localities down there.

and then the TomTom Festival is coming up in just a couple weeks.

Jeff Richardson is on one of the panels at the Civic Futures event.

There's a whole suite of programming across the three days of the conference.

Wednesday is really focused on government.

Thursday and Friday are focused on entrepreneurship and businesses and so just check out their website for more information.

All right.

All in favor?

We'll move into 241 for closed session.

He's named after the musician.

You don't need Miles Davis.

We are back.

All right.

I move that the EDA certified by reported vote that the best of each director of knowledge on a public business matter lawfully exempted open meeting requirements to begin the freedom of information and identified in motion authorizing closed meeting were heard, discussed, or considered in the closed meeting.

All right.

Chair Storm?

Director Hood?

Aye.

Director Friedman?

Aye.

Director Mechnick?

Aye.

Aye.

All right.

So, anything else?

Discussion of court?

All right, so we are adjourned until April 21st.