Economic Development Committee - Regular Meeting

Okay.

I'd like to call to order the Economic Development Committee of August 25th, 2026. Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Vice Chair Bushnell? Present. Council Member Palmer?

Here.

Council Member Tapp?

Here. Moving on to public comment. Is there anyone online or signed up in the room to public comment? Please raise your hand online if you're there and you want to put a comment. Perfect. We will close that up and come back to it if anybody shows up later. I will check it. We will move on to our first topic of the day. We are going to go over arts and cultural vitality strategic plan update. For that, I'll call up Rebecca Salverson from the Community Economic Development Department and Jacques from the Center for Strategic Priorities. Welcome, Brian. Thank you for letting us present today. So hello, Chair, Vice Chair, House members. My name is Rebecca Salverson. I'm the Division Manager for Arts and Cultural Vitality, and I am excited to be bringing an update to the Arts and Cultural Vitality strategic plan to you. And I'm here today with Jacques Colon, and I'll let him introduce himself and kick us off.

All right. Thank you. Good morning. I'm Jacques Colon. I'm the Director of the Center for Strategic Wife Parties. And I have the opportunity to just kick us off with this presentation by sharing a little bit about why we are even talking about arts and cultural vitality to begin with. So looking at Tacoma 2035, our 10-year strategic framework, We are very clear that there are certain functions that are a core part of what we do as a city, right? Community safety, housing and homelessness. These are really core parts of what makes a city functional. But as we look at this placemaking and experiences goal area, what it points out is that you could have a safe house community that wasn't really drawing people in or making people feel like they belong. There's something extra that makes a city a place that people want to be. And so that goal area is about ensuring that Tacoma is a thriving city that people enjoy living in and visiting, that it has things like historic buildings, libraries, city-funded art, iconic venues, and support for many great festivals and events, the things that make people want to be in Tacoma beyond those core transportation, safety, housing things. And so as we talk about the role that this strategic plan that you'll be hearing to update for today plays in our broader approach to Tacoma 2035, I would just like to point out that that is the context by which this is really advancing. So thank you for letting me talk about how Tacoma 2035 helps to frame the benefits of arts and cultural vitality to achieving our broader goals. And with that, I will pass it back to Rebecca to take you through the content of the update.

Thank you, Jacques. So I wanted to share the plan outline, but before I go through the draft and the outline, I wanted to share some of the input we've received from this plan. First, the Office of Strategy has really been a strong partner and internal consultant for this work. That's why Jacques is here today. That's why Ted was here last time with me. Ted supported the development of the plan, and Jacques has been able to get us across the finish line. And I have to say, even though we were very, I was like, almost had a small heart attack when Ted made his transition, but like, this is a dream setup to have Ted take us, you know, get us through development and then have Jacques put his eyes on it and make sure that it's connecting in the right ways with 2035. It's like, I couldn't have defined that better. So really happy about that. We are including the Arts Commission and CommitCrates Advisory Board in this work. We brought an early draft to a joint retreat session in the spring, and we're continuing to work with the Joint Subcommittee of Arts Commissioners and CommitCrates Advisory Board members, which has been really fun to get them in a room together. and they're continuing to give feedback and inform this work. We also did a survey to the community and that has been really helpful both in the narrative responses, helped ground me in why we do this work and that this work is really impactful to a lot of people as I was reading through some really powerful and generous comments people made. And also the critiques that people have that help us make our work better. But also some of the things we learned from it are around what artists say is most helpful for the web. So they say funding is most helpful. Next is access to space. And next is training workshops. So that helps us kind of prioritize. And as we're looking at actions, what we want to bring forward, what we can maybe kind of step back and depend on other partners for. So that feedback has been helpful.

can be seen throughout.

So again, the plan outline. One thing I want to point out is the introduction letter. Thank you to Council Member Scott for agreeing to do the introduction letter as our Arts Commission liaison. We appreciate you and so I'll be working with Christine on that. Thank you for being a present liaison always. My pleasure. And this will be, the plan is pretty concise. We're keeping it to about 20 pages and we have lots of great photos because of the work we do, but we'll keep it to where it can hopefully be useful and digestible for folks. We are thinking about how we align with a couple of key plans. So Jock kind of spoke to 2035, placemaking and experiences where we really live, but there is a lot of crossover with the other areas, including community safety and jobs and economy. There's really a lot of overlap. And also through our public art program, climate and environment and transportation and mobility, we do projects that are funded through those funding sources. So we really touch on a lot of it, but placemaking and experience is where we roll up under. And then CED strategic plan. More than half of the areas are bolded because there's a lot of crossover because, you know, we're in that department and we continue to see how the work that we do and the work that the other division has, how our work strengthens each other. A lot of that is seen through our longstanding partnership with Spaceworks Tacoma. You all saw a presentation weeks ago and there's, you go through the CED strategic plan and it's just like, boom, boom. They're like, they hit so many of them. of those goals that are even named in it. Um, but there are a lot of goals around creative placemaking, uh, like how we make the city attractive to employers and employees and make it a place people want to live. Um, and, uh, so we, it was, it was a task last time I, that was just one of the things I needed to do. And it was kind of a daunting task to go through line by line and look at where our connections were. But, um, but. cool to see how strong it is and where all those overlaps really are. So we will be speaking to that, not in super depth, but making sure that that's really clear. The next piece that I'm excited to share with you is our vision and vision, which we didn't have last time. Couple words, but as you all know, they're important words. And this has been a good exercise to go through with staff and also with our advisory, our CBC members on our subcommittee. And a couple of things that this really kind of brings in the connections to the 2035 Community and Economic Development Strategic Plan makes a nod, or includes also access to opportunity and belonging, we feel very strongly about in our division, and then also brings in Tacoma Creates by naming the arts, culture, heritage, and science, which is kind of was one of the main reasons we needed to redo this plan. So I'm not going to read through it, but we feel really good about it, and it is helpful to have this sort of language to make sure we're on the same page about what we do and that we can explain our work precisely to folks. Oh, one thing I did want to mention about this. You'll notice there isn't values on this page. And as we were looking at it, the values we were coming up with were really pretty well aligned with the city's values. They're pretty good values. So, and we decided for this, we are going to be kind of leaning on the city's values. Doesn't mean we couldn't have other values in the future or the arts commission or TCAB couldn't decide to dig into that more, but we are leaning on those and also just trying to keep it concise because people don't read as much as they used to and so we're trying to keep it short. Okay, these are our goal areas. These are very similar to what you saw before. So I'm going to kind of run through these. And I guess the headline for these, though, is that they haven't changed a ton. We've changed some of the actions. We've been refining, but the three buckets that align with our program areas are, we feel really good about, and that's what we move forward with. So again, these three goal areas align with our program areas. The hope is that we will be able to use these as staff as more of like a work plan, a really useful tool to support the work First area, Cultivate an Environment Where Artists and Creative Communities Thrive. This is really connected to the community arts area. So this is Arts Month. This is the PAP, Commodities Initiative Program funding. So like little seed money, I think it comes from Scott. You received that way back in the day. The community arts projects funding. So the general fund, arts and culture funding that also supports businesses and also that supports community groups engineering arts programming. This is also the poet laureate. And this area is also where we are kind of expanding and defining a little bit more and making space for creative economy as a program area and for community connection as a program area. We do a lot of that already, but I think that's worth calling out and that's worth like intentionally building on. I mentioned this last time, but this is also where programmatic support of the film industry, if there's ever a piece of that. Council Member Scott, I know that's happening right now. I know TVE is also involved in that, but that's where this would live. So we don't have any actions connected to film industry, but we've created space for that to live here. That would be part of supporting opportunities to create and experience art as part of spreading the creative economy. Um, so we've at least created space where we know where it would go if we were going to do that work. Uh, it's also where programmatic work related to space activation lives. So, uh, we are really excited about the partnership with the library right now, doing the artist residents, their, uh, 1443 films in their empty conference room. So one of these things we are able to do without additional budget resources, and we're just sort of matching resources, but, uh, Um, that's part of supporting artists, being able to create their work, especially as we don't, we don't have, you know, this is not a, this is not a budget cycle where there's money falling out of the sky. So we need to look at what we have and, um, Supporting artists can look like additional funding. It can look like additional funding. It can also look like being creative about what, what artists are asking for, which it does. They. which we do have, you know, and, you know, we probably, you know, I have lots of things, lots of dreams that probably won't come true, but we can, we can make a, we can start to, um, uh, be creative about how we're building partnerships, how we're opening up resources for artists with the LPR tab. I'm listening in online, but the last time I presented, you also brought up the idea of permits and access to public spaces. And this is also where that area would live. And we don't have an action related to that, but have created space for like things like, you know, blanket permits or ways that we could, again, open up space for different types of space for artists. And that's where this lives. So it's not just sort of like somebody had the pet project, a little bit of interest in it, but it's like, our, one of our goals is to support artists, whatever that looks like, and how we can do that as a city from our perspective. Um, okay. The other ones are really, so, uh, public art is the next one. Um, this is around partnering on creative placemaking and public art. This is my shortest section, I think, because this is my background. Um, so This is around, this is related to how we do public art, how we work with city resources, but also partner resources, and with our public art program, it's about, it's kind of balanced between partner resources and city resources, especially with our work with Parks Tacoma. So those are equally important, and the way we work together to combine projects is also important. Maintenance is essential, and that's something that I'm gonna bring off the back burner a little bit, to build things, but if you don't keep up with the community, it's not, that causes issues and it's almost as bad, it's not helpful. The third goal area is investing in cultural organizations. This is aligned with Tacoma Creates. And so one of the goals, one of the big, one of the reasons we, this plan was so important to update this plan is to bring Tacoma Creates into our work um because it really it wasn't in our in our last line it was sort of the dream and the last plan and it's here now so um these uh represent the work that tomocrates is already doing but the one that i'm really excited about is the last one which is growing sustainable futures for the cultural sector and that's where that's where i think we are going to see the most growth. There was a lot of conversation during the reauthorization conversation about how we support sort of the ecosystem, how we're providing support for our organization, capacity building, and the connections, cohort building, that kind of thing. And that's where that work lives. So we're very excited about it. I'm really excited about seeing that. and being able to kind of get the first three stabilized and kind of dig into that a little bit more as the program is more established. Okay, just a couple more slides here. So there will be metrics. They're not completely finalized, and so I didn't want to put them out there yet. Plus, you need something to look at in the final that you haven't seen yet. So we have been talking about outputs and outcomes in our metrics. We're going to have a decent amount of metrics because we already track a lot of things that we have been for years. So most of them are existing, so it won't be too much of a burden on staff. But we are including some new ones, especially related to equity. And at job suggestion, we're going to be also tracking some of the community survey questions that may relate. We're not going to own those, but we'll be kind of tracking against those. And then lastly, next steps, we'll be giving this to internal and external viewers. We're targeting adoption in quarter four of this year. That would be cuter. Our last plan is a council for adoption. We're planning to bring this one to council as well. You know, arts, we can have some fun with words. Yeah. We'll bring it to the Arts Commission first for adoption and then bring it to council. I'm planning to send the final draft of this plan just to this committee in the next few months before it's brought forward for adoption so you all can see it, unless you'd like me to send it to the full council or if you have other ideas about how to roll it out to your colleagues. I'd love your input on that. Thanks for having me answer any questions. Perfect, thank you. Do you have some questions? I started online, actually.

Hello. Thank you for the presentation and including the space activation that I had mentioned in your last presentation. I look forward to hearing about the metrics. You know, that's my jam. So I'm looking forward to seeing that in the report and reviewing. But thanks for all of the updates.

Look forward to sharing the metrics with you. Very soon. Perfect. So is that it, Councilwoman Palmer?

That's it.

Check it. In the room? I'll just say thank you. I appreciate it. I always love the updates and I'm excited to see the final collection of your work and all the things that you've done to get this input. And Obviously, happy to have it come back to the community. I think the scenario can get it to the rest of our colleagues better.

I think, honestly, I don't know that a presentation would look that much different just because we can't get the information to you. So happy to bring it back to you, but I think the plan itself is where not get just repeated information.

Thank you.

the list thank you chair and thank you again for the presentation i'm always really excited to see things happen at the strategic level this might be a more tactical question but um um obviously obviously one of the challenges we have is we want to have hard installations all over the city uh and but then you have to maintain those over time um has there been any conversations on what on a tactical level that might look like um

different art installations require different levels of maintenance there's just so many things that go into it yeah yeah um so we do have we have a system for it i will say that it's i would say compared to some of the other ways we maintain objects we we we do have a way to do it at least sort of like clear ownership over it um But it is challenging because we don't have staff for it. We just have one public art person to do maintenance and do acquisitions, too. So that is what gets challenging. But we do, I think, leaning into some of the partnerships, and there have been more discussions, too. This might be talking on our turn a little bit, but one of our actions is also, it's actually not around artworks. It's about how we work with our city colleagues to support pieces that aren't in the collection, but maybe are by an artist or are perceived as being artwork or monuments and things in the community. And I think without having like dedicated staff or a dedicated contractor for it, I think we're going to have to lean into our partnerships and look at how we can, uh, like how we can work with them and spend partners like internal partners, like, you know, streets and grounds or streets and grounds, um, or external partners like parks and how making sure that we have systems to, um, to like share resources back and forth and expertise back and forth because nobody has enough to have a full time person, but we might be able to share. So I don't know, that's sort of a veiled thing, but I think things like, you know, we're looking at, those bigger agreements, making sure that we have, that's something I've been looking at and advocating for, is making sure we have an ability to back and forth, to care for pieces in the right way.

If I recall, did we go through a mapping project of art installations that belong to us?

So we have a public art map, we've had it for a while we are getting ready to do an update to it. So we do, and we actually, every two summers, we do, we have an intern from EPS who comes and does a, they go and look at every piece. So that's really great. So we do a great inventory every two years. We don't always have, and they help us like prioritize based on what they see. But that doesn't mean we can actually get to it all.

Yes.

We do have a line item in our budget that we're very protective of for maintenance because of this, because if we give up that money, then, you know, nothing, you know, it's hard to get the work done. You also are working on different agreements, which I don't think are public yet, but with some large and, you know, art-related entities that, okay, we can work. Say you have city-owned property, so can you take care of, you know what I mean? So really trying to do those and our agreement with Metro Park or Parks Tacoma. So I think we're working on different ways. And I think even having the inventory that you go through every two years really is a great system. So you have a very good system of when things have been fixed. The thing that comes up with maintenance is when there's emergencies that happen, right? Can take your whole budget, you know, because something...

Somebody's shooting the bridge of glass in all of our budget lines. So yeah, that's a roundabout way. I'd be happy to talk more about it too, but I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to sort of clarify how we take care of objects. Like, even for example, I'm like looking at you a lot, but the piece at the People's Park artwork, that wasn't, nobody owned that, so we can't You know, I don't want to go start taking care of stuff that we don't own because they're not responsible for it. But so parks didn't, nobody knew who owned it. So last year we did a process with our commission to take it into our collection and we'll be working at this next year to, to have it repaired. So just like. being able to have that sort of clarity work with parks and be like, here isn't ours.

Well, I think that's what mapping is so important because, you know, guerrilla art is cool, but it's everywhere. But like, if there's guerrilla art everywhere, are we expecting to maintain that too?

Well, we've had this issue with business districts, right? Historically, great business districts want to put things in the right of way to show their business district, but then who owns that? Like, so they put it in, but then the city doesn't have it on their budget to take care of it. So you've got, been starting to look at all of those things and even you know the sister city is not that i'm responsible for that anymore but you know they're thinking of doing this kind of sign in tulsa plaza that shows where the sister cities are that the city is partly funding but like is that going to be a city asset is it a sister so starting to have those conversations up front rather than letting it happen and then being stuck with oh who owns what yeah so so i think it's it's there's more to do there that's the huge issue is we have a bigger collection but uh

We're growing up as a program. Great.

Thank you. Thank you.

Debbie, you bring up an interesting point, so now I'm just curious because I was there, but who owns the sculptures in Sacramento? Is that the business church or is that us or is that a mystery?

Mostly. That was the one that came to mind immediately. Africa. So, and even right now, like the planters down MLK, the business district owns those and now they're getting kind of old and over time. So business district has to decide, okay, should they fix them? Should they take away, you know, but yeah, we're really trying to be more intentional, right? Cause we'd love those things, but who owns them has to be clear.

Yeah. This is like a long-term project. It's like one of my retirement projects, which sounds depressing, right? It's going to take that long, but I think, I think if we can figure out how to take care of, those pieces, like we have the ability to, it's just having clarity and it's having resources. Who's going to do it? Who gets to make a decision about like,

And writing it down. When we did the Lincoln District Rehabilitation Project, we put a bunch of art in. But even that hasn't been that many years ago until right now. People are always asking, well, who's taking care of this? And I'm like, no, no, it was really clear. Public Works put this in. They need to take care of it. But maybe it wasn't documented in such a way that because as staff changes and, you know, like, well, really? You know, so we have to have a good system to track it all down.

Or to, I think, long term as research. government evolves. So, like, things merge, like, the department between public works and environmental services, making sure that those receipts track wherever the thing goes. We're keeping up with how we're going to fund mural repair as we're doing more murals for graffiti mitigation. So, yeah, there's a lot of growth there, but I think it's something we need to be focusing on as we're looking at, like, the basics of, you know, Makes sense. Sorry, I was a full rabbit hole. The other question I had around the plan in general, I'm wondering, maybe you talked about this and I just missed it. It might be in goal area one. If that's where we're still thinking about the piece around that, create an economy funding conversation that continues to happen within space works and community and us. If that is that stuff, all the things that we sort of heard about and like the glass recycling program that could be worked here, like our residents that was at environmental services. So I'm trying to think of the other pieces where common use back here. Is that all captured in here already in some way? shape or sort or it will be in the final plan so yes when council colleagues are thinking about those things they can circle back to it yeah so hopefully i mean that that would be something if you all are looking at it and you're like i don't see a place for this program um they should all be in there okay we did a sort of we looked at the old plan we looked at all the work we do now and sort of make sure that the pieces should be in there are represented. But if, if you don't see them, then that's a problem. It should be a tool for you all too. But yeah, all those pieces are, are in there. If they're not called out as actions, they are, they're, they're, faith for them at least so like great on public art yeah I'm happy I can speak it's helpful to speak to any of those specifically no I think they're all in there I was just making sure in my mind that I am not being where they're at in there but I trust that you guys have all your yeah I mean one thing I will say Um, with the space race conversation is it is really strongly represented in the CD plan and, uh, it's represented in our plan too, but like, I love that connection in some ways it almost shows up more in CD's plan as an economic development tool, which I think is awesome. Like, I think that's kind of, I love that it might live there for a little bit, especially now they've worked with CDBG with economic development dollars for so long. So they are absolutely partners, especially in public art with us. And we are connected in a lot of ways, but in some ways they show up more in the CE plan, which I like because it helps us. It's like thinking about that as an economic driver as part of our way of being. Yeah, one of our economic sort of nodes or focus areas, I hope.

Well, and I would hope in the future, in five years from now, we're both redoing our plans at the same time they would be together. You know, because when we restarted, when Jeff started redoing our economic development plan, Arch wasn't back. ADB wasn't back in 3D yet. So then we kind of had this like point, okay, do we now kind of shove it into the end when we had already started doing it or do they continue to do their own updates? So, I mean, eventually I would hope it's one plan because... you know arts and cultural vitality is fundamental to economic development as we said you know the whole place making jock talked about so i think that right now we're kind of pointing out the crossovers but five years from now hopefully they would actually be fully melded together yeah okay and that's the other piece of like how stuff moves exactly yeah yeah you would love it

Thank you. You perfectly answered the question I failed to articulate, which was exactly where my head was at. It's like the economic development pieces of this. And you're right. It's all captured in that plan. Yeah. And both plans, Craig was on the wrong chapter, all in the umbrella. So we're good. We're all in the umbrella. Excellent.

I'm really holding a camera on the forecast.

Okay, perfect. Well, thank you. That is all I had. I appreciate all your guys' work. It's really helpful. It's always good to hear from the dreamers and the doers about how to do it. Yeah.

Well, since I didn't get past this, let's do some of this.

So the project doesn't be working on? Yeah.

Can we just confirm, though, when you have kind of the final draft, would you like, Chair, would you like that sent to just EDC, or would you like to come to EDC first and then the whole council? The whole council needs to vote on it, right? Let's just go straight there.

I think to your point, we can get whatever pieces are left at the full council, because they're all really innocent. Great, so we'll share it with the policy and law staff, and happy to, if there are any questions or people need one-on-ones or discussion, I'm happy to do that. Does that work for y'all?

I feel like we're captured. And we'll leave time for feedback. It won't go to you and then straight to council. Perfect.

Thank you. Alright. With that, that was our topic today. I will go to Debbie, Executive Administrator for Thank you.

So the next meeting on September 8th is canceled. After that, September 22nd, we have Visit Tacoma Pierce County coming for an update, and they will talk a little bit about World Cup regional impacts, but more probably just about what they're working on and what they're seeing. And then on September 29th, we have boards, committee, and commissions update.

Thank you. I haven't seen anybody new come in the room unless it was a ghost. Is there anybody new online watching that would like me to open up public comment? Now would be a good moment to raise your Zoom hand so I can do so. If I don't see any Zoom hands, a couple seconds, I will move us on to our final topic of the meeting. Any other items of interest?

Move to adjourn. Perfect.

Thank you. Thank you. All those in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Bye.

We're done.