Economic Development Corp. - Regular Meeting

Can I get somebody to do a roll call, please?

Don Austin. Here. Tara Thompson.

Here.

Larry Hammonds. Here. Kristen Carton.

Here.

Shane Hines, Jason Herta, and Kathy Merritt are not present.

Shane should be here shortly though. First item on the agenda is the approval of minutes from our 07/17/2025 meeting. I'll entertain a motion. I'll make a motion to approve the minutes as written.

I'll second that.

Okay. And our next item on the agenda is citizens communications. This time is for citizens to address the board on seeing on issues and items of concerns not on this agenda. There will be no board action at this time. Any citizens?

Yeah. Do we need to vote

on this? Oh, I knew I was gonna miss something. Going back to voting to approve the minutes. That is everybody in favor say

aye. Aye.

Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Then back communications. And do we have any citizens communications today? Seeing none, we will move on to the treasurer's report.

Good evening, board. My name is Carrie Cook. I'm the city's budget manager. I'm gonna be walking us through the August treasurer's report today. We're gonna start out with sales tax. So June was another great month for sales tax. We saw that positive growth in May as well. So starting to see a little pattern here, but this year, as you all know, has been kind of a roller coaster for sales tax collections. Alas, ahead. Then year.

Future period payments, we're at 2.8% growth. So that's great. 2.8% means that there's positive economic activity happening in our area. So good news in June. I will note that for July, August, and September, for our projections that are included in your report, those months are projected flat.

Typically, we do a 2% growth projection. That's just kind of how we've done standard. But just in anticipation of any potential work done business. And done with slight lot growth lot in that sales business. Tax row, and that's because June was another great month. So that's the only material change there for revenue. Your current commitments. So this table is pretty different from the last month's treasurer's report. It includes all of your current commitments to date. So we made some pretty big ones at the last meeting.

The Northeast Lakeview College expansion and the Dry Comal Creek Floodplain, all of those expenses are now included in this table. So this gives you a current and accurate picture of all of your commitments to date. And that'll bring us to fund balance. Again, sentiment. All of your current commitments are included on this table or on this graph rather. So it gives you accurate representation of your fund balance projections through FY 2027. With that, I will take questions.

I had to be gone for the last meeting, and I think you proved a change in the HD Supply Mhmm. Deal. Is that reflected in here now already?

That is a good question. No. That is not reflected in these projections as of now. Okay.

Thank you very much. Moving on to our advisory team report.

Good afternoon. I'm going to go through this report relatively quickly, but I'll on most slides, but I'll pause on a couple. If you need me to rewind, for for operator for

services

contract. For the If there's ever something you want to see in here, let me know. But right up top on pipeline, as a reminder, we have leads and we have projects. Our goal is to get the highest quality leads we can so we can turn them into projects. You'll see that we had 32 leads in Q2. This is our three year average for quarters is 46. I'd say I'm not as concerned about that as the quality of the leads we're getting. Sometimes you get a lot of leads from marketing activity and there's not a lot good ones. So we're 32 is a good healthy amount. You'll see the majority of these are in manufacturing.

You'll see that of those 32 leads, we converted 10 to a project. So we also track why we don't qualify leads as projects. You'll see here real estate logistics, high utility needs, strategic fit. That's if it's just not a match for our community. We these are the reasons we disqualify things.

You'll see some examples. We continue to get every month or so pretty absurd power requirement on the lead. And I think these folks are sending those out to every possible place they can. So we track this, look for actionable information where possible, and happy to answer any questions on this. In terms of the projects we're actively using, actively working, we don't do And to projects.

I

Our team, we only did one thing marketing wise in terms of outbound travel. We do have our digital campaigns we're running. We are kicking off a handful of Q3 or at least Q4 for the city marketing activity. An example of that is our team is taking a efficient trip to Germany to meet with some suppliers of our existing employers and a few other companies. In terms of our business retention and expansion efforts, this is where we meet with local companies.

Is you know, we you'll see we've done 24 the last quarter. That's forty three year to date through June. You'll see that we track what assistance we provide during those meetings other than friendship. You'll see workforce connections, data resources continue to be the most common things we provide during those meetings. We conducted a mid course assessment of the five year plan.

You know, we're halfway through on this. Felt like it was a good time to, I know we've talked about this with you prior. Here are kind of the highest level bullet points. This, We didn't want to wear everybody out with a million surveys and a million meetings, but felt midway through a five year plan it was an appropriate time to take a look at some things. To point the of those business retention expansion meetings, we like being able to meet with a lot of companies every year.

We're heading in the direction of 80 or so meetings for the year. One thing that's really important is with our major employers to have really high level visits. You know, we're not gonna take Rush Enterprises for example. We don't want to wear them out every six months with a meeting. But we probably need a good meeting every two or three years.

So we're prioritizing that over the coming months and years. One of the things you'll hear from us. We're currently working, especially with NBU, but From this land use priority is to really just take a hard look at site readiness over the coming year. It's one thing if you don't want to have the power requirements, but what's the timeline? Where are there opportunities in certain parts of the city to do what we're trying to do?

You'll hear from us on that. It will probably be in a bunker for the next six months, then we'll come out with some data. So stay tuned. You're going to hear in the coming months from the early childcare advisory group on some next steps regarding that study. We're going to be focusing on bringing you some I hope fundable opportunities to further support entrepreneurship beyond what we're doing today.

And we've recently mobilized State Highway forty six task force to get that thing advocated for as quickly as possible. I'll point out a couple of points that aren't included on the overhead slides, but are in the data packet at the end of the advisory report that I think are nothing groundbreaking, but some things worth acknowledging. In terms of employment and employment rate, over the course of two years, we've got roughly 3,000 more jobs than we did two years ago. That's more than 10% growth over a two year span. You'll notice our unemployment rate continues to be low, effectively at zero unemployment.

Labor force participation rate. This was something we're very concerned with coming out of the 2020 and 2021 years. We've seen that as of year end 2024 was 68.7%. That's the highest we've seen it in recent memory. We'll see I'm curious to see what that data point looks like this time next year. That's those are all encouraging data points. That is all I have. Happy to answer any questions about our activity, what's happening in the economy, or any other matter.

I had one question. I'm just curious about this mobilization of the 46 task Who all is kind of making up that task force? I assume it's representatives from TxDOT, maybe some local businesses that are on 46 or tell me a little bit about it.

Yeah. That's a good question. So we've got a blend of private sector and public sector leaders on that from both counties and leadership in Seguin. The the point of the effort is to not folksily wait on the text dot gods to fund

Okay.

This project. You know, I've I've been calling it like a fifteen year, $1,500,000,000 project. Just kind of that's how I square it. And we want to make sure, given complexity of how many milestones you have to hit at the text out level at the MPO level, the things cities have to do to get the project in sorry, enabled. So our goal is right charted out what milestones need to get hit next, make sure we're there ready to advocate that they're hit.

So hopefully that looks like a lot of padding on the back that everything is going smoothly, but it may look like getting everybody lined up, all the institutions in the community, business community to write letters, make phone calls, all of those things. It's a good group. Gary Ford is in the audience, has been participating kind of from a technical perspective. And I also think it's just a really good pilot for collaboration between New Braunfels and Seguin.

Excited to hear more about it.

Hope that helped. Thank you all. I

also wanted to note that I'm very excited to see we have so many registered nurses that are posted occupations here in town because we have a lot of opportunity coming up for that. So it's very exciting with Northeast Lakeview. Okay. So moving on to presentation and discussion. A presentation and discussion on the renewal of an annual contract with City of New Braunfels for administrative support, professional services, and asset management.

Good evening. Jeff Jule, economic and community development director for the City of New Braunfels. Tonight's just a discussion. There is no action tonight. But as as you all know, the New Braunfels Economic Development Corporation maintains an annual contract with the city of New Braunfels for administrative support and professional services in support of not only the economic development corporation's businesses, but the broader economic development objectives and community development objectives for the City of New Braunfels.

The contracted amount is proposed as $455,386 This doesn't reflect changes between last year's amount. But, in addition to the administrative professional asset management services through the contract, our staff and ECD who you all interface with the most, we're really just really the tip of the spear at the end of the day. There's really a whole city team behind us that's really administering and advancing projects of the EDC from legal to city manager's office to TCI, our transportation capital improvements And next we'll start And is so the much intensive capital improvement planning, design and construction management that the city is handling on behalf of the EDC. Again, taking those $15,000,000 of approved projects in the last year and taking those through to completion. We would propose adding some detailed language around that.

We would have that in the next action. I'll have that exactly for you all tonight. As well as some additional detail around financial capacity analysis. I think as we're discussing these the ability to analyze and look at the EDC's ability to digest projects as they kind of come up, that requires some additional work on behalf of our finance team. And so we would propose some language around that.

Just want to kind of talk a little bit about kind of what has happened over the last year. One of our kind of contractual obligations is to administer and audit all of the active agreements that you all have. 100% of those were completed in the last year and they represent over 1,300 full time equivalent jobs. All of those companies had been audited. Almost all of them we've discussed with you all about which ones maybe fell short in some fashion, but they do represent about $275,000,000 in real and business personal property.

Another big accomplishment I think from this last year was the receipt by the city of the Controllers' Transparency Award for Economic Development. This required us to provide a lot of information around all of our economic development agreements, not only those with the EDC, but the chapter three eighty agreements that the city has, as well as any other kind of economic development related agreements. And as I mentioned, you all funded and advanced 11 different projects totaling about $15,300,000 When I say that it's not just EDC business, and when we're talking about economic and community development business, I just wanted to kind of point out some things that we are actively involved in advancing. We have downtown centric focuses. Whether it's the mains or the co op project, to parking management in downtown.

As well as upcoming projects like the mill redevelopment. Also, we are advancing kind of in final stages city council, TURS 4 And 5, the ZIP Sports Park, as well as the West End Master Plan. That was an intensive planning process that where we identified the whole host of different improvements and so we're looking to move some of those funding mechanisms into place and we'll be doing that before the end of the year. Right now we're actively administering the Arts and Culture Master Plan, which was an initiative that was identified in our strategic plan. There are ongoing workforce housing initiatives, policy development process improvements, and program development related to those efforts.

Assisting where we can with local business expansions. I appreciate the chamber and their business retention and expansion visits. They get to identify issues and let us know about any opportunities or things that we can improve. Any opportunities to capture for the local businesses to help them expand or any kind of process improvements that we can make here in the city to improve their operations. One thing we don't talk about probably enough is airport activities.

Our Transportation Capital's improvement team, us and ECD, also our airport team of course is working on a host of different projects including the air traffic control design. There's a perimeter fence, security fence now under construction out there, the North Apron that you all have contributed the match to that

with with next

process improvement manual that provides clear instructions, guidance and expectations around airport development because it is a little bit different, but that was a process improvement that we made. As well as they're undertaking and guiding the development of a master drainage plan and finally council a couple weeks ago approved the terminal feasibility study, which will help us identify the next phase of the terminal life and determine the slide. Then, slide. I'll we'll take take any the questions. Slide.

So if we have no questions, thank you Mr. Jewell. Was a great presentation. Thank you for updating And you might also be doing the presentation and discussion on future workshops, any possible strategic planning retreat?

Sure. Well, at our last workshop, we talked about there's a there's a host of ideas. We really have kind of two plans that are really guiding our work. That's the confluence plan of course and the strategic plan. And so what we're proposing to do is have basically just a short dedicated focus planning retreat where we use the lenses of those two plans to build consensus around kind of what the next stage of projects should be and what the next objectives with funding should be.

So we have engaged a consultant to sit down with you all virtually as well as city council members and other stakeholders to identify and get your thoughts about what the future, not only of New Braunfels but what continued economic development looks like in the community. Of course they'll compile that, all those responses will facilitate a day long in person strategic planning retreat with the EDC and then develop a recommendations proposal and a retreat outcomes report. So we would look for you all to be looking forward to that, those interviews getting set up at some point and we hope to wrap it before the end of the calendar year.

Okay, anybody have any questions on that? Thoughts on that? Okay, with that we will move on to executive session. In accordance with the Texas government code section five five one point zero seven one, the board reserves the right to retire into executive session concerning the items listed on this agenda to consult with its attorney. In addition, the board may convene an executive session on any of the following items with any final action being taken in open session. A, deliberate issues regarding economic development negotiations in accordance with section five five one point zero eight seven of the Texas government code. Number one, project shoot. Number two, project I'm never gonna say it right. New. No.

New. No. There we go. Number three, project Nemo. B, deliberate pending contemplated litigation settlement offers and matters matters concerning privileged and unprivileged client information deemed confidential by rule 1.05 of the Texas disciplinary rules of professional conduct in accordance with section five five one point zero seven one of Texas government code, specifically number one IBEX generated. And with that, we will go into executive session at 05:22.