Economic Development Commission - Regular Meeting

I'd like to call the meeting to order at 532. On our agenda, our first item is to welcome our new economic development analyst.

Nice to meet you all. Happy to be here.

And you go by Anthony or Tony?

Anthony.

All right. So we have Anthony. Anthony, as a number of candidates were looked at and Anthony's background stood out, among all the others. That's somebody who's a doer. We've got him off to the races and he's already taken the spreadsheet of commercial properties and you just sent out your update on that a few minutes ago, whatever, an hour ago. But do you have any questions or any information that you need that you can't find in the town hall?

No, currently I think I'm doing all right.

Should we go around and be able to introduce ourselves? That's a great idea.

Start with Madeline. Madeline.

Yep. I'm Lona.

You know me, I'm Joe.

Trenton Ryan.

Cheryl.

It's good to see you again. And you're? Jeff Barton. Yeah, I'm running through here.

Okay. And Wendy Russell.

Nice to meet you. Welcome. Thank you. Welcome. All right, and now we welcome Dale Proop, a Community Resource Management Consultant to the Rivercock for Nonqual Services. I was very pleasantly surprised to learn the depth of economic development knowledge that Dale has. He's going to do a quick presentation on, I guess we'll call this EDC 101.

All right, you told me in three hours. I'm from New York. I bought that. All right. All right. Well, I will try to distribute those. Don't look ahead. Sometimes they do this virtually, sometimes they do it live. And I'm also going to have Joe hand out the full scope. You can have a glance at this while I'm talking through this. And you can keep it for the other members. All right. You know what I mean? And if you want to pass these out, And this, you know, I encourage you to kind of sift through this because it'll make more sense as I talk. Okay. So while Joe's handing those out, so let me explain my name and all. So I'm a consultant working for Rivercott, your council of governors. And I have a, now 42, 43 year career in economic and community development. I probably started on the community development side, the neighborhood development, the affordable housing and that side, did a lot of work with industrial parks early and shifted more over. So I've worked in the private sector for not quite 14 years. Oh, we're about to leave the meeting. Somebody has to talk. There we go. Okay. So I worked in the private sector for a design company. There's a reason why I'm telling you all this if we go through the slides. And I worked with communities all over the state on all kinds of issues, elderly housing, senior centers, economic development, industrial parks, incubators, so on and so forth. Then I was the economic development director for 21 years in Amden. I worked for six mayors. So with that telling you, hopefully they liked our work. And I had a very activist economic development commission in Hamden, a long time chair up until the last, he was there before I was. So he was chair for 25 years. So then after COVID, I retired from Hamden in 2020, and I've been a consultant ever since. So that's sort of the quick moment. During my time in Hamden, I really focused a lot on the sort of the, excuse the sports metaphor, blocking and tackling of economic development business retention, business attraction, and later added business creation. And I'll get into all these things. I also started two development corporations in Hamden when they both still live. So they had an economic development corp in Hamden. We had 5.4% of our land was on commercials. We had to get a little more creative with how we could grow the commercial sector in town. So we got into brownfields and kind of taught myself that. got into the world of permitting and DEP and all of the other cognizant agencies. And that is sort of not dormant, but it's still hanging around for some old projects I had. And then finally I formed the Brownfield Land Bank. So the concept of a land bank is really to basically be a way station for properties that a town or a non-profit or a developer needs to clear up either the contamination old debts or debtors on the property, you know, deeds that are loaded with old mortgages and things like that. So we would take title of the property or control the property, clear everything up and get it ready for its next life. So that's like the 40,000 feet resume. So I was hired by RiverCon to provide the variety of services that are from my experiences. I started early in the year and literally I have the same scope of work, In the Sprague region, which is the New Haven 15-town region, that's kind of winding down. These kinds of services kind of have a length to them. My job is to build capacity in whatever way that you need to build capacity. Every town is a little bit different. So in the Sprague region, probably by the end of this calendar year, I'll be kind of done with that. It has a two- or three-year lifespan. My scope is run with River Cod. It's supposed to run until the end of December, but we've been talking about going into next summer. Because some towns are just coming online, like you. I was just in Cromwell for the first time today. And other towns have really gotten into it. Essex, Portland, and some of the other ones. Westbrook, I was a little surprised there. Clinton, I've been working in Clinton for a while. And now you are coming online with some of the other ones. So really, I try to adapt to what the community needs. And in talking to Joe, we had a very extensive conversation about all the kinds of things. I use a lot of case examples while I'm talking through these slides. So my job is not to tell you what I think you should do, but I don't know the town well enough to know that. And even if I did, that's not my job. My job is to sort of like build capacity. And one of the most common areas where towns have used my services are working with the local EDC. EDCs by nature are, you know, there's a lot of turnover in EDCs. You may have had longstanding, you know, folks on it. But as soon as I saw Trent got sworn in, I said, I got to get a hold of them and start working with the whole line. And so in some cases, like Clinton, the chair left after 15 years of being the chair. And then they were in chaos. Nobody wanted to be the chair. We tried a revolving chair. That didn't work out too well. And now they finally found the chair and they're really settling down. So what happens is there needs to be some sort of North star, some sort of plan to go forward. I know you guys read through it. I'm going to get to that. Right. So talking to Joe, I offered the opportunity to do my full one-on-one to really to pique your interest, to get a reaction. see what you're interested in. Some things will not really be relevant to you, but other things you may not know they're relevant yet until we talk about it. So let's go through the slides. I will try to make it as entertaining as possible as slides can be, and then we'll talk about the full scope, which I encourage you to kind of drift into that a little bit. And I kind of will, when I get to that, I will kind of talk through my thoughts on your strategies. We'll go through it and make notes, and we'll you know, have some ideas. I think it's an excellent start, I would say. It's way more than most commitments have. So I do have some thoughts about it. So let's go through the roles and responsibilities of the EDC. And again, this is just for you to maybe think a little bit more about your own role and talk a little bit about more things you're interested in. So basically, this is the title. I even got your logo on it. Second slide is really the definition of economic development. You know, all politics is local. They say all economic development is local. It's not for anyone to say what economic development means in a line. I just want to show you a couple of examples. When you have a committee of a thousand people, you're going to get a really long definition like the first one. This is from the IEDC, which is the International Economic Development Trade Organization, from which other trade organizations, there's the Connecticut Economic Development Association, where I met Trent 25 years ago. And that's their definition. Of course, they've got to get in all the appropriate and politically correct words. The second definition I stole from a guy in Tennessee I saw on LinkedIn. I said, you really need to have a more simple definition of economic development when the people can connect it. And I looked at many, many definitions, and this is one I like. you know, process of improving the standard of living in a community by creating jobs and attracting investors. Can't get any more basic than that. I also like to use, I use a lot of terminology like building wealth. There's nothing wrong with building wealth in the community. It's okay for people today, in today's day and age, you know, to say that, but I think it's a really good thing to build wealth in any community. Next slide. Again, this is really a team sport. A lot of commissions feel like, oh, they're by themselves. What's our job? What's our responsibility? What authority do we have? Your advisory, for the most part. Towns are different, whereas how the chief elected officials are, you have a board of selectors here versus the town council, right? But the team really is, you come together with your strategy, which becomes kind of like your North Star, what you always can depend on is your world. But all these folks and all these players are part of the economic development strategy. Obviously, you're elected officials, but it is your job to work with them because most elected officials are focused on one thing only, your grant list and your mill rate, keeping taxes stable. All very important, but there are many other things that are important as well. And so you want to keep them involved with what you're doing. of different boards and commissions. I see you definitely in your plan talk about the engagement of your Planning and Zoning Commission. Very good. One group I work with was shocked to hear that the chair of the EDC is supposed to actually talk to the chair of the Planning and Zoning Commission periodically. Did I actually have to talk to them? There's usually a little bit of a problem there. And the answer is, yeah, of course you have to talk to the EDC. The business community, the citizens, to inform citizens of what you're doing after they, do you have a town meeting vote on the town budget or a board of selectmen? So when you want money to start doing things, if they know that you're doing work, actually doing something, instead of getting $1,800 print flyers, maybe you get $18,000 to do something a little bit. And it's good to see that Anthony's here. So there's some level of commitment to economic development. So informing your citizens, In some way, it's important. Schools and universities, some of this is geographic. You have probably trade schools somewhat close here. You have New London. That may or may not be a bigger player here. Chambers of commerce. No, you have a lime, old lime chamber, or the joint chamber. It's actually a Greater Old Saver program member. Okay, Greater Old Saver. And they have a relatively new executive director. Chambers are really in flux these days. And I'm a huge fan of small chambers. Big chambers, macro chambers make money all different ways, but small chambers always struggle. And there's a lot going on with chambers in the river. Then your other advocates, the people involved with housing. In the past, the housing people were the housing people over there. Now they're really part of workforce development and other things that are important. Service providers, developers, and then government employees. I'll talk about the interior customer kind of approach Next slide. So these are the kind of like pillars of economic development. Most things in economic development on a commission level kind of run through these pillars, particularly business retention and expansion, attraction and recruitment. Most people think of economic development as attraction only, but it's a failed real approach to really just think about only attraction. Most towns are hamstrung on how much they can really develop beyond where they are. Most economic developers will tell you, and you'll find out depending on how your role develops, 80% of your day is dealing with existing businesses, existing problems. Having a focus on business retention, we have slides for each of these coming up. It's really a critical thing to focus on. yes you want to attract businesses and you have a beautiful town okay um what's your mill rate i'm guessing it's low 16 16 oh my god they're not even in the 20s no 16.86 is the last i heard that any more specific 15.86 yeah wow that's low so you know so that you know these are things that are important for attraction obviously business creation you know i don't know um How many home-based businesses do you have in town? But I bet you have more than you know. That's probably true. That's probably very true. You know, especially since COVID, I found that I've done a lot of research for towns and it usually had double or triple what they thought they had. Most towns have zoning regulations. I have a home-based business. I have an office in my house and I had to learn what the zoning says working for the town. So I didn't want to mess that up. But you probably have them. That's the business creation side. Young people, next generation of business owners, keeping them close, keeping them here versus going somewhere else and opening a business. That's business creation and there's certain things you can do there. And then clusters, I'm going to talk about clusters in the context of business retention, which is a lot about what Trill and I were talking about. Next slide. There's so many different responsibilities that you could have with the town will was that having strategic plan, you have a strategic plan, having a work plan that kind of goes along with that, which we'll talk about later. Promoting what you do to the citizens, not just within the room here until you're board selecting, you go for budget every year. Identifying areas, that's your POCD usually, which now you are, done with your POCD in the middle? Where are you with your last POCD? You're going to add up 2030.

We're in the middle of it right now.

So you're in the middle of implementing it, basically?

No, it's been a 10-year POCD, and so we're in year six of it.

Yeah, so you're in the middle of it going ahead. So 2030 comes up again. Yeah. Okay. And when the POCD comes up again, the commission should be weighing in and One of the services under my scope that I have provided over the last couple of years, because I'm working in both two regions, is helping the commission comment on the POTD, the economic development section of the POTD. Because in one particular town, the planner consultant did a fine job. I didn't really have much to say. And another one, not the case, I really, really wanted the commission to focus on that section and definitely Get involved. You know, initiate zoning things that you need. Now you have your POCD in the middle of it, presumably when it was approved in 2020. You had some changes to your zoning regulations if you needed them. So if you were to have a POCD process, usually what follows is a tool to implement it, which is your zoning regs. And again, the commission hears from businesses if you're engaging them. what they need to do. You know, they're mad about side yard requirements, front yard or pipe requirements, which are hard for them to come. Signage is a big one, a huge one, which I always focus on when I comment on that. Signage regulations is one of the most notorious areas that are, they get old fast based on the current economy. Reviewing other people's commissions. And then of course, your strategy has to be based on market realities. That's not so much, the problem here, but it is in many towns where they might have had a stock and shop leave, and now they want whole foods. That's not market reality in many towns based on the income of the community. So you don't, I don't think you have that problem. By the way, I did a little tour of your town before. I did some, I did a similar presentation in Southbury about two years ago. That shopping center, the main shopping area, It looks remarkably like the same exact one in software. I don't know if it's the same developer. It looks almost like, am I in software? I didn't know where I was. Okay, next slide with the little circles on it. Again, I really looked at this from my time in the private sector. This is very customer-oriented, economic development is customer-oriented. You have your external customers, which are your developers, your business owners, your real estate people, And you also have your interior customers, which are the people in your town hall, your finance committee, if you have one, your board of selectmen. These are your interior customers that you have to think about addressing things with. Political people, people outside, like your delegation, your state senators, and even federal, you have Joe Courtney here, right? He's a federal congressman. I had regular dialogue with, the delegation at the state, federal level, not so much like somebody like Joe, but I would have had his number two on the speed dial if I needed some help. Next slide. The program itself, again, you're doing some of this, but having some attention to not just marketing like a website, because websites are dangerous because they get stale very fast. You really have to unpack that and be on that if you want to have up to date with I think websites for municipalities and EDC should be static. They should not be dynamic because unless you really have an IT person that's going to constantly upgrade it, you want to have data on it. You want to have directions on it. You want to have the 10 biggest taxpayers. You want to have those things. But now with social media, that's the dynamic part, of course. So I encourage people not to get too crazy with their websites on economics. Maybe you have one that's unique for your commissioners. but it's dangerous and expensive to really have a website, but the social media part and the storytelling part is what you're getting. So I'll tell you a story. Guilford, not terribly different in some ways than areas of old mine. They called me up once and said they had a hydroponic lettuce growing operation, which is a unique business in Israeli owned company. And they grow lettuce with no pesticides at all. So you see their stuff in Big Y. I think it's called H2O. And their lettuce lasts like two weeks, by the way. It's delicious. It's not cheap, but it's really good. And they wanted to apply for a grant to the Department of Agriculture, and they wanted my help in helping them with the grant. Now, I'm not here to write grants for the town. That would be the 17-town River Cod would be like a nightmare for me. But my job is to basically advise and create, explain the opportunities and I will peer review the grants that's in the scope. And so they said, okay, can you find out about this grant and report back to the company? I did. And basically it wasn't super complicated, but there was, you know, it was technology. It was a lot of jargony stuff. I had to work. So they had somebody to put it together. I just created a folder for them, you know, in their system to put data in. And when they got the grant in, I peer reviewed it. I changed a few things. It was like five hours of my time, something like that. And went in. I think I showed the story, right? And so about two months later, I'm having lunch with the first selectman, which I do catch up with the elected officials in almost every town. And I said, but what happened to that grant? Oh, we got it. Excellent. Excellent. There's a 50,000, and it would basically, it's like a sun filtering technology for the lettuce. Where they grew it was like two football fields long. And so they're super happy, and I said, that's fantastic. Did you tell anybody that you got the grant? No. They thought this was the end of the story. But that's not the end of the story. So how you tell, the community of what you're doing, your successes, whatever, if you have a story like that. Tell the story. Somebody's got to tell the story. I think Anthony's going to be telling the story somehow. But somebody's got to tell the rest of the businesses in town, you did this for a small business. They only had like 12 employees. But that's my whole point about using social media now. Of course, in the old days, you would have update your website and somebody will be pressured to do that. It just takes two minutes. So I ended up writing a two-paragraph press release for them. It took me 10 minutes to do. And now all these businesses know what they're doing. Okay, so having all these folks, I won't go into every single one. These are the components of what a good program will be. A business visitation program, I'm going to circle back to that very much so. Heritage tourism, ecotourism. I know I'm talking about the trails. are important in many of the towns in Rivertown, particularly Haddon, East Haddon. I recently visited East Haddon a couple weeks ago. And man, do they have some great ideas for ecotourism. Bring people into town to go on their trails. They have lots of hiking trails, such as Chilliad Castle, and the whole area in general. The ecotourism part, your trails, walking trails, biking trails, are your ecotourism program. How you make that into a thing is something I can tell you. The ins and outs of building it and funding it, maybe the funding part we can talk about, but the actual selling that to the outside community is something I would help you with. That's part of your economy, bringing people in, going on the trail, about for lunch, shop, you know, whatever they do. I would be remiss if I didn't mention workforce as an important part of your program. Workforce, whether you visit a business, or you hear from your neighbors, or you worry that your kids are going to go live somewhere else and work somewhere else, it's got to be part of your strategies one way or the other. And I will get to that. And then that, of course, triggers conversations about housing and things like that. Next slide. And really what I want to do, I'll stop in a few minutes and see if you have any comments on this, but this is really just to get you started about how you see your own plan versus the integration of some of this stuff. When you dig into it, you don't have a tax incentive program, do you? Or do you? So TALs are like, it's controversial. I mean, the TALs don't want anything to do with giving away tax money, especially with a $16 million. But some towns have no choice. And some towns want to do some sort of incentive program. And basically, it should be based on capital investment. So basically, how empowered, if you had an incentive program, what would be the role of the EDC? When I was in Hamden, the first mayor I worked for, I loved her. She insisted. that the commission have a vote on every single tax application. And that vote was part of the ordinance that empowered the town to have that. And on her committee was the tax assessor and the tax collector. How happy do you think they would be having to vote on giving up money that they normally would claim in their budget, right? So, but you know what? She was a good leader and she really sold the idea of everybody part of this team to grow the economy. This is we're talking like 1999 to 20. And ever since then, the EDC had votes and the council saw the tax center. They wanted to see the ministry of the conversation that you all have. And it really kind of took the heat off of them politically. So that's what I mean about legislative authority. And, you know, it was a little controversial, but I thought it worked beautiful, really a good way of doing it. But, you know, now, you're not going to probably want to do that. But I work in another town who said we don't want to do tax incentives. So I listened more about what their needs were. What they were saying was, I'm assuming you're all septic in all the towns. The exception of the beach areas that are starting to put in sewer. Right, but most towns aren't even going to say the S word. They get nervous about the S word, which I have found that they twist themselves into pretzels to try to find ways of saying, essentially, they're putting in a sewer without calling it a sewer.

Old Lyme had a vote, the majority of the townspeople voted against the sewer project, but the state coerced us.

And it's not unusual. So, but in one town, they have a commercial area that has a lot of vacancy in this region. And I said, well, why is there so much vacancy? These are nice looking buildings. I did a little tour. I always do a little tour of the town. And they were like old banks that went out. Maybe there was a merger, you know, nice commercial 7,000 square foot building. They said our big problem is when the new owner, maybe, I don't know, this is a therapy place, wanted to go in. when they realized that they had to replace the whole septic system, which could be 20 to 40 grand, nobody wanted to take that building. The building was fine, it was the septic system, and nobody wants to put their valuable money into a septic system. So I said, well, think about tax incentives more to your need, not to what the business community wants. So if they could offer a tax incentive for putting in a septic system, that might be the catalyst to turning over more of these properties. So I just try to get them to think about, instead of not just giving away money, but to fit the need of the community. And I don't know if they're gonna do it, but this was my approach. Okay. Again, I keep mentioning educating the public. This is what your role is. DDT and P&G have a relationship. You know that's important. Next slide. Next slide is a little more esoteric. And just to get people, because I find on EDCs in particular, there's some disagreement on the kind of approach. I worked on a product in Bethlehem, New Hampshire about two years ago, and they had this site where a hotel had burned down in the 70s. And they were, they had a brownfield grant, and they hired us to help do some public facilitation. And they were telling me about how one of these dollar stores, called Dollar General, sort of a dollar store, wanted this, it was the site in the center of town. It was, you know, and they were like, no way do we want a Dollar General to have the only major development site right across from town hall. This is a town of like 3,600 people. What's the population here? 475, 575. That's non-seasonal? No, seasonal doubles. Yeah, right. Like 14,000 and 30,000 in the summer. So they had a big debate about that. And they, they said they'd rather not have anything there than a dollar general. And they were right. You don't, you want to, and the dollar general just went down the street. It worked out. So there's always this discussion about, are we doing this for developers or are we doing it for the community? So the transactional side is, you know, some people permit, we pay a fee. That's a transaction. Somebody buys property. That's a transaction. There's not much community input involved in this. Even the zoning regulations, there's a transaction. If somebody meets the requirements, It's a transaction. They get a zoning permit. They get a building permit. There's some sort of fiscal impact. Maybe there's incentives to offer something. I don't know what. Maybe they need a piece of common property to make it work. The transformational side involves the community. Do we really want this? Zoning regulations sometimes preclude sort of the community side of it. But there should be a conversation about what's good for the community in the process or in your POCB. would really involve what the community wants to see as a lifestyle or a way of living in O-line. And as you can see, there's all kinds of ways of thinking about the transformational side. Benefit agreements kind of took it way to the other extreme. I'm not a fan of benefit agreements. What benefit agreements are, instead of tax agreements, it's a reverse. If somebody wants to come to town and build something, whether they want an abatement or they want a piece of town property or easement or any benefit from the town approval, some towns have adopted, more urban areas have adopted benefit agreements. You could have it if you hire local people to work on the job. That's in essence it. Or you do something else. I think that drives away investment. developers are operating usually on pretty thin margins. And so, but sometimes they have adopted it to the extreme. So that's the extreme of transformation. The right answer is it's always somewhere in the middle. You need to have transactions to keep your mill rate going and maintain it and maintain jobs and so forth, create investment. The one area that I believe that has come full circle from transactional to transformational is workforce development. And this is a little bit of what we talked about. In the old days of workforce development, there were government programs, and you certainly know all about this. You would give a business or a developer a grant to create jobs. If we give you $5,000, like an enterprise or $3,000, whatever it was, you got to create one full-time equivalent job. It could be two part-time. And there's some sustainability requirements. They have to be there for a year. But that was it. The business will get a grant. And that normally wouldn't be the reason the business would do the development. But, hey, thank you very much. I'll create the job. No problem. But you would lose complete control over usually what that job was. Sometimes there was some follow-through funding source. The transformational way of thinking about it, and this is one of the things I'll talk about, is really how to look at your local cluster, your local economy. Obviously, you know, ecotourism, manufacturing, probably, maybe healthcare. I have to learn a little bit more about your town. But basically, got to stay on that, don't you? Is, you know, you want to build those clusters that are already successful. We call that asset-based economic development. Things are already assets in the town. But the workforce is building collaborations between the education system and those industries, not giving away money to those industries, but helping them collaborate with those who create the skills to help them. So a great example, Clinton has some really good things going on. They have, from Morgan High School, they have a machining engineering program in their high school. and they teach kids about CNC machines, and they do all kinds of things like that. In Hampton, they have a STEM program through the high school. And what the economic developer and commission can do is basically create the linkage between the industries that are there and those opportunities for training. Another example in Clinton is they have problems with restaurants. Everybody wants more restaurants in downtown Clinton. And the restaurants don't want any more restaurants that are there because they can't find help as it is. They can't find waiters. They can't find virtually dishwashers. Some restaurants are only open certain days of the week because of this workforce problem. What does Morgan High School have? They have a culinary program. So the focus of workforce doesn't have to be give a restaurant a grant for creating a job. Thank you for creating the job. But the real focus should be how the town and or the EDC works with Morgan to make that marriage between. So on that note, one of the things I talked to Joe about when I sent them samples, and I could send the whole group samples, is when I was in Hamden, I created something called Everyone Gets a Job. And I taped every single one of these. I took the industries that were important to Hamden. I brought in industry people, not academic people, and had them sit on a panel and talk to parents. I talked to the Board of Ed because I didn't want to offend them, but I definitely had a core group of parents that came to almost every single one. I had eight of them. That's a lot of work. If I had to do it over, I would do it probably a little differently. But I videotaped every single one. So I had one on the trades. I had one on STEM, because STEM is big in the New Haven region because of biotech. I had one on workforce development. I had the usual one on manufacturing. And I had one on the trades. I had, you know, I had real plumbers there. You know, I had one in health care. I had the chief radiologist teacher person at Yale Haven Hospital talk about how you build your career in those areas, whether you want to be an RN or radiology. I told them all, tell them how much money their kid can make if they go into any one of these fields. Because, you know, this decision of going to college isn't always the best decision for every single kid. I have One of each. I had one that was brilliant, did great in college. I had one that I can't tell you how much money I spent on the four different attempts that I'm going to college. He ended up being an entrepreneur. I should have realized earlier on, but he's doing well as an entrepreneur. But every kid has a different path. So everyone gets a job thing. Everyone should have a good paying job. And I did all these panels. I sent, I think, two, right? I gave you two examples. Would you like me to send it? Yes. I'll send it.

You've got everybody's address.

Yeah, yeah. I'm going to send it to all of you. You can see samples. That's transformational thinking about workforce as part of your, perhaps part of your focus. But it's not the belaying. Next slide. I'll try to go through this slide a little faster. You know, again, these are all questions about transformational thinking. You know, that's that slide. You can go to the next. So the next three slides, the first goal of business retention and expansion. I'm gonna land on these three, next three slides for a couple of minutes. So again, as somebody who's done it at the municipal level, and it is really a paradox almost of its economy. You have wealth in the north part of town and extreme poverty in the south part of town. You have institutions all around Quinnipiac, Yale, Southern, Albertus, Magnus, Gateway Community College, all within very drivable distances. So really, my intention was to focus on retaining the businesses that we have. I knew that we're not going to become a mega, you know, 128 corridor like in Boston or, you know, some research triangle down in North Carolina. We are what we are. And we are an inner ring suburb. You're a different kind of suburb. But I knew that 8,000 people a day left Canada to go to work in New Haven. I didn't know that. But having the businesses that are there, focusing on them, we had no land. So that to me was the most important thing that I could do. And everybody I talked to in the field focuses on retention, job one. So how do you do that? You know, you've definitely achieved number one, keeping your mill rate low and steady. No problem there. I have nothing to offer on that one. Tell the citizens about what you're doing, because they all scream for new businesses. At the same time, they scream, we don't want any development near our house.

Usually, obviously, that doesn't happen. How do you storytelling around that?

Yeah, well, I do it by being out there and talking to them and basically calling it what it is, like, I, if you don't know the areas it's kind of hard to explain the story, but I would go and say, you know, I would talk about the data about people going, you know, you are not going to get Whole Foods on a site in a poor neighborhood because Whole Foods wants a demographic, certain demographic. I would just tell the truth about the data about the town. I wouldn't like avoid it. I would say, What do you think about expanding the sewers in the north part of town if you're in the south?

Great idea. So did you use sources like Esri to storytell around the profile of the town?

Exactly, and CoStar. I used CoStar. So when stop, it prompts a good conversation. So Stock and Shop leaves, Stock and Shop has two locations, has two locations, one in the southern part of town in our lowest income area, one sort of where I live in the middle of town. And the lowest, the lower one leaves. And everybody wants a new grocery store. We want Whole Foods, but not coming here. Big Y is not coming here. Kroger's is barely in the East Coast. We're a little bit close. And I educate them on the cutthroat nature of the grocery business. I have speakers at public forums talk about real estate broker. But what I really did was I used Postar put a pin on a map and do a concentric circle of one mile, three miles, how many grocery opportunities were already in the marketplace. So they can see that it's already flooded with groceries. And that's why Stop and Shop was lost business because every single, you know, we had bodegas, we had Walgreens, CVS, all selling food with a few exceptions. And they stole from Stop and Shop's market. And I basically thought, was everybody believing me? Of course not. They still were like, you should still bring us the growth. So I had some food trucks to help people. So I just tried to use data and use common sense. And a lot of people did get it. And in Southern Hampton, where the poverty was, I would talk about building family wealth. And I would shift the subject. That's what I did sooner.

So if you ever use like that, imagine they have a leakage tool where people from the community spend money otherwise. So, you know, we spend money outside of a normal tax. So that leakage tells where the opportunities are for existing business. It's like it's still in the bucket, right?

Pardon me?

It's like it's still in the bucket. Yeah. I mean, I use every persuasive argument based on data. Yeah, because that's where it has all that data to, you know...

And every time I present data that was convincing, I still had 40% of the people said bad words to me and said, you know, I don't believe you. So I ended up in that stop and shop space, bringing in a big workforce development operation, you know, and I sold that by telling the story about how it's more important to build enough wealth in this community to raise median family income to attract a better growth stream. And I sold more people on that, but you're never going to please everyone. Okay, so basically, all of these things are important for businesses that are already here. If you go and do a visit and try to extract whether they have plans to expand, which is something you really want to know about. Let's say you have a small manufacturer or construction company, and they are thinking of expanding. And they'll say, Gerald, we love it here. They'll rate 16. Our families from here, we don't want to leave Old Lyme. We really needed a bigger place, a third bigger. We want to stay here. We would not think about leaving. Well, they're lying to you. They're probably looking at real estate all around the region, any kind of business, smart business people. They're going to look and see where they can get a building. Maybe they find something in Niantic or somewhere else. And so you want to really get out there and find out what's going on with them and really focus on their industry a little bit. I'm going to talk a little bit about clusters more in a minute. So to really have a good retention program, you need to have a business visitation program. To do that, to start that, the data actually is really important. You need to understand how many manufacturers you have. It sounds like, Anthony, you have the beginnings of that where you have the data. You need to understand what the market, how much people spend in your community on certain things. Healthcare. I mean, I'm 70 years old and I have like 12 doctors. And I'm not good. I'm pretty healthy, but I have all those doctors.

So healthcare is the market. And as you read, it shows you where they're spending money. So the national average on Healthcare is 100. It'll show an online, they're 120, which means, you know, they're 120. Okay. Surfboards, 70. So that's an example. So it shows this, as it will show you the different spend, helps tell a story, tell where the gaps are.

And this is the kind of thing that, putting everything on Anthony here. How many hours a week do you work by the way? Eight hours a week. How many? Eight. Eight? Yeah. Well, some of the data should be shared with you to come up with a strategy to where you're going to go visit. Some of them are obvious. You have manufacturers, you definitely go visit them. And when you hear problems, you definitely go visit them. But when you go visit, you don't go, hey, Joe, what do you do here? That's a waste of their time. You want to basically go in there as knowledgeable as you can about their industry, if it's a manufacturing, if they're an extruder, some sort of plastic extruder, who knows what. And a lot of towns don't think they have a manufacturing sector. I see you mentioned that in your plan. So you know a little bit about what you have. But I was in, actually, I'll pick on Essex. I was in Essex and they said, well, we don't really have a manufacturing sector. I said, are you kidding me? I went in, they have two industrial parks. Like, what are you talking about? I mean, for Selectman owns like 40% of the building, but that's another source. Yeah. Sorry out there. But the fact is they have a big, In fact, they didn't even know about. I said, well, go make some visits. So you use the data to find out where you are and you plan some visits. And you do them. I have some guide tools on how to do a visit. So if there's something you want to do, and you probably should do, I will share those with you sort of like next level. You go to a company, bigger company, more technically natured where it has a lot of people. I have one guy for that, and I have one for doing a mom and pop.

So should Anthony pull the top taxpayers and some high-dollar coverage?

Absolutely. That's usually the easiest way to start. And when you go there, you're going to hear, you know, there's certain, you know, you don't just go and ask 25 questions. There's 25 things you might want to know. You should probably, you know, learn a little bit more about them. You probably know some of this. And then you go in there and sometimes you get a tour. If it's a manufacturer, you always get a tour because they love showing you. But they do, they're proud of it. And so going, doing a visit, you want to find out what their future plans are, what their problems are, obviously. They're not going to complain about taxes here, but they're going to complain about other things. And then you find out about things you would never know about unless you visited them. Case in point, Brantford. So they were starting to do their visits. And I said, let me just come to the first couple with you and see how it goes. And now they've been doing them on their own. I just kind of started, really. So they went and visited one of the most successful businesses. They picked a low-hanging fruit. So they picked a company that makes these giant Jersey Bears with steel-reinforced stuff in the middle. I mean, we're talking big stuff. And they had a place in Brantford, very successful company. Everything you see on the highway, they make it pretty much throughout. And so we went there. And, you know, it's a typical thing. We can't find enough engineers. You know, so we were resourceful to them. But then they got into two, like, what I would call pothole things. They had a real big problem with space on their land. They had probably four or five acres, but they needed more. And right next door was a few acres of land in a building where they never saw anybody going in and out. They said, we would love to buy that land, but every time we approached them, every time we approached them, they'd say, get lost, get out of here. And so I researched the land next to them and it happened to be in the next town in North Brantford, actually. So I called the planner in North Brantford and got the actual contact information and the parties, they're still talking actually, but they're hopefully gonna make a deal. The second thing they told me was their cranes had a lot of trouble with moving and they were saying, we would never leave Brantford. I don't believe the thing, the word, anybody ever says they have these cranes that lift up the we're talking like 50 feet long things and they couldn't turn because of the wire at ui what ui wires were sort of at the entrance of where they like to do it so we got a hold of ui not the easiest you know i had very this way of utilities in your sort of wheelhouse i had no problem getting through but i getting them to make a decision. They wanted to underground about 200 nanometer feet of wires. Now, you have Eversource here, right? And they agreed if the company paid for it. The UI wasn't there to pay for it. That's 700% of fair value. Yeah. So the company paid for it, and they got it done. So that's what I mean about visits. You're going to find out things you never would know unless you went there. The only thing I would encourage you, so you need the data to start. What are you going to do? Are you going to store a software package or just? Whatever you have the capacity to do. I mean, I'm not a big fan of over-softwaring data. You can keep it on a simple list in Excel spreadsheet. But I would say that what happens with EDCs is they get excited about doing business and they over-plan. So if you're going to do it, don't do more than one a month. You know, I had one selectman recently say, I want to do five. This is great. I want to do five of these a month. I said, you're not going to do five a month because once you go, you're just creating three hours of work or more for each visit that you make to follow up. If you don't follow up after the visit, you shouldn't have visited in the first place. You know what I mean? So you make the decision on who you visit. And I have the guides for it. It's not rocket science, but it is something that, But be, don't be overly ambitious about it. Just be sensible about what's, if somebody, if you didn't hear about a problem in town, obviously you want to go there. Your biggest taxpayers, you start with exactly right. That's what Slinton is doing, starting with the biggest taxpayers. And then when you go to the low-hanging fruit, this is where I am right now in North Haven. They've been doing all the easy ones. I'm like, now you got to go somewhere where you don't really know them now. First, open the door. say but they'll always open the door for the mayor or select them and now go someplace where you don't know them that well and then you really start but you have to start somewhere you know so this is the most important thing in business retention you're going to hear about workforce every single visit no doubt about it so having some chops some kind of idea of what the resources are before you go in, start doing this is probably a very good idea. So what's the ideal team?

I heard you say per select person. Who's like the ideal?

Very, very good question. So you never go with more than three people. You're definitely going to, you know, this is a small business. Well, three is good. I mean, you always, in the beginning, you want to offer your first selection the chance to go, because there are people at least one member or two members of this group. I would go with you maybe one time or two times just to get a feel for everything. But that's not even necessary. But I would go at least the first time. So three max, maybe four the first time. They pick something easy the first time, and I would go for that one. To answer your question, three. After a couple visits, your first let-in will probably will say, you guys do this. And then there's follow-up. I make notes that very day that I do the visit or the next day, because my brain won't remember. And then somebody's going to be following up. Who is that? I think it's a young man who's already left. That eight hours should have maybe a one in front of it. Yeah. But you know what happens is, this is what I'm saying. If you're telling your Boris Lachman, do you have finance support too? Or are they the finance? If you're telling these groups what you're doing, we visited six companies in the last six months, and this is what we found. And that budget of 1,800 bucks for bagels and coffee that you gave us last year, well, we really need $10,000. So to pay Anthony, a real resource, on, you know, following up. You know, somebody needed to call Eversource, somebody needed to call DOT, because they might be in a DOT right away, the problem. You know, those things are not short endeavors. You try to get a hold of your district DOT person, not always easy. Or you call your congressman to get help, you get a camp track, somebody. Not an easy thing, always. But these are all, you can see, I'm not going to go through every bullet, but basically, you get the idea that retention is about all of these things and helping them, really helping them, not just cutting, you know, going to get rid of and cutting their new product or whatever.

Closer. I have an idea on that, about the business visits for Anthony's Fund. Sometimes there's an issue in town, and in particular, it was the railroad train bridge was being, starting, it would be renovated and rebuilt over the course of seven years. So when that was getting started, we talked to the businesses down close to that bridge to make sure that they were in the loop of what the timing was and the river would be closed and how to get on the mailing list. So sometimes you can take an issue I know Exit 71 will be closing at some point for that restructuring. We want to talk to those businesses around that to make sure that they're well-informed. So you can take issues like that as a way to step in and give them something.

And keep giving them updates. Like if you know the whole 691-91 project around Meriden, it's wild. But the city's done a great job in communicating They do it through a little bit through website dynamics you can create, but yes, that's exactly right. Everything related to the time is all about retention because that's what they want you to do. They're paying taxes and this is the service that you're providing. All right, let's move on. All these things are creating value for their patents, basically. Next slide. On the attraction side, I don't know how much developable land you have or buildings that are available. My guess is not a lot. But if you want to attract investment in many communities, there's certain things that you, it's a different orientation when you think about that. Certainly your mill rate is important. But most businesses won't come to your town only because of your mill rate. That'll be a factor. But they want to know if you have housing for their employees. I don't know, they could live somewhere else. They don't have to live in a lot. If you want people to buy houses, and those people are young people, and those people are your future taxpayers, your future leaders, so there's sort of a civic infrastructure that you're building, having some sort of strategy on housing, which I know people get scared of. However, there's a housing bill that sort of requires you to at least think about housing, and so I'm not. And I don't know who's responsible in the whole line for that. But having a strategy that makes sense, workforce housing, which is code word for not quite affordable, but for your teachers and firefighters, police officers, that they can't quite afford to live in. My son pays $3,600 a month for a two bedroom apartment. I'm like, wow, that's a lot different than my $400 two bedroom in 1979. But that's the way it is. Having demographics on your website, the static, but something that's up to date. So people looking at your town that you don't even know about are looking at your town. They're looking at your website. Are they looking at a line? You know, you may not have such an appetite for big development, but if you do, these are the things that you would want. Having a good reputation for timely permitting.

You know, Hamden, everybody's like, oh, the process is too long. If you have to get a special permit, it took me seven weeks.

I'm like, that's not bad. What are you talking about? But communicating where you are compared to other towns is important. Do you have a full-time town planner? Yes. Do you have a CEO? Do you have an enforcement officer? Who reviews site plans? The CEO. The building department. Okay. Okay. You have an inventory available, vacancies and things like that. That's the kind of thing you're working on? I'd like to see that, by the way.

a working database.

Sure. You know, showing people where things are that might be looking at your talent. That's usually where you're talking about having a good static site. People think that their website has to be really dynamic, but that's, you know, that's really a slippery slope. You got to be careful with that. All right. Next one. Almost done. Almost done. That's what I told you. It was, it was our position. Oh, you did it. We're good. The last one, people always talk about the VRE business potential expansion and attraction. I've added creation in my presentation because I think that, you know, between home-based businesses and younger entrepreneurs, you should think about the future, just like you're being able to be talks about the future of what a town is going to look like and feel like. the next 10 years. You want to have an idea of who's going to be taking over, who's going to be, I always say today's high school students are the taxpayers 10 years from now. So there's many ways to think about business creation. Do you have some sort of an appetite for co-work space or business incubation? I have a lot of experience doing those. I know the pitfalls. Sometimes it's a good idea, sometimes it's not. A business incubation is a program. It's not a place. So usually it's in a place, obviously. So business incubators are shared space where small businesses who can't afford a whole retail or a whole production area, maybe they make t-shirts or whatever. I'm visiting one tomorrow night in Middletown. The town owns this massive old building that turned into a fantastic business incubator. They have common programs. It's a weird location near the railroad track. I don't know if you're familiar with this. I have the address on my phone. They're having an open house. It's a big old building that they're going to probably put back on the market at some point. But they do lots of... What end of town, Don?

I'll get you the... Is it next to the highway there when you get off the exit by downtown?

All I know is it's a funky spot near the landfill, near the dump. It's a weird location. But it's a thriving place. I'm really surprised. Why don't you build old buildings in there? They're all buildings strung together. You go over a funky little railroad track. Don't go there at night. Well, there are people there that work there. They have 24-hour operations. Then they have parts of the building that need to be rehabbed. But anyway, business incubation program, whether it's co-work space. I know some towns have co-work space. You're talking about shared office space and That's a way of dealing with creation, creating that opportunity. If somebody, sometimes that's done in the private sector or public sector. But a lot of these things in isolation are not good business models. Full workspace should be part of a program, but not by itself, because it's a big thing. Makerspace, you know, it used to be wood shop, metal shop, experimental, that turned into 3D printing, which everybody knows about. And even that, you know, stuff breaks. If you have invested in that kind of technology for young entrepreneurs, if you give them an opportunity to think and you create, and the thing breaks and you need $19,000 for a new one, where's that money come from? So, you know, all these things should be part of a strategy, not just a one-off thinking, but these are ways to create businesses. And now, Technology transfer has sort of been put into the bucket of makerspace.

I think we're the last ones in the building.

So these are all ways of dealing with business creation. The last thing I'll mention is entrepreneur type training. I am going to talk a little bit about that when we get to my scope because I've created some programs at the local level for startup businesses. something you could sponsor as an EDC. That's the business creation part. And kind of to wrap this part of tonight up, you know, there's some structural things that all towns should really be thinking about having available. You may not necessarily be in charge of it, but you certainly should be advocating for it. Having a plan for housing. I know housing can be controversial. You have your own school, what, high school? We have a regional. It's us and Lyme. Okay. Lyme, Lyme, Lyme. You know, most middle schools and most high schools are underutilized in Connecticut. May not be the case here, but I have one client where they are truly mapped out. But most towns, they're running 70% occupancy in middle school and high school and even in elementary school. So there's room for kids. The argument is always, well, if we bring in housing, there'll be more kids in the school system. Well, Is there something wrong with kids? I mean, I love children. So, you know, Joe and I have the grandchildren, right? And so, you know, there's always going to be opposition to housing in every community I've ever worked in. But having, you're kind of mandated by Connecticut now to have a housing plan. So these are certain things that are important to think about. If you have redevelopment issues or physical structural things, a bridge that needs to be replaced. Having a grant strategy. Who does the grants in? Nobody. Okay. We talked about grants for the trails. So, again, I'll talk about that with scope. Having some sort of a grant strategy.

Did you mean within EDC?

No, for the townwide.

There are people that have grants. There are? Yeah, there's not a grant for $300,000. Who did it?

I'm not, it would have to read the article. It's like whoever's involved in a particular project.

So whatever department it might be, we've got to conquer it.

Except for the... Research laws. Yeah, research laws.

And, you know, again, I don't like to spend money on things, but is it good to invest in a grants consultant that'll generate $600,000 next year? You know, that's the town's decision. But so it's basically, you're saying it's based on a department that's interested in a grant. So if you have Park Rec, somebody in Park Rec is going to work on the trails for that. So, but having some sort of grant training or locally would be a good step. So I was in a town earlier today and they didn't want, I can't write grants, but you can imagine what grants are. I would die from that. But they asked me to do a grant training for their staff, which I can do, which I'm going to do in the fall with them. In another town, they have a bridge that's really, a bridge is like a C out of A through F, but it's a pinch point where all these manufacturers, it backs up trucks and if, God forbid, there was an earthquake or something, and there have been earthquakes in this town before, Connecticut, if the bridge ever cracked, they would cut off all of their manufacturing areas. So what we did was we, in our contract, we went to VDA, Federal EDA through the Department of Commerce, we advised them on how to apply for a resiliency grant, which would entail The all the you know strategy for permitting because you have the Amtrak involved in the railroad track, which is a nightmare. It would involve some of the pre design work and up to a 40% drawings it's like a $250,000 grant, so we advise them based on a structural need. I have to learn a little bit more about you know you probably have a five year capital improvement, something like that, and you may not have any problems, but. But these are structural things to at least think about how you connect the dots. Now you, as you're sort of pointing to it, the EDC does this, or this is in the town, but as an EDC, you're saying, hey, it's Wallingford I'm talking about. In Wallingford's case, the economic developer and their commission actually brought this up and put it front and center because the manufacturers were saying, hey, if anything happens to this bridge, This is a major problem in public and manufacturing is huge in Willingford. Huge. So these are sort of the structural issues that every community that you could advocate for. You may not have authority over any of this, but you would definitely be aware of the things that are happening. All right, last thing, I always come down to land use. I'd be curious to know, and I'll have to come back and learn a little bit more about the towns, what your land use process, and probably similar to other towns where you have zoning things as of right, you have a site plan approval, and then you have a special permit, which is a public hearing, which brings in your public and so forth. But it needs to be consistent across the board. And so I probably would chat GBT, like learn about the old lines of revocation of the planning and zoning, but making sure that your town is the same or better than other towns. And I don't know if that means more theft, I don't know what that means, but the point is, it really, as this slide says, it should be consistent and fair. And having people complain about it, I was like, compared to other towns, are you kidding me? Actually, the one thing to really do well is communicate. A lot of times it's the communication. So before I move on to the scope, I roll fast. Any comments so far?

One comment, you mentioned Brownfield, but when we talked, you also talked about Grayfield. Yes. So as an example, we have a restaurant that's been abandoned for, I don't know, 10, 20 years now, Cherry Stones. Cherry Stones, yeah. And this was a viable restaurant for a very long time. The owner is eventually tired of running the enterprise, and it's ended up boarded up, sits there, abandoned. So you were talking about gray fields that there's actually a state program now.

Yep. I'll kind of cover that all that. Okay. Okay. So I won't go in order of this. So this, as it relates to this, I'm going to try and comment. I really think you have a great plan, great strategy. I'm not just saying that. I really do. It's much more than most towns have. So I'll start with that. With regard to what Joe was saying, under my scope, as you can see, I can do all kinds of things. But, and it's a big but, there's a limit to the hours that I'm allowed to spend in a town. What they did was they got a number, and they divided it by 17, and that comes out to 12 hours per town. Right, using basic, between your hours, that's two hours, probably right there. Most times, well, what can we do with 10 hours now? So I think after tonight, talk amongst yourself and kind of prioritize what's important from this list for what I do. And I try to economize my time. Like if I'm in the, like today I was in Cromwell. I had to go to Rocky Hill, but it's not in your region. I went to Essex and now I'm here tonight. I try to, you know, I'm coming here. I try to hit my feet. But with regard to some of the focus, I do a lot of work with brownfields, which you kind of know what they are. They're contaminated properties, whether that means grants, that means doing workshops. I've done work. So River Cog, not part of your 12 hours, I'll get the great fields outside. River Cog is, I'm talking to them about doing a public education program on brownfields that I've like 25 years of experience. In fact, we've done public spaces at parks, a built-in business incubator on a very bad brownfield, done residential cleanups, other commercial properties. We're going to do a public education program and have a brownfield advisory committee. So if anybody on this group is just interested in learning more about it, I'll be letting Joe know to let you know what that's all going to be. So if you had that big, bad boy brownfield that's been confounding the town and the owner died or the owner won't cooperate, I can help with brownfields. But there are properties in town, many properties that are usually privately owned, but sometimes town-owned, buildings that have outlived their usefulness, like your restaurant. It could be an old public works garage that a town owned. It may not be contaminated, although you never really truly know until you get in there. There could be private, you know, just buildings that are old retail buildings that are just not good, old office buildings. So they're called C-level, not A-level. But they're not worth fixing up, and they're just sitting there. So the state recognizes that there's probably thousands of these in Connecticut all around the state, especially in more rural areas, like exactly what you just showed. So they created something called the Great Fields Program. So the state of Connecticut has been really great about supporting brownfields. Twice a year now, used to be three times, they put out $25 million for cleanups and assessments and then market studies and things like that. So Woodbridge bought a golf course in 2019 and two referendums have failed. to reuse the golf course for housing. So we went in for a Brownfields grant, they call it a bar grant, to do a cost benefit analysis of they use the golf course for solar panels versus open space versus housing, what the impact would be. They did a market study. They did a phase one and phase two, which are site assessment. The Grayfield is the same exact thing only for properties that are not known to have real big contamination issues, that restaurant probably doesn't have soil or groundwater problems. You don't know yet, but they probably don't. You could do a phase one with the Grayfields money, which will tell you. Phase one is like, for those of you who don't know the terminology, it's basically like an environmental title search. They go to check the state fire marshal's record. Was there a spill? Was there a ruptured oil tank? Fuel leaked into the groundwater or something like that. But the Grayfields, The state is, this is their inaugural round of planning money for Grayfields. Actually, the deadline was today. If you're going to look at this, I can invite you on how to engage. Are the owners still alive?

I'm guessing they are, but I don't know.

So if somebody locally could get a hold of them, I could maybe try to work on something on that. So basically the idea of the Grayfields planning dollars is two, many fold. is to help the applicant, which I'll get to in a minute, figure out what the heck to do with this property. Do a market study. Is it made for housing? Should it be scraped and just knocked down? It's there to evaluate essentially the building conditions. There's probably asbestos in that building, which it was built in any time in the 40s and 50s or whatever. And the glue in the, that holds a roof on almost any building from the old days that has asbestos in it. The roof tiles have asbestos in it. Floor tiles sometimes have asbestos in it. Could be many things. But as long as it's not soil or groundwater, you can apply for Grayfield's planning money. You could do a market study. What's the best use of this property? You use data from that reader somewhere else to figure out what's the best possible use. What's the need? It's unfilled retail need or whatever it is. You could use the Grayfields money to study all these things. The minimum is 100,000 for a grant. The max was 250. You can do preliminary designs, like schematic design. What could it look like if you wanted to build a garden center? This is the Grayfields program. Every nobody is an expert on gracious because they literally just so I just did a poll presentation for a bunch of communities in another region on grateful so i'm consider myself an expert, even though i'm not really. After they get the applications today. The state tells me that the part of this is their mission is to find out what the end or your breakthrough so they were 100. Probably right. And then they're going to, they've committed $25 million in the first round, and then in the future round, which will probably be in the spring, to actually fund the actual activities that you went in for the planning. Maybe even the build-out or rehab or demolition of that building or whatever. That will be in the next round, but they'll also have more planning dollars. So, One very good thing for you to do as a group is decide, let's prioritize one or two sites. Think about applying for them.

I mean, Perry Thones would be one. The second one is on Paul's Road. There is a shopping center that was intended to be built out as a horseshoe, if you will. Well, two sides of the horseshoe got built, and the other side, there's an abandoned foundation that has sat there for the 41 years I've been in town. 41 years? 41 years. This abandoned ugly foundation just sits there. Everybody just takes a perfect thing for a great deal.

You probably, and if you suspect there was a contamination issues, there's other programs that are, it's the same thing, only different title. But the bar grant for Woodridge, they knew there was a ruptured oil pan. They knew there were pesticides because of the golf course. They didn't pray the crap out of it. No.

See, yeah.

Great question. So the applicant can be, I'm going from memory here, could be the town for a town property. It could be a redevelopment agency as assigned by the town. If you had one there or one regionally. It could be a land bank. I didn't go in for this round, but I will go in for another round of the project. The owner can apply or whoever is responsible for the property at this point. If the town provides some sort of memorandum of understanding that the town controls the grant on behalf of that property. So the town or one of these redevelopment groups would have to be a co-applicant. So the children or grandchildren of the Cherrystone restaurant cannot apply at the moment. They need the town to support it. What does support mean? It's probably some sort of non-binding greenwood, if they get- Both of those sites are general reference for private farmers. And that's very common. In Guilford, they're going to definitely apply next round. They had an old public works garage that there's no soil contamination, but there's kind of asbestos in it, you know, and there's no heat, nothing in it. So part of the drill there is doing a cost estimate. And if they were going to fix it up, they would have to put all new electric on the heat. But it's a great program. And it's grand news. Because there's a ton of this stuff out there. Oh, I can't wait to hear what they got. In the first round, I did hear through the room that they were going to take this money. It was $4 million in this round. And the match you applied for was $250,000. And everybody who came in for $250,000 got $16,000. And I heard some of the bigger cities were already promised, you know, which is usual. That's what happened. But I do think they're going to get tons of probably crazy requests too, by the way. Oh, sure.

Yeah.

So that's the great feels part. When it comes to these on-call services, rather than take another hour and a half to go through every single one, I think, you know, think about the hours I can spend. My personal suggestion is to think about a business certification program of some kind. And then you, among yourself and through Joe, let me know what you want me to work on. And you have Anthony, which is great. Even though it's eight hours, it's better than no hours. But maybe Anthony's, or is your time, who tells you what to do? Yeah, right now. Okay. Okay. So depending on what happens, maybe he just keeps doing, I'd like to see what you have for a database.

Or even as, you know, the commission calls for your services, what information that we can gather for you.

Yeah, so that would go with whatever you want to work. So I'm available. I like the communication because I got 17 pounds and something. So what ended up happening was sometimes didn't respond to the request for the services. So I suggested that River God do an opt out. So you did some more ops? Yeah. Wow. So three pounds of opt out, that's 36 more hours to go into play. Okay. And then there were some, but we didn't know what the response was going to be. There are more hours if you need them. So Westbrook had 50 hours. Essex will definitely go over this. They're already at 11 and I still have about four more hours to go. I was surprised how active they are in a pleasant way. I've done some joint things. And one other thing I forgot to mention, so go through the scope. I mean, there's a lot of things here. The one thing I did do in Clinton that became very successful, and again, it sort of depends on the local economy. So Clinton, their EDC was, for a while, was in disarray because their chair, John McIntyre, Mr. McIntyre, he did it for a long time. And they wanted to really put the EDC on the map. So they said, what can you do to engage us, you know, create some sort of a program or breakfast or, you know, sometimes we're doing get to know the, get to know the chamber, get to know the EDC. You can do that. But I'd rather see some sort of education program. You can do that and bring a speaker. So what Clinton did two things, I'm just going to, putting this in your brains to think about. They said, well, what, um, We would like to engage other real estate brokers and get them involved in downtown. Clinton's economy is really different than yours. So first thing we did was a broker's breakfast. I've got the developers that are doing the work near the mall in Clinton, which is Ken Navarro, who's kind of a big-time developer. He's doing the big Y and all this stuff over there. And then I got some local real estate people. I don't know if there are ones that work more heavily, like Lyman Real Estate is big in the region. commercial commercial real estate yeah right right and so they so I had two panels I put it together you know Tom did their shtick you know morning to town we had a room full of real estate agents and small business that was first of all it was last summer in June it was like 120 degrees that day the building was not air conditioned but it had but it was early in the morning and we had coffee and bagels and all that kind of stuff And they had a tremendous turnout. So they got all excited. The agency got all excited. So what can we do next? So the next thing we did, which I think is maybe even better for you, I want you to do that, is I put together a small business lending entrepreneur panel. And this is sort of like the all-star team of technical assistance providers and loan, small business SBA kind of lenders. So this was in the middle of the winter. We did it this past winter. It was scheduled for Monday or Tuesday, and we had the first big snowstorm, so we had to put it off a week. And that day, it was like five below zero. Filled the room, but I had CEDS, which is the Community Economic Development Fund, Meriden. We had the Community Investment Corporation, which is SBA programs, and they work with banks. I had Liberty Bank, which was the main bank in downtown Clinton. So you might have a different bank. You might have citizens with somebody. I had Women's Business Development Council, which is the technical assistance provider in Hartford. But they go statewide. They were tremendous. The fastest growing area of entrepreneurs and business startups are women. So we had them. And we had BBC Daily in the state. And we had one other one. It wasn't SBDC. but it was a small business development center. They couldn't come that day, but they would be invited. I put this together and it was a structured panel with like some softball questions for them. And we had a lot of small businesses in the room. There was a huge turnout. And that was something I could be replicated. And so then I did it again in Meriden, same group, got the team back together, did it in Meriden, even bigger turnout, but Meriden's a bigger town. And we're doing the same thing in Meriden in all Spanish, by the way. Putting it together. I'm helping them a little, but I don't speak Spanish. I'm useless at a certain level. But that's something, having an event for your small businesses, if you're going to have, like, engage your business on a sort of macro level, having a program with coffee at 8 from 8 to 10 in the morning, having one speaker or even a panel is something that can

Business Online. January was the Women's Business Initiative. April was something, July something. So we could put together an account. Would you help us with that? Where are the opportunities?

We'll get you good speakers. That's going to couple up all your hours just for that. If you had a program, what I'm hearing is, if you want to do a quarterly thing with these four topics, I would help you get it all set up ahead of time. Yeah.

Well, yeah, it is a lot of, you know, who's getting the bagels, you know. Yeah, and we have a beautiful full-on senior center that has plenty of parking and a nice, so we can have it there and have a kitchen.

Yeah, you get the topics, you maybe plan the first two.

The immediate thing that's coming to mind, I'm just throwing this out and we can discuss it as a commission, but you know, the commercial vacancies, which Anthony is drilling into, you know, what's the extent, what are the types of buildings, how do we start reversing this commercial vacancy issue? And so that topic would be Grayfield would come into that. Well, that's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking immediately Grayfield is thrust in that, as well as whatever other methodology could be used to reverse that problem. Because that's like one topic right off the top of my head. Yeah, and that's a useful thing.

I just want to interject for a moment. I think before we go starting to plan all these events, there's a lot that we haven't finished that we've been working on for the last two years that I'd love for us to finish before we start something like that new. And one of the most successful events actually Cheryl put on a couple of years ago where she got people from every commission to and different departments in town got us all together and had local people speaking so that we could get a better understanding within our town how to make our town more business friendly because we do know that that is a problem you don't have to AI it we know there's issues and our zoning in the middle of a rewrite right now which thanks to Madeline who's a lawyer she's a We have to go over this tonight. We're making recommendations on her suggestions on how to make us a little bit more business friendly. We've been doing this. We've been working on this for the last four months, five months, since March. And we've got to submit that statement ASAP because zoning is having a workshop addressing commercial properties on September 15th.

You have some time on your hands.

We do, we have some kind of things, although I think your topics sound wonderful I just I my head's going to explode if I start. Doing events on grayfield private property and getting.

What we're thinking mode is like you know as Jeff suggested, you know, a case that we set up a cycle of four meetings a year.

The first one could be Eugene.

Getting together, how do we do better as a community? Maybe the drill right now is while you're finishing some of these things, work with Anthony on the database development. That would definitely be productive. And then I can just work independently doing that with him and get to know the time, actually.

That would give you a chance also to take stock of Yeah, so the extent of this.

The other thing I was going to say, your head's getting bigger, it's about to pop, is like you mentioned the industrial base. So that piqued my interest. I was like, okay, I got to learn what the industrial base is because most towns don't promote that. You do. The one overarching thing, and again, very complimentary and I'm not patronizing you about this. The one thing I think you need here, you have a strategic plan. I have a friend who's a big CEO. So if he uses the word strategic once, he uses it 10,000 times every conversation. I said, Mike, you need a work plan. The task, what happens with EDCs is they get involved in something they want to finish, like you're saying, and this is very timely, obviously, what you're talking about, and then they chase the next shiny object that comes their way. These are all great ideas. And so what I think you need is, this might be a way of working this out, is What are the tasks, prioritizing the tasks, maybe some of the things that come on, right? And making an actual work plan. What are you going to do in the first quarter, the third quarter of 26, or the fourth quarter of 26, the way you're going to do for this first, be one in 27, be two in, what are the tasks by month making a phone call? I'm not talking about not just theoretical things or like heavy things, but who's going to call four businesses and set up a visit in, I don't know.

So that's my bad because Jeff had quarterly tasks assigned to people and I thought it was prudent in my own mind to not publicize that because then the public would be holding us to tasks that we weren't meeting deadlines on. Well, here we are. In itself, we've spent a year on, we haven't.

A strategy without a real, you know, we'll do it.

We can add just some disclaimer language to, you know, reduce our liability.

Thank you, councillor. We're going to work on some things to that, you know, that was the monitor that we played. So you're, they're executing against the plan. I mean, I'm working on wayfinding signage. That's great. Business resource guy, you're working with Scott. So I think we're kind of- We're following. We're acting.

We're doing it. But part of having, whether you publicize it or make it public or it's an internal document or not, when you go for money for your budget for this commission, because you don't have to do that every year. I don't know if you've done it. You want to tell people what you have done and what you've delivered. What's the value added? So I will not get involved in how you do it and what's priority. And you have other items on your agenda tonight? We do, just a couple. Yeah, I'll probably bid you adieu and then let me talk about this. So why don't we leave it as I'm available between 12 and 20 hours between and 15 hours more, however you want to say it, to do things. And what I tell people, don't pick six things. Pick one thing or two things, because that's going to eat up. In Westbrook's case, they wanted me to do a build-out study of their village if they built a new wastewater treatment facility to serve the village. What would this mean if I had eight hours to do this work? Nothing. I needed 38 hours to do it. So I did some mathematical way of doing it. And I told them what they didn't want to hear was there's no way they're going to probe their village too much just because of the way their body language was thought. But anyway, I did do some work for them and they were done. But they picked one thing for me to work on. So I would say, I will talk to Anthony. I want to learn more about the town in the short run. And then you decide one or two things think about doing when you get past some of these deadlines you have and let me know. I mean, I'm in no work to do anything.

Like based on what you know of the conversation that you've had, what you've seen about a strategic plan, is there like one thing in your experience that you would say, you know, I would tackle this first based on what I... Based on anything or based on what you've had in that strategic plan?

The two things I would do, think about doing, you're visible is making sure you have good data, so I can do that, and planning a visitation program or something. Because visitation leads to so many different things. You're building your street cream with the businesses, wherever those businesses are, and then you can get an idea of what their needs are, and then you can produce that quarterly program, whatever that may be. You may find out things that you don't even know about. So I would say if you were to do one thing, I would plan the visit, but the visits usually are centered around the data that you have, but the companies that you know, I learned about. When I went to Essex and I went into their industrial park, I was like, what are you talking about? You don't have any, they have many, many, many manufacturing businesses. And it's just a question of whether you want to pursue the data or not, but that's the one thing I would say. All right.

I'm sorry, and it expires the end of December?

No, so what's happening is with River Cod, they're very good about this. We originally, we didn't know what the reaction would be. In my other contract in the scrub region, the other region, there were towns that immediately got very involved. And there were towns that never decided. And now you look at the other region, you have New Haven, Milford, Meriden, Hamden, West Haven, all towns that are big. You have Middletown and then a lot of towns in the teens population. I think that's 14,000. East Hampton's 14,000. And a lot of smaller ones, ones about your size and even smaller, Killingworth. And I said, not all towns are going to really go for this right away because we started it, you know, by the time we actually rolled it out, it was the beginning of spring. That was okay. Then summer, everybody disappears. And then in the fall, it's like, you know, in your mind, you're still in school. September, we're going back to school. Well, let's work on stuff. So I told him this, there's no way this is going to end in December. I said, let's talk about extending it until next summer. I have a feeling that it's going to be fun. It's just too hard to get 17 pounds. I got 36 hours back. I said, give them a deadline. Tell them if they don't commit to something, we'll give away the hours. And there'll be other towns. I will name them. I think that we'll never use 12 hours. They might use six. They might use four. Thank you.

All right. Yeah. I'm sure some of us. I will send this to you.

Put my name on it. And then what I will do is I will send some of those videos just to do that. Sort of like.

And pray feels into it. SUGGESTING, YOU KNOW, BROWNFIELD AND GRAYFIELD. THANKS, JULIA. AND, YOU KNOW, YOUR EXPERTISE IS SOMETHING WE'RE GOING TO LOOK FORWARD TO THINK WILL BENEFIT US.

I DON'T KNOW IF WE'RE GOING TO GET GREENEY IN A LITTLE MORE TIME.

IF THIS GRAYFIELD APPLICATION IS DUE TODAY, IS THERE ANY WINDOW, ANYTHING WITH THE STATE USUALLY DRAGS? So could we sneak in, let's say, these two peculiar properties?

I think you're looking at, and again, with all your priorities, I want to get some reconnaissance on what happened with some of these privately owned in this round that we're doing today. Did they get a lot of those? Were they complicated? Because nobody's an expert in great things. You're going to learn. So my... Basically, they do round now. I have a feeling the next round will be probably start in December for March to middle. So somewhere around there, you'll probably get the next round. I will be at the lunch, by the way. Call everybody in.

Okay. So just to action items in terms of closing for now, you're going to work with Anthony.

I'm going to talk with you about what you have. And I will, next time I'm in the region, because again, I don't do one-off visits. There are too many. I use up too many hours doing that. So, I mean, I've had days where I visited five times a day. But I'm not born. I'm young. My brain, you know, it's talking about exploding heads. Pride heads. And then I will send you follow-ups, you know, send you stuff that you can just forward to everybody. Probably new things. I'm not sure I have everything in email. And then you let me know. Okay, we'll come back. You're going to have to start an amorphous process. You're not really quite sure. But anyway, I will bid you adieu because I've got to write back.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Good presentation. We appreciate the benefit of your knowledge. And I'll let you talk here on the phone. Good to see you.

You too. Bye, Linda.

You're just going to go on. From stairs, everything. Yeah, I just go downstairs and walk. Okay. Oh, okay. No, no, you can't.

Okay, let's continue.

Next item on our agenda is public comment. We only have one member of the public in person who has no comment. We don't have anybody. Online. Is there any member of the public online? Not hearing any. I guess there's no public comment. Approval of our July 1st meeting minutes. Do I hear a motion to approve?

We're going to have a conversation if we make a motion, right? Yes. I'll make a motion. I'll second it. Okay. So in the meeting notes, there was one error that I noticed. It was I was speaking and we were having conversation, I said, I do not want us to repeat work that has already been done, but instead I wanted to repeat work that had already been done. So we needed the word not included.

I will take a look at that and edit it and we'll bring it to the next meeting. All right.

We're actually, I think what will happen is we'll vote now on that amended amendment to the.

Thank you, Michelle.

Yeah.

Okay, so we've discussed, and do we need a second motion?

No, unless there's any other comments.

So the minutes, the motion is to approve the minutes as amended per Maura's request to insert, not repeat.

Okay.

Anybody in favor? Aye. Okay, any abstentions? Any nays? No. The minutes are approved as amended. So let me make a note.

Jen will make the note. Okay. Okay.

Next item is the Chair's report and priority. Well, the EDC recommendations to zoning. Has everybody by now read that? Do I hear a motion to approve that for issuance to zoning?

Assuming we're going to have discussion. Assuming we'll have a discussion, yes. Yeah, I'll make a motion. Okay, any discussion?

You didn't go through it at all? I have four specific items that I have questions about.

Okay.

Do you have questions? No, you can leave. Okay. Okay.

So what I might do is, let me hold on one second. Maybe I can forward it to Jen. And you have it.

Madeline, you obviously will change July to August on this app.

Yeah. Unless, is it better that Madeline does the edits?

If you don't mind. Based on bonus.

Yeah. Okay, yeah, I think that's I can do that.

So instead of me forwarding this to Jen, it's probably just clearer, cleaner.

Yeah.

Okay. So, okay, go ahead.

Let me start with, I think the copy that I had that we had gone line by line through and we had discussed at two meetings was this one that was dated back in March. Yeah. Okay. And so, so my questions then, you know, I know some of this stuff had changed because then you would modify it with the updates, but I'll just go through, they're pretty quick. In number two, number two was the sign regulation. And I have in note that we were gonna continue discussion on removing the manageably signed curfew. And in the recommendation, it was different than the paper version. And so I think I just got lost in there because there was no longer a curfew.

It was an addition of the and or, I believe.

Let's remove the 10 p.m. sign curfew or limit it to signs visible from residential properties.

That was the original.

Yeah, and I put an and in there because it was, I think we decided business operations, like business hours or. Okay, so let's.

No, I've got to pull it up too because now my notes don't make any sense without it.

remove the 10 p.m. sign curfew or limit it to sign visible from residential property. Was that what we had agreed on?

That's what I'm seeing in this copy as a recommended change.

Okay. Okay. I guess I didn't write that down, so I apologize. Okay. And then in number four, the parking theft act and lot coverage, I know that residential is listed in this newer one, but did we even want to make a recommendation on residential? It says reduce residential boundaries set back from 25 to 15 feet with a screening buffer. Do we even want to touch residential or should we just focus on business?

So the recommended change means reduce the C30 front parking setback from 30 to 20 feet, reduce the residential boundary setback from 25 to 15 feet with a screening buffer, reduce the light industrial parking setback from 50 to 30 feet.

So you're basically saying scratch the reduce the residential boundary setback from 25 to 15, so removing that line. We don't even want to touch that because it might be a hot topic.

I'm not sure, but why is there a residential boundary setback in a C-30 zone?

That's what most towns have both the...

I think now with the new housing regulation issues, yes. Yeah.

And I thought we had agreed that 20 feet felt more comfortable versus 15.

I think we did that on the front parking setback, right?

So we did, I did change that front parking to the 20 feet.

I don't know why, see how I had it on this one, had it 20 feet and typical. Oh, maybe.

Maybe that was me just not understanding what that was.

Cause I did, we did, I almost made like an extra.

This is for the C30.

No, reduced residential boundaries set back from 25 to 20.

Oh, like 20. So we, do we want to keep residential in there?

I mean, I guess residential is coming into C30 now, so it's interesting that it's already in there. I think to be more conservative is better.

So keeping the residential line, but changing 15 to 20. Is that where we're landing? Yeah.

If that's okay with other people. Yeah, I agree with you. Yeah.

I'm okay with it.

Trent? Okay, number six. I apologize for my confusion on this. Number six were the restaurant restrictions. And I had notes like to look up definitions for...