Economic Development Committee - Regular Meeting

We're gonna be, calling the economic development committee to order. First up is public comment. If you can go ahead and play the recording.

Public comment is now open for this item, available in both English and Spanish. Call (951) 826-8686 and follow the prompts to access the meeting in either language. To request to speak, press 9. You can also join via Zoom. The meeting ID for both languages can be found on the agenda.

Alright. Seen no caller speaker cards and no callers, we're gonna go ahead and move to item number two, and we'll go ahead and start with implementation of the economic development strategy led by Miranda Evans.

Thank you so much. Good afternoon, honorable chair and committee members. It's an honor to be here today to share a very exciting deliverable with you. I'm here to present an important tool we're proud to share with you, Riverside Realize. And what this is is our economic development implementation plan, which is an important tool for our work.

It will be the implementation tool to our strategic plan that was previously presented to you in September. Riverside realize is not just a pretty plan that will sit on your shelf, although it is beautiful and will be printed as a book for each of you to have and to be able to reference, it is our tactical implementation tool that will ensure we realize the items set forth in our strategic plan and realize the vision that has been set for Riverside centered around our economic development areas of excellence. This plan is our data driven book of work for the year. To help us advance our larger vision, it was critically important to define how we will reach our economic development goals and how we will measure success along the way in a transparent and accountable manner. Riverside Realize is a book over a 120 pages that includes six chapters.

I will give an overview of each chapter, and we'll flip through together in to make the most of our time. I wanted to take a moment to highlight this. When we presented in September, we did share that we are all economic development in Riverside. It takes all of us working together, all of these important community partners to reach our goals and build collective capacity to help us realize all of the goals for the city. We have these amazing partners to thank, and I wanna thank and acknowledge each of them for our city's economic development efforts, including our community, our mayor and council, very supportive of our overall vision and goals in advancing areas of excellence and economic growth, great partners we have in the office of sustainability in building up our green tech cluster, real property services, our Streamline Riverside team, tourism and our Visit Riverside initiatives, workforce development, arts and culture, just to name a few.

But really, we are all economic development, and we are all working together to make Riverside's goals come to life. I would also like to highlight our team. It's really an exciting time right now for Riverside Economic Development, and I really feel we're building something quite special. And this begins with our team and the people behind our projects. So I wanted to share and introduce our team with you. We have our fearless leader, Jennifer Lilly, and we also have, some new updates I wanted to share with you with our staff. Effective this week, we have, workforce development officer. Randy Solis has joined our economic development team. We are so thankful and happy to have Randy on our team. Yes.

Round of applause. And Randy really fits seamlessly in our overall structure. We'll be running alongside each of our senior project managers in supporting them and ensuring we have workforce development top of mind infused with our strategy for each of our areas of excellence. We also have a fantastic administrative analyst, Arlene Hernandez. She's currently on maternity leave, so not here today, but will be back this summer.

And a a new addition to the team, I wanted to make sure to introduce you to John Ahumada. He's our senior project manager. There he is. And he's specializing right now in green tech. And so the goal is that in our structure of the team, we have senior project managers, one dedicated to each of the areas of excellence in Johns over green tech. We also have Kyle Worsinski, senior project manager. Yes. We'll clap for everyone. Thank you. Thank you.

And Kyle is our senior project manager over aerospace and defense. And we're very thankful for the investment that the council has made in supported in growing our team and building resources. We will have a new senior project manager who I'm very excited about to have their talent on our team joining next month. So we will introduce you to them when we do our department overview, next month in April. And then currently a recruitment open right now for two senior project manager positions.

And then we have our project manager side of the house, and this vertical is really focused on current economic development, business assistance, attraction, retention, taking care of the businesses we have and then filling key vacancies. So I'm happy to introduce Denise Hammett. She's a project manager. And we have two project managers, again, very thankful for council support and resources that will be joining our team, in early April as well. So you will see three new faces soon, and we are so excited.

And, we also have a project assistant, Connor Biggerstaff. He's not here with us today hearing spirit, and he really, provides a lot of our data needs and keeps the team moving. So those are the faces behind some of the projects in economic development I wanted to share with you. And really, throughout the book, a lot of visuals, text describing what we're doing and why. And really, this is messaging we're able to share with businesses when we're attracting them to come to Riverside, investors when we're attracting their investment to come to our community, and those who are interested in understanding our value proposition and the story about all of the amazing things happening in Riverside because we are the city of choice in Southern California where people of diverse talents choose to work and live and where entrepreneurs and businesses choose to locate and invest.

Our mission in economic development, working with all our community partners that you saw on the previous slide to create a thriving local economy through programs and initiatives that support businesses and encourage job development, income growth, and investment in Riverside. This has a division overview, speaks about the different areas of excellence that we're focused on building out. I'll just keep thumbing through. And then that brings us to chapter two, data in key demographics. An initiative I'm very proud of in economic development you'll see within this plan is establishing a data team.

So data with is important to everyone, but critically important to economic development, telling our story, and, sharing our impact, quite honestly. And so we have a data team as part of economic development, tracking these key metrics and reporting out on progress. So this is some of the data points and metrics you'll see within Riverside Realize, and we have these and more that we're tracking every single month and reporting on. Again, I'll just keep flipping through. We can go back to anything, but in the interest of time.

And then that brings us chapter three about Riverside. So these are all of the amazing things about our value proposition that we love to share with businesses and with the community. We've been, putting ads every single month in the San Diego Business Journal, and this is an example of one of them illustrating the very powerful savings for businesses as a result of RPU. Also, something to share, we were in a business attraction meeting just this morning in hearing how California is so difficult to do business compared to other states. But when you really look at it, we can save you money.

Everything's bigger in Texas, even property tax. So look at how much you would save. It's twice as expensive in Texas as it is in Riverside when it comes to property taxes. So messages like these are what we're sharing to communicate our value. Key access, key assets and access to markets, transportation, telling our story about being the birth of the citrus industry, recreation amenities across the town, Fairmont Park, putting the river back in Riverside, sharing what is safe and secure and, community that we lead by example when it comes to our fire department and our amazing police department and sharing our story there, and also sharing how affordable and attainable quality housing is in Riverside.

So when you look at all of the key markets that surround us, Riverside has quality housing that is the most attainably priced. Additional stats on diverse housing stock that's available, and then we have highlights on unique attractions within the community, which are facts that we love to share with businesses. Then that brings us to the next chapter, a community of knowledge. So really highlighting and celebrating the incredible talent pipeline that we have here in Riverside with over 4,700,000 students within just a one hour drive. 80,000 of those here in Riverside.

So when we're speaking with businesses, they want to know and have that guarantee that their talent pipeline and the staff that they need are here and trained and ready to work. And, fun fact, we love to share is that Riverside was named the top destination for millennials by Time Magazine, a critical part of our workforce. Also highlight institutions of education, including the award winning leadership, institution in Riverside STEM Academy, and then highlight top majors at all of our universities, and then did a profile on each of the universities within the community. And Streamline Riverside, which we are working very hard right now to refresh and to bring additional, measures of success back to economic development committee next month. We'll be before you for an update on those efforts and how we're advancing those.

And then that brings us to the next chapter on our five areas of economic development excellence, highlighting each of those, general technology, medical and biotechnology, green technology, aerospace and defense, and arts and tourism. And then each chapter highlights notable employers and key assets that we have in the community. Green tech. This was in the San Diego Business Journal just last week. Love to tell our story and be a champion of Riverside becoming the premier destination for green tech innovation.

And we were able to highlight Omeo, Vultu, Hyundai ROADM, and Green Power. We had a big chapter for green tech. Lots to share there. Northside ag, startup spotlights, and then that brings us aerospace and defense and the chapter on them. Arts and tourism.

And then that brings us really to the meat and what we're here to discuss today is our 2025 implementation plan. And so our implementation plan is structured around eight key strategic focus areas that help us realize the vision of the strategic plan, and then that is backed up by key objectives and supporting actions that it will take to help us accomplish our goals and a time frame identified so that we can transparently track our progress. So altogether, we have eight key strategic focus areas, and that includes business attraction and marketing, where we're working to increase overall competitiveness profile and notoriety of the city of Riverside's economic development program, business assistance and retention efforts so we can foster economic growth by supporting new businesses and retaining our existing businesses to help them thrive, advancing workforce development, which again, we're so happy to have Randy on our team to help us and have seamless efforts there, enhancing economic growth by providing critical workforce skills. And, we're taking a look at doing something new this year in investing capital projects to drive growth, such as the council's actions on February 25 to approve the purchase of the Magnolia Avenue property.

We are also looking at assessing the viability of other opportunities to invest in capital projects to help us drive economic growth in the economy. And we're also working to drive catalytic projects, such as the, ASR project and to protect and bolster existing economic assets that we have in our community. We have key redevelopment areas that we're laser focused on right now. Also, the sixth strategic focus area, improving collaboration and outreach. This really is aimed at collective capacity building.

So that speaks to the message. We are all economic development. We're working with cross departmental teams, regional partners, local partners, all to work together in harmony to drive economic and workforce development. And then the last two really are internal. And, these are important because as I shared, we're a new team. We're in a rebuilding year. That's a very exciting opportunity for the city. And everything we do is centered around data driven decision making. So we're really working to create and strengthen a team culture rooted in data driven decision making, transparent reporting, and staff accountability. And then also internally, we're working to enhance operational efficiencies.

And, the theme of the year is building a high performance team. So that's really at the center of all that we do with having a shared commitment to excellence in our work. And so then there's following chapters. I won't go into all of it, and these tasks are representative of the book of work that council had approved. But we have a chapter on each of the different strategic focus areas, and then it breaks down in a transparent way what the supporting actions to accomplish the goals are and the time frame we're striving to accomplish those goals within.

So that's marketing and business attraction, and then business assistance and retention. And then so you'll notice each the title of each chapter calls out the number of KPIs we have. And so that's what gets us to about 97. But we're very excited for the work we have ahead of us this year. And then that brings us to the end.

We have our contact information so that we're easily reachable. This is really a tool we plan to use not only internally, but to share that why Riverside message when it comes to business attraction efforts and also investment attraction efforts and just to have as a helpful tool in sharing Riverside's amazing value And with that, that is, overview of the Riverside Realized book. We're working on finalizing this, and we'll be printing it so each of you have your own copy that we're very excited to deliver. And again, it will not just be a beautiful book you can put on your shelf, but a a tool and a testament to the work that we're doing to, realize the vision of Riverside and our strategic plan. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Miranda. And I love the produced by Miranda Evans

Little Easter eggs.

Hidden in there.

Thank you. I'll go ahead and open it up to my colleagues for a comment.

Thank you so much for sharing this. This is it's beautiful. I'll just say, make it's wonderful. Very proud to be a Riverside when you see this, and I hope it makes others want to become Riversideers as well. Only thing I wanted to ask was when we got to the arts portion, because we have that new great economic development report that came out showing what the CHEECH has brought in, are we gonna be adding that or including it?

Absolutely, yes. We have little icons that show the economic impact for that and festival lights.

Okay.

Wonderful. Thank so

much.

That's great. Yeah. I think just that whenever we have I know it was new data, so I I wasn't sure if it was included. And I would just say in the future, because I know this isn't communications, but it you know, as we work for future years to build and put these out, I don't know if it normally comes to committee. But if there's an opportunity in the future for us to workshop or see it to give input in advance too, I think it's always helpful. But yeah, I was really happy to see it today. Thank you.

Thank you.

Council member, if I might, for for certain, what we're looking for is for this to be a dynamic tool. What we've really wanted to bridge the gap on is we've had amazing vision documents in the past. And we really haven't seen the step by step implementation approach. And also, how do you measure success? And economic development already is such a kind of ethereal concept to people.

So to be able to nail down this is what we're doing, this is how we're going to do it, and this is how we will measure creates that, transparency to the community and to our leadership. But, certainly, as we use this tool, it's meant to be that dynamic. So we wanted to give you a preview and then be able to get your feedback as we, continue to refine and revise. I

think you just answered my question. I was gonna say, how so you're making this this booklet that we take to businesses sort of to show why Riverside. Right? And I was gonna say, I'm guessing it gets updated as we add all these things. Probably annually. Is that about right? Or as needed?

As needed. Absolutely. And annually will be the goals. So we'll be tracking how we accomplish the goals and progress towards realizing those. But really, the the wow factors, the Riverside story, we're constantly going to be updating as we have new accomplishments to share of of which keep happening.

I love it. And will we will some of us be able to get our hands on it to also be able to brag about the great work that Riverside is doing and why they should be here too?

You will all have printed copies.

Excellent. Excellent. And so I know I know the chamber does sort of like the Riverside Magazine. Right? This is obviously the economic development side of the great work going on. Will it be just available in different places? Are we only giving it to businesses when they're kind of interested? How accessible is it to anyone and everyone that wants to grab it?

That is a great question. We love digitally just to be conscious of cost. Digitally, it will be available to everyone, and then we'll have printed copies available too.

So mainly online, we can direct folks maybe even a QR code somewhere and they can perfect. Excellent. I just wanna be able to review when I need inspiration. It's amazing. Thank you.

And really how it's set up, which is great, is almost to be a little pocket carrier. Right? So if you just wanted to do the about Riverside story, you can pull out that piece. If you just wanna talk about aerospace, you've got that to grab onto. But that dynamic part and this is the downside of the world we live in. Things change so rapidly. The minute we print it, it's out of date. And so we want to have that beauty book that can sit in an office so that while you're talking to the community members or business members, you can show them all of our value propositions. At the same time, we don't wanna print thousands of them and then go, oh, darn. That is out of date next week.

Right. And what might be important to one on page 40 is not important to the one that's looking at page 60. Right? And so, agreed, the digital makes sense. I just I wanna know how we can grab it and get access to it. So, excellent. Thank you.

Sorry. I just had another question as a thought. Because I I what I we know in this ever changing world, one thing is folks often like to doom scroll like reels and look at videos that are very short and just, catch their attention. Are we looking at all to turn to market this and turn these into like mini packages on all these different great areas? And just curious of what do we do now, like if we know there's conferences or we're trying to really attract or pull people in for a certain industry. I guess my thought was like when you go to a hotel at a conference and then all of this the marketing on the TV is coming is about visit this place or they're trying to direct you places. Do we do anything like that here in in the area or when we're, again, trying to capture a certain business or group to come to Riverside?

We are excellent question. Thank you so much. We actually have identified that as a task that we need to do this year and will be taking on within our our attraction and marketing efforts. So absolutely. And the vision is we would have a standalone package for aerospace for each of the areas of excellence. So you can take that, and that's just target message for that audience. But also, it's the broader marketing work as well that we're we're working very hard to do this year too.

The other piece I'll just add, plug for the city manager's office that we are taking back our TV station, and we will be creating content, whether that's about economic development, our business attraction efforts, or just telling our story. And so I can very much imagine that we would take this book and make that little segments that could be out to whet people's appetite and get them excited and interested in looking at the implementation plan.

Thank you for that. Can you hear me? Thank you for that. I'm going to go ahead and open up to public comment because we do have some people that would like to speak online. So I'm going go ahead and play the recording.

Public comment is now open for this item. Available in both English and Spanish. Call (951) 826-8686 and follow the prompts to access the meeting in either language. To request to speak, press 9. You can also join via Zoom. The meeting ID for both languages can be found on the agenda.

Okay. With that, I believe believe we have one caller online.

Hi there. Good afternoon. Jason Hunter, ward one. I'm thinking when you're putting together this book, there's two things that kinda stand out as maybe missing. I don't know.

The that presentation wasn't available to the public as part of the agenda package, so I'm seeing it really for the first time. Two things. I talked to a lot of businesses, talked to a lot of executives in this state, other states. One thing that they're looking for is if they were to move a company here, they need to have things to do for themselves and for their employees. And so putting a little bit more in there about what makes Riverside attractive as far as amenity goes, and it it doesn't have to be just the built environment.

I think the natural environment, meaning things like Mount Rubidou, I think things like Victoria Ave with the Orange bros. I guess that's kinda built. But the Santa Ana Trail and what's along it. So, hopefully, we put RTRP underground because it's one of the really gems and and and and wonderful assets we have here in the city of Riverside, natural assets. People wanna move their companies here.

They wanna they don't wanna travel an hour from to go to work. They probably wanna live in the area, and they need to know why they would wanna live here, not just put their businesses here. Number two is they need to know that it's it's a low cost of doing business. So it's really and the government does control aspects of that. The government controls fees, taxes, and rates here.

And so and it's not just you know, for people, if you're looking to attract folks from all over the country or the world, they don't care about what our rates are compared to or taxes are compared to Corona or what what Edison does or what metro Metropolitan Water District does. They wanna know how you're competitive versus everywhere else, particularly in The United States, particularly in The United States. So if we're really high, relatively low compared to surrounding areas, but we're high versus other states that they don't care. They're not gonna move here. So it's we really need to do as much as we can to keep those three things, rates, taxes, and fees as low as possible.

That's why it's so critical that we look to on rates in particular, keep them low by enforcing section 11 o nine of the charter and not just allowing all these capital projects to be done in house at what's assuredly a much higher cost. K? That puts rate pressure on. We can't keep increasing our rates 30 to 40% every five years. It is completely unsustainable, and and you'll you'll price people out of the city of Riverside. So, anyway, those are two things, low cost of doing business and also sort of amenities for employees and executives should they move here that I think need to be in that handbook. Thank you very much.

Thank you for that. And I'm gonna go ahead and move to item number three on the agenda. Funding playbook for economic development areas of excellence, again, by Jennifer Lilly this time. Alright. Sounds good.

Switching off. Okay. So, again, by way of updating you on the work that we've been doing, I'm gonna go back to January where we had our economic development summit. And at that time, the city was introduced to Bruce Katz and New Localism who gave us a a brief overview of what was happening in the economic landscape across the nation. We were able to secure Bruce and his team to do work for the city of Riverside to give us the data, background, and information to base our where do we sit in the market today stake in the ground and develop a playbook of how do we grow and should we grow in these areas of excellence that we have identified.

What we talked about at the Economic Summit is we've said these are our areas where we have assets, where our community has been growing our future since the past. But is it still an area of growth? And so with Bruce's team's work, we've been able to show where we sit in the market today, where those growth aspects actually are, where we have, an opportunity in each of these industries, and how will we really measure that growth in data. The great news is because, the report came to us even as of the beginning of this year, Bruce and his team were able to feed in the current landscape that's going on across the nation and really give us an up to date playbook that, looks at trends, looks at where the markets are going as much as we know, and gives us that data to be able to lean on as we start this next effort attraction. So this book really runs alongside of our strategic plan being kind of the overarching umbrella, the implementation plan that Miranda just shared, and now we have the data that goes behind it and really supports the landscape.

And even what the caller talked about where we're talking about our fees, where do we sit not just regionally but nationally? Where do we sit to be a real attractor? And where are we able to look at ways to refine and grow in the industry? So as you flip through, the playbook you'll be able to look at our current conditions or the diagnostic, being able to identify what happens next, how do we capitalize really that we're looking at funding opportunities, and how do we approach these next steps along the way. This is one of the first times ever that Riverside has the ability to have a baseline to be able to study return on investment, where are we really growing, and how do we identify those growth markets in the future.

I'm going through really, really quickly. And this is one that you're going to want to sit down with a nice cup of coffee and read through each of these pages. If you are a data wonk, this is really interesting to see how all of these different industries feed into what Riverside is doing today at a federal level, at a state level, and then in our regional and local level. Throughout the playbook, we talk about other assets that we should be looking at, How do we identify our next areas of growth and support in our key areas of industry? How do we capitalize on our town to gown connections and really build that talent pipeline and build on the assets that we have today?

I went really fast. So we're very excited to present this to you as the first step in you getting acquainted with the Playbook. Once again just as the name describes this is something that we will be referring to on a regular basis. We'll be able to tie into reporting as we go forward with our economic strategies and we'll be able to measure along the way. Bruce's team is staying on board with us over the next year to actually help us with the implementation strategies in some of these key areas so that we can get a really big jump in growth in these markets.

So we're excited to present the full package for you today, not only the vision that you had last fall, the implementation that you saw today, but now the measurement tool that we'll have to go forward. And we're happy to answer any questions you might have.

Thank you for that report. And just to be clear, we are doing This is communications only, so there will be no more public comments on this section of the agenda. And I'll go ahead and open it up to my colleagues.

Thank you. Well, there is a lot of great info in that very short condensed quick that flies by you. So I think for me in the future, I'd I would love to get a copy, be able to take a closer look, and just see, you know, in the future again if we have a further in-depth conversation whether a committee or a council, you know, could give further comments. But overall, think it's great. I mean, it's amazing to see just a couple in the sit nips, know, examples of some small businesses or, you know, or very large, actually, businesses too that, you know, shows what economic wealth, you know, we're producing here in the city. So just very interesting facts, and certainly would love to take a closer look another time.

Yes. It's great. You know, the snapshot for the for public watching, it sounds like it's us being intentional about where our industry what industries we can look to and attract and try and bring into our space with target audiences and things and so I think it's great it was a bit of a fire hose to the mouth and that's okay but it I mean when we're at least getting down in a strategic way our plan forward I think that's always a good thing whether I fully grasp all the work that you've put into it or not it looks like a lot. So thank you for that and thank you for being intentional about moving us in the direction where we have some blue water to grow and do things. Think it's phenomenal. So, thank you.

Today is that quick snapshot. And as you see on the screen, this says short version. There is an in-depth study that provides the data matrix behind this, how did we arrive at the conclusions, and where do we go next. So consider this a teaser or an appetizer, and we will provide for you the full report and be able to walk you through. And as I said, we'll be using that in our reporting out as we go forward.

I love it. So it's an app a teaser.

App a teaser. Thank you for that.

And I think council member Robillard will enjoy this too because I think his office and we're all looking to work together. Too. This might help us know where we can get talent pools focused too for from our spaces. So, anyway, there you go.

Yes. Thank you for this report. You know, this this kind of information is exactly what we need to kind of attack the economic development plan. We, I think, have taken the bull by the horns on this and are really focusing our efforts on specific industries that we're seeing growth potential in and really targeting those industries for that pathway pathway for our college students and getting them invested early into the Riverside economy. You know, as you saw saw this morning, Riverside is very, very competitive, not just statewide, but also nationwide and worldwide.

And those numbers are reflected in our reports, and and and those details are are reflected in other places about what makes us competitive. And this is part of that competition is that you can't just create talent a talent pool out of nowhere. It has to, have a ecosystem around it, and I think we have that ecosystem here. And I'm very excited to see where this goes to, I think, the coming years are very much Riverside's best years of taking advantage of these economic opportunities. Moving forward, we're gonna go ahead and close item number three and move to item number four, aerospace and DOD conference and career fair overview. And we'll have Kyle Rosinski, senior project manager, give us an update on that.

Thank you, honorable chair, members of the committee. Here today to present with you our upcoming first annual Aerospace Community Expo, which will be held on Saturday, 05/31/2025 from the hours of nine in the morning until noon. It's gonna be located at the Riverside Municipal Airport, and the expo is intended to introduce Riverside residents, their families, and friends to the aerospace industry operating successfully in their backyards. Without them, maybe no about it. Showcase career opportunities, increase awareness of this career path for the city's youth.

This will be done through aerospace company participation, showcasing what they do and what careers are available, and providing students who might be interested in some of those careers information on how they can utilize existing assets from our learning institutions throughout the city and the region to prepare them to enter into that career space. Offering hands on demonstrations, including free flights to the first 40 kids that sign up through a partnership with the EAA Young Eagles program, and showcasing military and other static aircraft and other related displays. You can see before you the event flyer, which is gonna be used for our marketing campaign, which also includes circulation from each of the local learning institutions and our k through 12 school districts. The event has been added to the community calendar, and we hope to see everyone there here to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you.

Thank you, Kyle. And I'll go ahead and open it up to my colleagues if guys have any other comments.

I just wanna know. So if I show up, I get to fly I get to use the simulator. Is that right?

Yes. Through San Bernardino Valley College is bringing the simulator. Yes.

That's excellent. No. This is great. I I do have maybe one request. I'm guessing this will be the one the first of many similar like this that we'll have. Hope. Right? Because I know I can take a few cracks at the simulator. But I'm just wondering if there's a way maybe at times to stagger the days so for folks that may not be always available on Saturday mornings maybe it's a Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon. You know just to make sure that Certainly. We can also take certain church. Yeah. I mean, we could all take advantage of the

I understand where you're coming from.

Yes. I appreciate that.

Thank you. Well, yeah. Thank you for the presentation. You know, this is actually a passion project of mine that we've been putting together, and I'm finally glad we have a solid date for this and really excited about how this will turn out. And the this really leans into one of our five, you know, categories of excellence, the aerospace and DOD sector.

But, you know, really the well, the inspiration that came from this is that so many of our young people in high school have no idea what a career in aerospace looks like. They have no idea how accessible it really is. And I wanted to show have an opportunity to showcase our local companies to our young people about, hey. You know, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to work on an aerospace. You can, have get a certificate, and you can be building rockets.

And it is a very accessible, well paying pathway, into the aerospace field. And, also, you know, part of the inspiration was Planes and Treats. When I'm walking and doing trick or treating with my kids on the air on the airport and seeing families taking pictures of the planes and and just wowed by just being on the tarmac of an air airport. You know? It's just a great opportunity to kind of demystify our airport. It is a public airport. You can go there. You can enjoy it. This is for the community. And, really taking that aspect of there's no TSA involved, and it is a fun place to be and a really accessible place to be.

And I'm looking forward to how this turns out, and this will be a probably an annual thing. It says first annual, so we can do more of these. And I think if other council members wanna take on a area of excellence, you know, maybe do host an event similar. I'm sorry, guys, but love to find hire other people to I don't wanna overwork economic development because I know this is a lot of work. But really excited about what this is turning into, and I I think it's really gonna put us on the map for aerospace. But thank you for that. Thank you the report. Alright. Final theme. Item number five.

I ask for future economic development committee consideration. I do have one thing. Okay. It's super easy. Alright.

I would like to request that economic development committee hold a workshop focused on the experience retail food service establishments such as restaurants, coffee shops, and similar businesses when starting their operations. The workshop should explore the challenges these businesses are facing and the issues currently being reported. Specifically, addressing the processes related to entitlements, plan checks slash permitting, and inspections. Additionally, it'd be valuable to compare how these procedures align with or defer from those in the cities, other cities, or within the county. Kind of the goal of this is to streamline our process for the retail and food food sector, and seeing how we can lower the barrier of entry for new restaurants trying to open up.

And that's it's clear enough? Clear as mud? Okay. Perfect. Alright. And that will conclude our economic development meeting. Thank you.

California School for the Deaf Riverside made history tonight.

First time an entire team of deaf players is in the state football playoffs. The Riverside public