Economic Development Committee - Regular Meeting

Good morning, everybody.

I would like to call to order the Economic Development Committee meeting of June 23rd, 2026. Quickly, please call the roll. Vice President Rochelle. Present. Council Member Ponder. Present. Council Member Scott. Here. Chair Deer. Here. With that, we're going to move on to public comments. Since we've got so many folks in the room today, I want to make sure that anybody who wants to make a public comment today, please make sure you sign up. It's in the corner. Hollyann's out here in the back. If you didn't already, please sign up. You're going to have two minutes to speak. Hollyann's going to start a timer. If you're online, just raise your Zoom hand. Normally, we try to open them up back at the end. I will do that when I see anybody new or somebody feels called to sign up, then I'll come back around. Otherwise, we just do the topic. So with that, quickly, three questions. Three questions are in public comment. Writing is on the agenda. If you find a friend's room, if you're not in the floor, or if she's in her seat, that's great. But if you're the bottom team, whenever you're starting on your own. Your name or the last word is just on the comment. Thank you. Is there anybody who wanted to choose something?

I don't see anybody virtually. We did receive one right in the comment section. Then we have three signed up in the room.

Perfect. Um, Angelica, since you said something in writing, we are happy to take that. You also can speak in person if you want. Um, so don't forget to mention that's your prerogative. With that said, um, when you're called, please state your name for the record. If you're in the room, just come up to the desk right here. Um, the timer will start when you do, and I will have a quick call for you. We have Angela Michaels, followed by Angelica Duncan, and then Kit Burns today. You guys can come up on again too. We'll just help you. With these mics, you've got to be a little closer. Thank you.

Okay, good morning. I'm Angela Michaels with Michaels Trucking and Excavating. And I attended the meeting a couple weeks ago about doing the CWA Conditional Reward and how damaging it would be for smaller companies to have to implement to actually be able to work on these kind of jobs. I have trucks. I would not want to have to lay off my current drivers that have worked for me for five, six, eight years to hire somebody out of the union to drive my truck who I don't know how they drive. Our equipment's very expensive, liability on the road, all of those things to have to put a union driver in that I am not familiar with is not feasible. My insurance doesn't cover somebody if they don't have a good driving record, if they don't have enough experience if they haven't had their CDL for very long my employees that work for me now I currently pay for their benefits I fully pay for their benefits and as they work on prevailing wage jobs I have fringe so I try to recoup some of that so if we had to join the union they would either have to lose their insurance wait for enough hours or I would be paying their basically paying double for insurance. So that's another problem that I cannot possibly do as a small business. And I actually pay for their benefits even when they're not working. Through the winter, they have benefits. Unlike the union, if you don't have enough hours, you need to go ahead and pay $1,000 a month for your family. You don't get to do the group benefits at the lower cost. I'm trying to refresh and see what else we have. had to say about you know it just it just makes it so much more complicated and the cost i can't compete if i have to raise my trucking rates to cover these benefits and my employees will never see so they'll never get the pension that they put into the union they'll never get any of those benefits, the life insurance, because you have to be vested for five years and you have to have so many hours for five years or you lose. It just keeps, it's just a big money pit and I'm not able to join the union. I can't, I can't compete with joining the union for my other private jobs. Doesn't work.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm Angelica Duncan with High Grade Asphalt and Seal Coat Inc. We're a certified disadvantaged SBE, DBE, and women minority owned business. And first I want to say that I'm really proud of how the city of Tacoma has invested substantial efforts in promoting opportunities for disadvantaged minority owned and women owned businesses. I think that you are one of the leaders in the state of Washington and I applaud you for that and I really hope we can continue down this path. In addition to that recognition, I think it's also important for us to understand that policies that create additional barriers to participation can work against those objectives. So if a DBE or a WMDE such as myself is qualified, responsible, properly licensed and capable of performing the work, that contractor should have a meaningful opportunity to compete and perform public projects. That's how we grow. And also, we really love it when we can pay our employees those prevailing wage rates. And I understand unions were a part of helping bargaining for those rates. And so I applaud the unions for that as well. And I know we have another union rep in the room today. But by putting the CWAs and PLAs in place, and even the AURs, that money that goes towards all of these employees through the prevailing wage laws gets diminished. And the unions take anywhere from $15 to $30 an hour. And they put that into their trust fund. And as Angela said earlier, our employees don't see that money. So I see that as wage theft. A union has never helped me get a job. A union has never trained any of my employees. A union has never helped me with safety. What they do is they displace my workers. They put strangers on my team. I have to figure out how to work with them. My crew have to figure out how to work with them. And then those of my employees who do get to work on the project, see a tremendous amount of money get completely taken out of their paycheck and they will never see those benefits as spoken before. So I respectfully urge the city of Tacoma not to move forward with mandatory community workforce agreements, project labor agreements, or apprentice utilization requirements. I think that if the city is going to move forward, which I really hope you don't, that you will exempt small businesses from having to participate so that we stay protected and continue to be involved. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

My name is Kit Burns. I live in Tacoma. And I'm here just to, I'm here to listen. I know I can't do a vote that's already been done by the city council, but I spoke against an agreement to allow the housing authority, no, I'm sorry, the Habitat for Humanity to be able to hire people.

Kit, that's not on our agenda.

Is it on wages? Is it on wages? Is that next week?

Yeah, we're doing EGB and CWA.

Okay. I've been here for the CWA. I know it's complicated.

Okay.

So I sit and listen.

Yeah.

But I'll bring this up again probably next week. Yeah. All right.

Thanks, Daniel.

Thank you. Okay. One line is a tip. Yeah. Perfect. Tim, when you're zoomed in, you've got a two-minute timer, and it'll start what you do.

This is Tim Atterbury with Associated General Contractors of Washington. Wanted to say thanks for doing your listening sessions. It's valuable. I've had meetings on the CWA issue with the city manager recently, the mayor, some of Executive Mello's top staff. They're looking at also doing a CWA. And in talking with them, there's some things that are important. looking up as far as a compromise goes. So, Chair Diaz, please do give me a call if any of the other council members want to talk about a potential compromise that is common sense and maybe a win-win for everyone. Get a hold of me. I have some ideas. It centers around sort of what the state threshold is of $35 million essentially exempting open shop contractors from CWAs for projects under 35 million. That is what the state has done. That is what the federal government has done. We have a lot of federal facilities in Pierce County and we have a lot of state facilities in Pierce County. So sort of looking towards standardization for the industry as far as aligning your regulation with the state and federal government. So give me a call. I want I want to talk compromise. I want to talk how we can make everyone happy. As you can see with your listening sessions, there's there's energy on both sides. And you can see why past city councils have kind of let this issue lie and not deal with it is because they don't want to hurt women of minority owned. contractors, and they also have friendships in the union building trades. And so just looking towards compromise. And I think it's an opportunity for us all to get together and do that. So reach out, please, Senator or Chair Diaz. Thanks.

Great. So with that, we will close public comment. And if you have time, feel free to sign back up. If there's time, we'll come back around. And we'll get to our first briefing item, which is Economic Development Board Update. So I will call on Paul Baker from the Community Economic Development Department and Michael Coffey from the Economic Development Board for Tacoma and Pierce County. Please come out and take the seats here by the mic. Thank you. The floor is yours.

Thanks. Thank you, Chair Diaz, and thank you, council members. It's always an honor to be here, and it's an honor to introduce you to Michael Katze from the Economic Development Board of Tacoma and Pierce County. We're often asked how we're able to continue to deliver our economic development goals in the resource-constrained environment and with all the changes that you're well aware of. As much as I would love to take credit for those successes fully, a lot of it has to do with the fact that we have great partners like the Economic Development Board and that our ecosystem is very well-tuned and coordinated, working together on those efforts. And so with that said, I'm really delighted to let Michael share about the changes that are happening at the EDB, some of the successes we've had, and let him speak to how the organization has been able to deliver great results.

Thank you both. Welcome, Chair Diaz, Council Members. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you today and talk about the EDB. I think it's probably been a while since we've been in front of this committee. We haven't been in front of you since I came on board in September 2024. So thanks for the opportunity. I look forward to sharing a little bit about who we are and what we do. It's a brand new team I have to do the work that we do. that we do. So as of yesterday, I have a full team. Myself as CEO, I have Betty Boblitz over there as investor relations manager. Meredith Neil behind you is our economic development director. Eliana Kydus is our marketing and communications manager. And just starting yesterday behind you is Gavin Horton, who is our intern, who will be looking into permitting across the county and seeing what we can do to help with streamlining that. So brand new team. We've had 100% turnover in employees and really in a good place right now. We're all right. We're all right. So what do we do? Who are we? What do we do? And so, I mean, I think quite simply, we try to drive sustainable growth by attracting investments, fostering innovation and supporting business expansion. And we do that through many different ways and I'll explain as we go along. We are a private nonprofit. 501C Corporation. We are designated as an associate development organization by Pierce County. The state has a program of associate development organizations. and there's one designated to each county and the county makes that designation. Part of that is a contract with the state to do the work that we do countywide. And that's probably one of the things that makes us most unique in that we work across the county, different cities, the unincorporated Pierce County, the Port area. We are funded by public and private investors. We have over 40 public and private investors who generally pledge a five-year commitment to the organization. We are not the chambers. We're not a membership organization. We're not a pay-to-play organization. They invest because they believe that a solid and dynamic economic development program leads to a... an economy that is vital, diversified and sustainable for the future. And through that investment, the community will benefit and each of the municipalities, public members and the companies will benefit in direct or indirect matters. We're not pay to play. So you don't get special treatment if you're an investor. We serve everyone in the county who wants to do business, and we serve anyone who wants to come into the county to do business. We have our investors make up a 40-member board, and again, we have a very diverse board, so we get very different perspectives at the table. So I was talking about the three-legged stool of the ADB. We have sort of like three and a half legs, but the three main legs here are business retention and expansion. And that really is about supporting the businesses that are already here, making sure that they can succeed, they thrive, and they can grow. And what we hope for them to do is to expand here as well. And the reason that is the bread and butter of economic development, which generally speaking, 70% of all new investment and all new jobs come from existing businesses. They're here because they want to be. Part of the job that we do with the city's community and economic development department is go out and visit each of those organisations or as many of them as possible each year and really find out what's working for them, what's not, and then provide the resources they need. to hopefully be able to keep them here and help them expand. The other side of the coin is really about business attraction and recruitment. You know, as businesses go through their cycles, businesses come and businesses go. So it's really important to keep filling the bucket with new businesses. So we work on bringing new businesses into Tacoma and Pierce County. And this is a higher risk, higher reward sort of play It's not as easy as business retention expansion. It is what we do, but the bread and butter is business retention expansion. And the other thing that we are now specifically going to focus on is marketing and investment promotion. There's no point in being the best place in the country to do business and to live and work and invest if no one knows about it. So we need to do a much better job of promoting our community across nation and across global markets as well. All right. So what makes us different to all the other economic development organizations in the county? If you look at the economy, and this is an ultra simplified version of our economy, but There are businesses that we classify as traded sector. Those are the businesses that make and sell products and services outside of Tacoma and Pierce County. So if company A sells widget B to County C, then that money comes from County C back into Tacoma, back into Pierce County. That's new money coming into the economy. On the right-hand side, you see the orange businesses. and they're what we call local businesses, then that new money comes into the economy. They circulate that money, hopefully for as long as possible before it starts to leak out. There's always leakages in your economy. That money's going to go elsewhere. But these two functions are critical. We need to have the new money coming into the economy to feed the existing economy. But then we need the existing economy to capture those new dollars coming in without straight out. So while they're very different functions, they can't work without each other. Each of these are symbiotic. And we focus on the left we focus on the left-hand side traded sector businesses we see our role as getting as much new money into the economy whether it's through expansion of existing businesses or whether it's recruitment of new businesses that's critical for us if you think of the economy as a bucket full of water with holes in it for money leaking out where the watering can that helps fill the bucket and hopefully makes the bucket bigger. And the local businesses are the ones that keep the water in the bucket as long as possible. And that's what makes us different. I think we're the only economic organization in the county that really just focuses on trade. And again, this is a very simplified worldview of the economy. So How do we know if we're doing a good job? How do we know if we're succeeding at our work? We do an economic impact analysis. We use in-plan, input, output program to determine the impact our wins have on the economy. Projects in economic development can take a long time to see the light and to get them across the finish line. Several projects we've been working on lately have taken over three years from first contact to actually getting at least signed. So if we looked at things on a one year basis, we wouldn't really see much. Some years you'd see more benefits than others. So what we do is we take a five year look. And over the last five years from 2021 through 2025, we were involved in 15 successful recruitment, retention and expansion projects. And these are only projects that we had a significant hand in. There were more projects throughout the county, but these were the ones that we had significant role. We either took the lead or were a co-lead with our partners, including the City of Tacoma. And those 15 projects, resulted in $252 million in private sector investment. And this is countywide. $252 million in new private capital, generating $286 million in new annual personal income. And I think what's important here is over 4,000 jobs were created. That's direct, indirect, and induced. and the combined economic activity of those 15 businesses direct indirect and induced is almost a billion dollars in additional economic activity in the county that's for us tells us that we we're doing our job we're working well with our partners and um Pretty proud of the results. You can see the projects we've gone through, you know, manufacturing, logistics, aerospace, clean tech, and services, businesses. But we're pretty happy. And those numbers change every year as we look back over five years. But this is a very strong past five years. It comes in after COVID, sort of the 2020. And 2025, to be quite honest with you, was pretty slow. Um, given all the uncertainty, the volatility in tariffs and trade and other things, uh, private investment was almost non-existent last year. It was very hard. People were sitting on the sidelines. So, um, I think those numbers are pretty good. The time that counts here. Um, and sort of going back to why our investors invest in the work that we do. For our investors, including our municipal partners, for every dollar that our municipal partners invested in the EDB, they saw a return of $14.60 in new tax revenues annually. For the state, $23. And for our private sector investors, they'd like to see an investment on their corporate profits, and they see over $24 return on their corporate profits for the five-year period. And that's why they invest. Again, it's not pay to play, but they see the benefit of a diverse and active economy. So these are some of the businesses in the last five years that we've helped either expand or recruited here. These are all over the county and it gives you an idea of the range of the types of projects that have won over the last five years. The work that we do continues on no matter what day of the week and no matter how good the economy is or not. We work very closely with the city here. Again, we do a lot of BRE together. We work on a lot of recruitment projects together. As you can see over the last year, it's been the 2025 was a little rough. It's sort of the beginning of 26 as well. One thing that I will say is that things are picking up. We're seeing a lot more interest in Tacoma and Pierce County as an investment opportunity, working with companies from Vietnam, Korea, China, and Japan at the moment, looking at this region to invest. So while the numbers are down a little bit from April 1 to June 30, it's also part of the staff transition. We're actually starting to see more quality engagement rather than just numbers. We're seeing projects that we have a good traction on at the moment. Actually, let me just go back. And we don't do these visits on our own. I mean, we work with the City of Tacoma, Pierce County, City of Lakewood, Fife, Puyallup, Sumner, UP. We work right across the region with our partners. And we do a lot of those BRE visits with them. Uh, so it's not just a, we're not doing things on our own context. We have those, those municipal, um, officials there. So, uh, just some sample recruitment wins, um, more lately, this sort of more recent ones, uh, project big fan. We worked very closely with the city of the camera on it's a fish processing facility in the tight flats. Again, I'm not going to go through all the details, but you could see that up to 50 new jobs and $7 million of private investment. Ericsson, which is a Belgian equipment processing company, signed a lease down in the tight flats earlier this year, I think in February. And they're looking to ramp up to about 75 new jobs when they are fully operational. Aloha Carbon is a bit of a weird recruitment win. And I included this because it's not them opening up a business here, but we've been working with them for multiple years. actually started when I was still at TPU about three or four years ago. They are a renewable fuel producer using municipal waste. And while they haven't actually, Pat was here and we're working with Pat very closely, we've continued that relationship with the city and Aloha and ourselves and They have just been accepted into the blue here in Tacoma. So we're hoping that once they go through the cohort, they'll stay and they'll find a place. They're working on a pilot project in Hawaii that they're trying to finish up. And I think once that gets up and running, there'll be a lot more interest here in Tacoma. But they've been focused on Tacoma. They've been focused on the Thai Flats almost for several years. So to get them into the incubator, I think is a bit of a win, but it's not a typical win. And sample BR interactions. And again, these are all here in the city of Tacoma. Paul and I visited a machine shop down in the Tide Flats. Been around since the 50s, 20 people working there. One of the issues, and they do stuff. I mean, some of their stuff goes up on Blue Origin. pockets in the space, it goes into the baby. They have a fairly diverse product range at their machine shop. And they have so much business right now that if they can get six more people, they can actually put on a full second shift. So that's what's holding them back is talent. And we referred them to Workforce Central. They, and it's Workforce Central, went and visited the facility and they're working with the company to get those extra six people, get that second shift working. And that would essentially double the business without changing their footprint. Also working with a small manufacturer here in downtown Tacoma. They're an apparel maker, small business, probably four to five people at most. But they export to multiple countries and make them close. But they're looking to grow. They're actually building up their markets. They have expansion plans in the future. They're currently operating out of an office block, which is not the ideal place to do manufacturing. But once they're ready, and I believe within the next year, we'll be looking at a new place for them to come up. they're also potentially having issues with finding skilled seamstresses as well. So we're going to work, once they're ready to expand, we'll work again with Workforce Central and make sure that we can get them the help that they need to do that. One of the manufacturers, I think Paul's been involved, Debbie's been involved, down at the Tide Flats, they had to move out of their premises on the Tide Flats due to the building being old and not up to code anymore. So we're helping them, working with the city, and we're helping them find a new location. Within Tacoma, they can't quite stay here. They don't want to move. So it's critical that we help them find a place. We're working with our Brooklyn community, and we're going to find some properties that they can actually use. And then, again, they'll be making the decision in the near future. So that just gives you an idea of the types of visits we do. We do... you know, over 100 of those a year, really getting to meet the businesses where they're at, planning out what it is they do, how long to do it, and just any problems, how can we provide the resources to help them get over that. What I said, well, you know, initially I said we did three and a half legs. The additional engagements is the other half leg. We promote that. We promote the county, the Tacoma and Pierce County, at multiple trade shows. We're working on a new slate of trade shows. We've gone to the Paris and Farnborough air shows over the years, looking for new recruitment opportunities. We have worked with foreign businesses and dignitary visits, working with the city of Tacoma, Maritime Blue, the port, finished Ambassador was here last year and the year before. We helped them understand the economy here and some of the Finnish businesses that came along with them. We helped Lakewood with their Danju sister city visit when they came here. We were able to be there and offer business opportunities. We do legislative work in Olympia and different organisations. We work with our congressional and legislative delegations. Last year, when times were tough for Safe Boats and Brown and Haley, we brought Senator Murray and her team to those businesses to make sure that she could help them through some of the issues. She was able to help Safe Boats get their government contracts paid that the government was threatening to pay. We do land use planning, tie flats. We've been working through that for many years. We also do training for businesses right around the region. Last year, we did three training sessions on taxes, tariffs, and lean manufacturing. If we look at Tacoma more closely, I just want to give a little bit of a brief overlook of the economy here, as you can see. I think the gross regional product of Pierce County is around $66 billion. Tacoma's $20 billion of that. You can see the population of Tacoma and the total regional employment. So this has been small, unfortunately. These are the largest industries. Healthcare makes up about 18% of our economy here. And these are Pierce County numbers. It's very hard to get the local to count the numbers on this. But healthcare, management, retail, and accommodation of food workers really are the top, the largest employment industries. And I'll probably tell you why, but that's concerning a little bit. But these are the top growing industries. So this is where we've seen the most growth in employment from 2020 to 2025. And that again, it's management, it's a combination of food services, healthcare, transportation, warehousing. They've really been the big drivers of the economy. The biggest concern about this, and we just had an economist speak in our board meeting in May, is the fact that he's seen that Pierce County is producing far more low-wage jobs than high-wage jobs. And what we're doing, what's happening because of that is we're seeing jobs are increasing, but they're at the lower-wage side, which doesn't really get us to where we need to be. Well, those jobs are important as... but we should be growing our higher wage jobs far higher than what we are. That's a sign of not just Tacoma and Pierce County, but I think it's a sign nationally as well. We've seen manufacturing decline across the nation, and we've also seen a decline across Pierce County as well, which is a concern. This is where our top industries are growing. This is where the jobs are coming from, and While that's good news that the job's growing, it's sort of at maybe the wrong end of the wave scale. And in Pierce County employment, what we've seen, we've seen an uptick since April last year to April this year. What you don't see in those numbers is that December and January were around 6.5%. So we're actually doing far better than that. December and January, but again, our employment rate is still higher than the national average. And why do we do our work? Well, we believe in Tacoma, we believe in Pierce County, believe that we have strong fundamentals, we have a great workforce, we have a diverse industrial base. Can't beat the location. We're halfway between Asia and Europe. We have a deep water port. We have infrastructure that includes interstates, national, international railroad. We have Relatively cheap power. We used to have cheap power.

It's not as cheap as it used to be.

But we still have a lot of those pieces of the puzzle that make this region attractive. We still have those economic anchors of Port Tacoma, JBLM, and healthcare. And again, we have seven institutions of high quality in Biscayne. That just works. And they're great organizations and entities that are we have a lot of good talent being graduated. And from what I understand, the majority of that talent that graduates from our college is Stacey, which is good. We have high quality of life and really high quality of healthcare. I'm not going to go through each of the individual slides that's coming up next, but these just sort of talk about those economic strong points that we have. And again, these are, here more for your review at your own time. But we've got the Port of Tacoma, we've got JBLM, which is a significant employer and, you know, $15 billion in the economy. We've made some switches to some of the work that we're doing right now and looking at the defence supply chain. And there's a lot of money coming out of the federal government and state government towards defence supply And we believe that the businesses within that supply chain in Pierce County should have a piece of that as well. So doing a lot of work on that side of things. It could be people can actually have a little widget that goes on to another widget that goes on to another widget that ends up on something eventually that the fence uses. Healthcare, again, huge part of the economy. Critical. Yeah, it's a critical part. employer. Aerospace, I don't think we're as big as we used to be, but aerospace still plays a significant role here in Pierce County. And we have a large number of small shops, tier two and tier one businesses that feed up into the larger OEMs like Boeing and Aerospace and others. Retail is the third largest employer in the county. You can see 36,000 jobs. It generates $2.2 billion in taxes. Retail is one of those things that really tie into the quality of life and the character of the community. From historical downtown storefronts to shopping hubs in Puyallup and Sumner and things like that, they really add to the community character. And manufacturing, I mean, you can still see the 16, over 16,000 jobs in manufacturing, but I think that's gone down significantly over the years. And that's it. I don't have information to share with you.

Okay, thank you. I will start with my committee comments and then we'll do our questions.

uh thank you for this and i appreciate you and the rest of the team and all the work that you guys have been doing um i appreciate the level of partnership that's been occurring uh across the region um especially with our own folks here at the economic development department i really believe that we can't do these things in a vacuum we have to do it together to really be competitive in this really difficult global market um One of the questions I had, I noticed one of the companies actually had a happenstance like that on a plane coming from, I think maybe DC or something like that, with an executive from Second Suite. And he had talked about some of the challenges that he was going through at the company there. I think I connected them with our economic folks at some point. But I'm curious as to, you mentioned them as kind of one of the success stories there. Could you kind of talk to me a little bit more about that? them in particular. I know they were trying to like find talent and maybe potentially looking for a new space as well.

Yeah, last year, I think they, late last year, early last year of this, the year before, they expanded their operations. I think the PSCAP operations, they brought on 400 new jobs. And that was sort of a nip in anticipation of Boeing ramping up as this sort of a new startup. So, you know, sort of Boeing had bottomed out and it's starting to ramp up. And I think that's what we're seeing right now with them is that, you know, a lot of our aerospace companies are ramping up to meet the demand that will be coming from Boeing, but everyone's ramping up at the same time. So they're all having issues of getting the talent that they need. So it'd be good. Boeing puts demands on those suppliers and they need to ramp up to keep those contracts in place. I think that the SUI has just had this many issues with everyone else in getting that talent. I don't think we're producing the talent in that area fast enough to meet the demand, especially going and Boeing's looking at ramping up considerably over the next two years. It's going to be a struggle. I sit on the board of the Aerospace Futures Alliance, made up of aerospace companies around the state, and they're all talking about the struggle to get a label. In that supply chain, everyone's ramping up at the same time.

Thank you. And then the other question on the other side of it, in terms of like finding locations for different businesses, um, is there, is there a common theme? I, every business is unique, but have you noticed that there's a common theme of like a challenge in that space? Is it just buildings aren't necessarily quite large enough or be smaller or any, or like maybe a site requires a ton of remediation or effort to be usable? I'm just curious about that.

Yeah. So, um, You get a lot of recruitment opportunities, leads from the State Department of Commerce. For companies looking to expand, they will hire a site selector. That site selector will do a real quick look at the buildings and the environments around the country. They'll pick some states, and then they'll send them out to other states. They come to us, and we distribute it to our partners across Pierce County. A lot of those projects are looking for three, four, 500 acres green fields. They're looking at two, three, four, 500 megawatts of power. And we don't have that. We do not have that type of land. So a lot of those projects, we just pass on. We don't have that. What we do have, and I think we just probably struggle over 50 acres at the moment throughout this country. There are some spots at the port that need cleaning up. They're a little bit bigger than 50 acres, but they're going to take years before they're cleaned up. But yeah, so on the small side, we don't really have a constraint. We can actually handle most of the small and medium size requests that come in. We can find a place for them somewhere at the company. That's not a big issue. But it's those larger projects that there's a lot more of these days. So much sort of money, data centers or gigafactories or these sorts of things. They're looking at building massive levels and we don't have that type of land. It's really hard to find anywhere in sort of Western Washington that's close to a population density or the construction that's needed. So that's one of the struggles we're having. We have under about 100,000 square feet we have lower vacancy rates. So that means they're basically pretty full, over 100,000 square feet building, seeing some higher vacancy rates. I mean, that will fill in eventually, but it's not filling in right now. And we're seeing that trend right across Western Washington. So that's a little disconcerting, but I think the infrastructure's there, the buildings are in place. It's just a matter of time. But it's those bigger projects that we're struggling with.

Can I say two specifically? But with inside city limits, even like the medium-sized, we just don't have that many areas that are zoned for industrial manufacturing, regular constraint, valley-valley in the port, which a lot of areas, especially in the port, still need to be cleaned up. So a lot of those end up kind of moving out to the county because they have more available land, even for the medium-sized companies.

But even now, the parts of the county probably can't farm 50 acres.

which is important. Thank you. One definition question. Can you give me an example of cleantech just so I have an idea of what that means?

Yeah, and I think it's a pretty broad term. Paul's probably better at being able to explain that. But we think any technology, that either is green in itself or produces something that's green. You know, talking about low hot carbon, they're talking about, you know, sustainable aviation fuel or renewable diesel, things like that, using municipal waste to actually create that. We've been working with a lot of sustainable aviation fuel companies over the years. They're looking at getting the green. If you're going to build SAF, then you need a green supply chain. And one thing that we bring to the table is 98% carbon-free power. Kip and Bush know, remembers from his TPU days and my TPU days, sort of something that sort of drilled in our heads. So that becomes a critical piece of that green. So for me, green tech means anything that either produces something that's green or, and I think as we, I was working with Paul and Debbie on the writing of the green economic strategy of the city. we also focused on those technologies that green current processes. So we thought if we just focus on green economy, that limits our ability to really make an impact. We then started talking about the greening. What are those businesses that exist today that we can actually green through their processes, through the materials that they use, all the products that they make. So we need that technology that goes to doing that. you sort of reduce the fault line, I mean, clean tech. You look at companies like Aquaga, they're cleaning up PFAS, homeostasis, which is taking carbon out of the air and creating carbon dioxide out of the air and creating carbon for batteries. So we've got a lot of those little companies around that sort of clean tech.

Thank you. Going back to something that came up when Debra and I were speaking, So when you're saying we're having some issues meeting the workforce demand, is that specifically a local issue or is that national?

I think there are national issues, but I think in general what we're seeing is people let me go back to one point I didn't bring up, and this is something that's keeping me up at night now, is that Washington graduates from high school, within eight years of high school graduation, there are less than 50% of those graduates that have a secondary certification. Only 43% are actually getting a secondary, post-secondary certification after high school age 25. That's a huge concern. And maybe that's why we're seeing a huge increase in the number of low-wage jobs that we're struggling to meet, to have people get certified. And we're talking about any sort of certification. We're not talking about four-year, two-year degrees, any post-secondary certification. That's it. And that is a Washington statistic. So it's not just a Dakota, Pierce County problem.

Well, I was just going to say, and it's a strange juxtaposition, because you said we have eight... you know, training institutions, right, in the county, and they're all very engaged and willing to, you know, even make specific training programs for workers, right? I mean, it's not that we don't have that, and I think even our department and our workforce would say we have a hard, we struggle with getting people interested in doing the internships and so it's apprenticeships and things, and so it's just weird, like, we have people, we have the education, we just are having a hard time getting people maybe motivated to do it, or, I mean, I don't know.

Yeah, I can just add the kind of cloud that hangs over all of this is how is AI going to shape the future? And I think you see a lot of younger people coming up and they're reluctant to commit to a career path because they just don't know that there are going to be jobs there. And at the same time, you have companies that are trying to figure out what can be automated, what shouldn't be automated, and what's hype, what's real. And so it's definitely an uncertainty. environment to try to navigate both on the job seeker and job hire side.

And the other thing I would probably add is that I think we're going through a transition period nationally as a workforce in education. I mean, for so many years, everyone was told, you've got to go to college, you've got to get a four-year degree, that's how you make money. And it's actually true. If you go to college, you get a four-year degree, generally speaking, you will make more money than you should have. But the ROI on that four-year education now is getting a little bit less certain. The cost of higher education increases significantly, potentially not having jobs due to AI or the sort of the market shifting to different things. People are hesitant to go into those white paper four years worth of college if you don't know what you're going to get out at the end. But at the same time, all those years that we told everyone to go to college, we told them don't go into the trades. because you'll make more money going to college. So all of a sudden, we don't have people going to college, we don't have people going to trades, and we're having a workforce shortage. But I think people are starting to see that the trades and skilled employment is actually critical, and you can have a good, there's a career path there, and you can do well. But I think we're in that transition period where people are really about sort of those post-secondary education routes that they want to take and lots of that. And that's a national problem, it's not just a current one.

I felt good about that four-year degree. I have not done anything that is specifically related to my degree since graduating, however many years ago it was now. But yeah, I get that. You actually answered the other question that I had, and I guess it brought up another question. When you talked about the marketing piece of it,

are doing is marketing these programs to the workforce part of that or are you just kind of marketing like the business side of things yeah so we work with workforce central i mean they're really the workforce folks and whatever they do we amplify we work closely with them we're not workforce experts and so um and that's you know going back to what deputy manager was saying is that um You can't do economic development. This is a team sport. You have to have partners. You have to have a team. And so we look to each other's specialties and areas of expertise, and we lean on them when we meet. We don't know everything. We just don't. But these guys know what's happening specifically in Tacoma. Becky knows what's happening in Lakewood, you know, and others. So we lean on them pretty heavily when it comes to that. And Workforce is one of those. Impact Washington is another partner of ours. They work with our manufacturing clients, doing lean manufacturing, working on Workforce training, production line design and things like that. We don't know any of that stuff. So we bring in those folks that we know have the expertise to help the businesses thrive. Thank you.

Oh, I was just going to say one other interesting fact is that even with that, I mean, the team sport aspect, right? And I know one of the items on the kind of city management plan is to work with partners to evaluate, you know, the economic... Development, you know, what are we missing? What are the holes and where do we get better? And I think it's interesting, though, even the county, like Pierce County, we don't really consider ourselves necessarily working against them. We're working together because if a company wants to come and be in rural Pierce County, they're going to go there. They're not going to decide between downtown Tacoma and rural Pierce County, you know, so we do. work together and they're one of the partners and it's just you know it really is we have to include everybody to get the best outcomes for and also if we get a manufacturing outside of the city it still benefits the city because most of those manufacturing goods are coming through the port or they're being sold in this area so the more we can build up the whole county yeah and i think it's an important point where agnostic goes to where business goes i mean they want to sometimes the port will call us and say hey got a call from a business we can't

We can't fit them in the port. We're going to, we're going to show them to you. And then our job then is to get up to our partners across the county and find out if we can find a place in Pierce County. We want to capture them. So they don't, we can't fit them in Tacoma. We work with the rest of the county. And if we can't get them in the rest of the county, we try and get them in the nearby county because we all benefit from that as well. Stronger regional economy makes us stronger. And again, workforce moves across these artificial boundaries that we created. So a facility in Thurston or in South King is, I mean, a lot of our people work in South King County. That money comes back to Pierce County to come. We want them to work here too, but we're working. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

I had a question which is, I'm very familiar with how the chamber organizes. There's lots of small businesses that organize themselves. There's certainly a lot of, obviously, the contractors are organized in the room. Labor organizes themselves. And it seems like y'all are the ones that are working closely with our manufacturing partners. So is there a place or a space in which you guys can network and talk with each other or talk with any other actors? When I see the slide where you're talking about how do you advocate for those? I'm wondering how do we connect them? In my mind, there are a lot more folks who are either literally building the widgets or the people who I'm sure people building the widget. How do we connect them with our small businesses, with other sectors? How do we make that mix happen? Are you guys doing that already? Yeah. Who's the catalyst for that?

Yeah, we do that on a small basis during our BRE visits. If we make those connections, if someone says, you know, I'm struggling to get this, I go, okay, well, we know a company that does that. We'll connect you. Or we know someone who will know a company. So we make the connections, so they're unique connections as we do our VRE business, we make those unique connections. We're also working with other companies that say, we're not necessarily doing a VRE visit, but they'll call us and say, Hey, we're an industrial symbiosis company, we need wood waste to sort of do the stuff that we do. So even though they're not necessarily a client of ours, the one that we visit, we try to make the connections between them and find someone who can actually support them. And that's just something that came up recently. So yeah, we do make those connections, but they're more on an individual basis based on the needs of the company.

Okay. So there's no say annual quarterly space where all these folks come together that

No, there are other organizations that do some of that stuff. So what we don't get with focusing on that traded sector side, on the service side, is we have those partners to do that. So we don't do it ourselves.

Who are those partners? We're trying to figure out who we're wearing in that space. If it's not you, it's still canceled.

Yeah, I think you want to...

They're sticking online, the Hospitality Association, the Chamber of Citizenship, the Chamber of Citizenship, the Business Association, the Small and Community Services Association. So there's a whole variety of World Trade Organization. There's a lot of different partners that if someone tells them something, they're trying to connect with them. And they need to get something out of their system.

So there's always the Chamber primarily. I don't know if that works. I don't know if it works.

So that small service business that the hospitality association focuses on, hospitality, you have our master builders, and there's a lot of different associations that do this. So when we do raise or recruitment, we care about what the needs are, and then we try to align those. So if someone were coming in to connect to master builders, we would connect them into master builders because that helps us.

Master builders, thank you.

I was trying to make sure that there wasn't anything that you guys are convening that I am missing from my report. All the existing things.

Yeah. And again, we don't want to duplicate what's already been done by our partners. It's just, we have a whole bunch of services in one area and nothing in the other. So, well, those areas are covered. Yeah.

You do, like, there's the Manufacturing Festival Council, I'm sure you're aware of, and Michael will go to those, you know, Paul goes to those meetings, so that we're aware that a lot of manufacturers come to that monthly meeting to talk about their, what issues they're dealing with.

Trade issues where, you know, we're connected to North North, we're SQL Alive, we've got Trade Center, so those companies that need trade-related assistance, they're the experts, so we, again, 40-member board so it sounds like that's where the mixture is and then now that you've got a full staff i assume that i will see the full staff in the community yeah yeah yeah absolutely absolutely um just because i think

Maybe with the changeover, I feel like EDV, if I don't catch you, I don't know who to catch there. So I think now it's probably another spot in general.

Yeah. And to be honest, I've been internally focused for a little longer than I would have liked. But we've built out the foundations of the organizations and modernized a lot of processes and put a lot of new systems in place that we can actually do more with less now. So I'm really excited about that.

And I'm excited about the fact that y'all do that work sort of on this micro one-to-one level. So when you mentioned Workforce Central being a partner that you're thinking about connecting, trying to find more seamstresses for this business, trying to do that, I immediately think of three small businesses who are either tailors or seamstress or folks who would like, they would probably help Workforce Central find the trade. One of them I literally saw is doing a class to help people learn how to sew next week. So how do we make those connections, and that's why I was asking about where those spaces are so you make those purchase.

Yeah. And we did a... Actually, we all went. We all went to visit another company that uses seamstresses, a larger company, and they're looking at expanding. So they're going to have... So there seems to be a need for seamstresses right now, so hopefully we can make sure that as we grow one business, the other businesses benefit from it.

Yeah, it is a big need. I saw some deadline at some point last month, I think, where tailors and seamstresses are the, they're going to see, was essentially the headline. And so clearly we're seeing it. Yeah. Other sort of my initial question I have for you was on slide 13, I think it is. There's one that's just a closer look at Tacoma. It's got our population. It's got just the city of Tacoma map. I'm wondering if you can speak to it. Is there a significance of the color coded zip codes on there?

No, no, no, no, no. It's just how it comes up on my cast. To get the Tacoma information, I've got to pick out the zip codes. So it's just, no, there is no.

I was like, I could attribute what I would think blue or red.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, quite frankly, it looks like it was manufactured, but I just wasn't sure if there was a bullet there.

Let me just zip code. That's all.

Great.

That's a great question. I should probably note that.

I mean, I've lost the message. But anyway, thank you so much for the presentation.

My pleasure.

Thank you. Great. We will move on to our next piece of culture, which is me. I am going to do a quick overview of the WeWork that we did for community workforce agreements and outreach. As folks know, we had, I think to maybe make the picture a little bit bigger, last year we had a table here at the Economic Development Committee on wage theft. Um, and we started to have some early competitions throughout what a CWA in Tacoma would look like, dusted off a report from 2017 to see how that task force that had a different title, but looked at a similar topic, um, that helped create the LEAP program, the EIC program. Um, fast forward to today, um, we have been holding round tables between May 29th and June 17th, um, with myself and Mayor, um, Ibsen. to reach out to key stakeholders to discuss community workforce agreements and project labor agreements. So I suppose came in and gave some comment today. The first meeting that we had was with prime contractors. The second was with subcontractors with a focus on women and minority owned business enterprises, WMPs. And the third was with labor partners. We centered most of our questions around identifying best practices of other public agencies and understanding what the trade-offs could and should be considered as the city considers this policy. I added this on the agenda today to make sure that everyone had a good overview of the feedback we collected. So there will be a high-level memo summary in the packet that is released online. folks will be able to see that. I don't think we have any more paper copies, right? So if you didn't get one, please feel free to grab one in the front. Um, and like I said, it will be posted online to folks who are online. Um, there is a bigger report coming that I referenced in all the stakeholder meetings where we'll have outlines of all of the comments that were given, any major suggestions that we will be putting forward, and then future, um, committee will be able to consider any kind of a proposal that is then created from those recommendations and from that feedback. I just wanted to make sure that I was able to circle up with folks since we've been having online conversations. There was a lot of energy around making sure that folks knew what the process was going to look like. Because there is no exact proposal in front of us, we want to make sure that we're being clear about what the timeline is, what the updates look like. I'm very, very thankful for everybody who took a lot of time out of their schedules to come here. folks have been coming to committee meetings over the last few months which i'm sure are going to continue to engage and i know that particularly for our contracting community that time is literally money so it's not lost on me it's very i'm very grateful um and uh we want to make sure that folks know that we in the subcontractor group folks have been interested in linda sharing out additional contact information so folks can't organize themselves can't talk with each other And committee members or other council members who are not in the room today are able to reach out to them directly. So we will be putting that out there. We want to make sure everybody has an ability to be transparent and reach out to folks. Since the mayor and I were the conveners of the group, we got to hear the bulk of everything. And we will be putting out a report, but we wanted to invite folks to be able to reach out, right? Not everybody is as unshy as Tim is. And so we want to make sure that people are making sure that they're able to have the dialogue they want to have with their different council members. I've been reminding folks along the way that we do not have a strong mayor system. So there are nine people who get to vote on a policy. No assurances from any one council member will get us anywhere. And then I just wanted to, again, thank you, Rudy. Make sure we all are very clear. There's a lot of information that will be coming to digest. And that... I will be looking forward to bringing something to the end of July or early August back to this committee for us to at least look at before it goes to the full committee. I think just to make sure that we're getting any actual proposals to the full committee for their consideration so that the weight is not lost here on us, but that other folks get a chance to weigh on any actual language of proposals that are put together. So with that said, I will open if anybody has any questions in the committee. Sorry, Mayor. I realize you probably haven't had a chance to look at the profile yet.

No, I was going to say, I'll definitely take some more time to look through this and check in with you. But I did have one question that I think came up when I was speaking. There's CWA, which I understand, PLA, which is the New York State Law.

I don't know what that is. That's Apprentice Civilization. Thank you.

That was my main immediate question. I just wanted to make sure everyone's tracking all of that. But I appreciate that you're taking the time to just talk with all of us and get feedback. And I've had some people reach out to me as well. And so I've been able to get some input in that regard. And I also just wanted to just put out there that to any of you at Roomsday or anybody listening online or anybody listening to this later that I'm always happy to have as much information I can through decisions that impact people in a lot of different ways. So feel free to reach out. Thank you.

And we'll make sure, I think, as we're doing the work, I'm sure Linda will have some sort of a glossary or something, because we use a ton of acronyms, and say, well, you've been deep in it. I mean, as you asked it, I didn't remember until I had to say it. Thank you. Good reminder.

What's the best way to get question or response or comment to you guys. I know that you have your general emails. I know those probably get a lot of people that reach into those. It's not the best way to do it. You guys do look at all that.

Folks are also always welcome to email us and I think we're all

in our capacity, is really willing to sit down for coffee with folks, for meetings individually. I think, I don't know, a single council member or elected official in general who has wanted pitching to talk to people. So a bunch of general, even introverts, are like, oh, I want to make a good policy. So reaching out to have a conversation is usually the best way, but information sort of in a one-way here, the information is always also received.

I would like to offer up that I'm currently about to engage in a CWA against my will, of course. The process is already complicated. I was like, maybe I should just videotape this, videotape my conversations with the union representatives, with the prime, send this to the city council so that they understand the way that things are communicated to those of us who are contractors, or if you're able, like, You can take a field trip down to my small little basement office in my mom's house so that you can kind of get a full experience of what it's like trying to navigate one of these things. Because, again, there are so many barriers. There are so many hardships. If I had something positive to say, I would say it.

I just don't. No worries. I repeat myself. If anybody's online. I'm having to offer to tape a negotiation she's going to do. So I welcome you to do that, to send it to us. You can certainly send it to us directly as individuals. You can send it to the clerk's office. They will send it to all of us. Either direction, we receive all those things. I am certainly interested in that if you want to do that. And if your parties are interested in that, I don't know if everyone is, but I absolutely welcome that. Thank you.

I do not have questions. I just appreciate all the outreach and effort. I think this is a very, it's a very expansive subject and it really goes into the rabbit hole quite a bit. And so, yeah, I really appreciate the engagement from all the partners and really talking about this in earnest. And I'm happy to, like Councilmember Chair Diaz said, I'm happy to sit down. I do read my emails. uh even not even if i'm not able to respond to all of them because they do get a lot um and then i have my city cell phone number it's you know 253-312-0550 you can text or call um if i don't get back to you right away i'll definitely call you back um but uh yeah happy to talk with with anybody about this and learn more i don't assume i know everything yeah i think this has been a very fun execution project for us

We also, I should point out that I forgot to mention in my talking break, so we did hear a lot of concerns that have nothing to do with the CWA from small businesses particularly, but from other folks, even our labor partners. So if any of those ideas pull out, we will definitely include that in the broader report as well. Like, this has nothing to do with this topic, but this is something that the council can take action on to identify those things as well. I should actually formally close this and then open some back, but for public comment, I went a little wild here, but I will do that. And the committee votes have no more questions. Public comment. Do you want to come around here, state your name, and do a public comment for me? You're welcome to. No worries at all. I just want to make sure you're on the mic because people will watch the recording.

Thank you.

Chris Ramos leads Demolition. We're a full union contractor. I got a lot of information to give you guys for your records. I haven't been able to do it in more than 20 hour days again. Last night I was out chatting and woke up late. I got a lot of information to give you as far as the working capital. what a company has to flow, be in full agreement, how the struggles are, the rules and regulations, just everything that we have to do is on a day-to-day basis to be helpful for you. But I'm planning to do this.

No worries. Thank you. We've got time, too. Our timeline is late July, August, so we've got time. Thank you.

Appreciate you coming up.

Does anybody else have anything they wanted to add on a couple of times?

Chris. My name is Mike Hall. I work with 2G and Science here in Tacoma. I'm a long-time employee there. I'm also second vice president of ATC. So two different seats that I sit in and two different perspectives sometimes as well. We've talked, I've communicated to you many times. We're union contractors, so I walk a fine line when I'm talking about the PLAs. Jared knows it well. But I wanted to just reiterate, because I sat in on the subcontractor committee as well as the general contractors meeting as well, was the amount of passion that was given up, especially from these two ladies behind me and from Chris himself, about what the CWA and what a PLA will do to a small contractor. As a general contractor, it doesn't necessarily affect us like it does these people. Since we're union, we pay our union dues, we do everything that we have to do and the union requires. We need small contractors in order to work within the city of Tacoma. For any agency, actually, but in particular in the city of Tacoma. Without those small contractors, we cannot bid the work within the city of Tacoma. We can't meet the goals that you guys have established. CWA is the way that they're set up. PLA is the way that they're set up. Can limit the amount of small businesses that are able to work, period. Chris will give testimony to what it's like to be a union contractor and abide by the union rules. And Helica has a great explanation of what it's like to work within a PLA. She's worked on before and she's, like she said, currently moving into one. I know these two intimately because they're protégés of mine. I get to mentor them and it's a great deal to be able to learn through them as well. But I want to come back to the iteration, reiteration of the amount of passion that was distributed and shown here during your subcontracting meeting in particular. It affects these people to the bone. So thank you. Thank you. Right on time, too.

Great. Oh, yeah. Kim, come on back.

My name is Kit Burns. One of the stunning things I heard today was when 50% of the people don't get a post-secondary degree. That's really shocking and disturbing. And I look as an architect, it doesn't matter what the degree is, if it's a skilled electrician, if it's a skilled carpenter, any kind of technician, any post-secondary degree. So I think that's a serious thing in our community because that's an investment in the future. The second thing I'll say, and then I'll finish up, is that on the LEAP program, when I was looking at that, it seems like they need a lot of people on that. And it seems like a really good program. So I hope to hear in the future how that's doing. So I'll look forward to it more. Thank you.

Thank you. For a second. We'll go into the topics for upcoming meetings. For a second. Great.

Jennifer, it's your turn. Thank you. Thank you. So on June 30th, we are scheduled to have a discussion on the Tacoma Minimum Wage Community and Stakeholder Engagement Report. On July 14th, Equity and Contracting Advisory Committee interviews and the $20 minimum wage proposal discussion. And on July 28th, Spaceworks Tacoma Annual Report.

Perfect. Thank you. Exciting July ahead. I will go to other items of interest. Great. My one thing that I should have said earlier and I will say now is I really, really want to thank particularly for all of her work coming to all the roundtables in addition to Linda Foster. Staff has been really great. Corey was able to come to a couple meetings from Public Works. And I know that some of that work probably trickles out to the rest of the CE department. So I wanted to thank you all for any support that you've been giving. And as we're developing these policies going forward, I know this is probably a bigger shift from where this committee has done work in the past. So I really appreciate the lift and the support and the help, especially as we're all transitioning. And I will just encourage Kit to chat with staff about this. Or Jared, because Jared's also here, and he's the chair, please. So, those are my last two things. I will entertain the final motion.

Move to adjourn.

Second. All those in favor, do you want to say aye? Aye. We are...