EDC fourth quarter report and Penny for Pasco

1:39:06Good morning everyone. Happy Tuesday and I'm glad you got the consent items approved. That would have been a major issue. Um it's my pleasure today to present to you our uh fourth quarter report for the Pasco EDC uh with regards to our contract for a memorandum of understanding, as well as our uh agreement for the penny for PASCO. Do I have thank you? Clicker. Uh first of all before I uh proceed I'll I'll go fairly quickly and give you some uh summary

1:39:37um slides as well too. But I did want to mention I think it'd be great if we scholarship the media into our Citizens Academy so that they could start telling that story. And I don't know how many of them live here in Pasco, but I wish they were sitting here today to hear everything that was talked about today. This was a great meeting. So more good news. We didn't save any lives or anything like that, but we created some jobs and helped to create jobs. So first I'll talk about the MOU and I believe

1:40:07this is the you know the good news report. We had 13 wins over this last year, which coincidentally was our goal. We still have about six that uh are coming to you very soon in the Hopper project. that are in those late stages. Um actually seven, you see down at the bottom there. But last year we had 13 wins, $188 million of capital investment, just a little shy of $200 million, and $3,400 jobs in the

1:40:37area. um a a mix of the types of companies that are coming here. I think this is probably some of the best news is the wins are those that are in the black and you've got high tech, uh advanced manufacturing, stuff that we historically really didn't get a chance to to be participants in and now we're winning these projects. But as you can see, the pipeline is full and for those of you who have ever been in sales before You see our leads are 90 and our projects are 125. Uh our our our funnel

1:41:07is a little inverted right now because we've got a lot of really good activity that's transformed into projects and not just leads. Historically, we average about 30 projects at a time, not 125. So that'll tell you how busy we are, not just by looking out in the community. Business retention, again, this is where we spend a lot of our time. It's not just moving people here, but it's taking care of them after they're here and helping them to grow. And part of that is getting out there and actually visiting them, understanding their business,

1:41:38year-to-day. We ended up with uh 85 unique visits. Several of them were multiple visits, going back and helping out companies. And quite a few workforce connections, 133 connections, and that's referring people to AM skills, to career source. That's also really indicative of our future as well. We're going to be doubling down on workforce development as well as entrepreneurship going forward. Forward. Uh events and conferences, again, this is just the fourth

1:42:08quarter. O over the um the year we hit our goals and we got the word out. Those that are in bold are those that we actually hosted ourselves and a lot of them you all participated in as well. We are your marketing agency for business and economic development, and I'm proud to say we had $1.5 million of earned media value. Now I still haven't figured out how to bring that to the bank and cash it, but that is something that it shows the multiplication of our media

1:42:38that picks up on our stories and tells our stories. And sometimes that's better than me telling our stories. because I'm I'm the hired help. Uh website views, fourth quarter, twenty-five thousand. That's qu that's quite a bit actually considering we didn't have a lot of big events that that quarter, so you ended up with a lot of people um that were looking. And if you look at where those hits are coming from, no surprise, California, New York. We don't want all of them. Well we want some of

1:43:08them of course to to come and locate here. Georgia, Virginia, and Washington. Uh market social media highlights and again 425,000 impressions, 56,000 engagements. That's where people are actually conversing back and forth. And a lot of that is our our startups and our smaller companies here. As far as our public-private partnership, where we're at right now, we've got 82 total investors, private sector investors, and a new one. this

1:43:39term right here from Dade City, uh Tiger Concrete and Screed. We raised um $682,000 from the private sector and our uh board and policy council members we've got 40 total so uh a lot of participation from the private sector here. Um Some events that we had, uh again, the annual awards, very happy and proud of our uh leadership award this year was to Mr. Ray Gand, who's done so much not just for

1:44:09education, but for economic development and for all of our community, especially the Penny for Pasco. Upcoming events, and I'll see you all in a couple of weeks for our investor party at 4G. Also, at that time, you'll be getting a copy, a new copy of the annual report, which will be published by that time, and we'll have lots of glosses and more stats that back up some of these items. PASCO 50 is going to be December 7th, Pearl Harbor Day, and again, this is that Workforce Connect program where we're bringing. in the HR

1:44:39and leaders from the top 50 companies from each side of the county to understand what their needs are. If you don't have any questions on the MO, you all quickly go for the penny for Pasco. Okay.

1:44:50Pasco.

1:44:52All right. Lots of awards this year. Um we had nine awards from our peer and industry organizations. Um many of them were national and international in scope. This is from the International Economic Development Council, that is our accreditation agency. We actually got four awards. These are mock-ups and they only had three available for us. We were the only group that had four awards. So um so just pretend one of those is two. Yeah. But there's nothing better than having your peers say, you're doing a great job as well.

1:45:22Um ready sites, it's it's interesting. The first item on the ready sites, and these are summaries of those big uh penny items. Zephyrhills and Airport Industrial Park final round of site selection for a manufacturing company to locate on this site. Remember this is fourth quarter, so this was prior to October one. You guys met the company not long afterwards which was Paduco that came to get.

1:45:46Hang on one moment. Commissioner Weightman?

1:45:48Just a a comment. We talked briefly on this. But for our ready sites, are those protected? From Live Local.

1:45:55Yes. Yeah. The the Ready Sites, um all of our ready sites are under an agreement with us as well, too. Um most of them are about five year agreements. So if we don't get 'em marketed and somebody in those sites by that time, um they they can come back and ask for rezoning, but most of them uh probably hopefully will be used by that time and we get Somebody enter. Um that is something that the Ready Sites uh so Ready Sites was established um 2015,

1:46:272016. And a lot of it had to do with some of these same issues that we're working with with Live Local and that is preserving land for industry because industry doesn't necessarily move as fast as residential and making sure that we've got that job creation there. Um ReadySites took us almost five years to change the culture of land ownership in Pasco. Um Keeping in mind a lot of the landowners here were ranchers that uh had residential developers beaten at their door. We had

1:46:57to go convince them not only to set this side set aside the land, to invest in it, to go market it and potentially sell it for less, uh, industrial versus residential. So as you can imagine, that's a really tough sell for us to convince those landowners to do. But after five years we now have about two thousand acres of sites and they're working. So it's all very related and very similar. The key was to preserve that land for industrial growth, but not forever. Preserve it

1:47:27Until we get the jobs there. Great question. Uh international program. Uh we continue to to grow and work with our neighbors to the south, uh Pinellas and Hillsboro. We had a trade mission to Santa Domingo this year. We had three of our Pasco companies uh participate in it, which we're starting to see more and more of that as people looking for outside markets. Um and we joined the Southeast U.S. delegation uh to Japan along with Moffitt and uh we

1:47:57attended the bio show in in Japan to try to uh attract more life sciences companies to the new Sparrows campus. Enhanced marketing, we talked about the awards we won. Uh Workforce Connect. Workforce Connect uh has historically been its own program department, and that again that's working in the interest of the employers, not necessarily uh the employees. There's a lot of different agencies that are working in the interest of the employees. So this is for employers when they're looking to hire uh

1:48:28people to help them shepherd through that system. That now has grown into a tool. called Connect OP and you'll see that in the annual report and uh we'll be doing a another launch on that so that you can actually try out the app and as well. Executive success program. We kicked off another cohort in September. Um and Smart Start. So Smart Start, our third location at uh West Pasco was opened this uh quarter or last quarter

1:48:58and we're co-located with AMSkills. And so far it has been an amazing um partnership because uh they're thinking along the same lines as we are, and we're talking about skills uh that people can take and and actually make a living out of it.

1:49:13Can I make a c can I make a comment on that one?

1:49:15Mr. Stark?

1:49:16So one of your members over there is a guy that makes signs. And he mentioned that you know right now he doesn't have a CNC machine, doesn't know how to use it, but he wants to grow into grow his business to where he is cutting uh materials on C and C and so I said to him, Why don't you just come use our machines? You know, we can work out you don't have to invest in your own until you're you know ready for that, but you can work out something with AM skills where you learn how to do it and do it on our machines.

1:49:45That's right.

1:49:46So that's how that's how that partnership can work uh between the P E D C and uh the customers and us. So

1:49:53Yeah, and and I think really similar to like uh even even the Dade City incubator where we've got a commercial kitchen. So you've got people that can actually do hands-on working with equipment that was either donated or or brought from the county to be able to grow their business. And you you know how expensive those machines are. Can you imagine as a startup going out purchase a machine and then find out, oh, that's not my cup of tea. That's a lot of money to put out there. So um these are really helping the people in each one of those neighborhoods and each one of those regions. Um I'm

1:50:23gonna go ahead and skip to the end, which is kind of the report card for the end of the year. 'Cause I I believe all of these are in your packets, but each of the programs has a um a dashboard to it.

1:50:37And if I can get to the end.

1:50:44Oops, okay.

1:50:48Well too far. Okay, I guess I'm done. Okay. Uh There we go. Thank you. Somebody's helping me a little bit. So when you look at the overall dashboard, you see we're trending 94%. I like to say that's an A. There's always room for improvement, and again, this is this is the specifically the penny programs. Between the two programs, between the MOU working with general funds and working with the penny, at the end of this year. We found that the return on investment

1:51:19for the public dollar is 221 to one. So every dollar that we're getting from the public, we're creating $221 in output to our local uh gross county product. So I will stop there and see if you have any questions. And I know you've got a couple things you want to try to do before lunch today.

1:51:36Okay. Any questions?

1:51:40I'm gonna throw one question at you.

1:51:41Yeah.

1:51:42We're talking about the ready uh ready site, so we've got Safari's airport, how critical it is, rail lines there, airports there. Um A subject coming up today, it's due for the next one, but we'll do one more one in between. On the Greater Laccucci area. Uh we've talked about the railhead, the rail spur. How important is that to try to capitalize on for the county here?

1:52:01Oh huge, huge. Not only that, uh not just for Lacucci in that region to create jobs in that area. Uh historically at CSX spur, that spur coming down out of Jacksonville has not been uh the most efficient and the fastest and I think the more activity down here the more it will warrant more uh attention from CSX and that we can start actually marketing the other rail serve sites that we have around there too. We have you remember we have one of our large

1:52:31ready sites over a thousand acres uh the enterprise site that is served by CSX not far from there. So each Each one of these incremental wins that we make by getting more rail traffic. One, we get trucks off the road. Two, we're getting jobs and three we're making really good use of of that rail um alignment that that we can that we can utilize for business there. So it is important. And uh uh CSX uh railroads don't move very easily or very quickly we know um and I

1:53:01really appreciate the perseverance to continue to work on 'em, not just for that but also for things like trails and uh other uh track space that they have that they might not be utilizing too.

1:53:12Okay. I'm gonna throw one other idea to you to you too. It's gonna be quite conversational later on today. We're gonna be looking at some developments in the connected cities, um also the V O P H. And what we're finding is sometimes we get some stuff we want to have come in, but there's not enough infrastructure in place um to make it all happen. And we need a look gonna need some creative ways to talk about it as a commission coming up. Um and I think one of the things the great job you've done with the Penny for Pasco is give giving us that flexibility with transportation and

1:53:42that may be one of the venues we use to even improve our return a little bit more.

1:53:46Yeah yeah I I I agree and and again that project uh you know I don't think anybody had the crystal ball back then to know how this county was going to grow. At the rapid rate that uh we're working at, and then inflation on top of that. But yeah, there are still quite some entitlements out there we'd like to see utilized, uh especially the business piece of it to create some jobs out there too. Um those of you that drove from the other side of the county, you know the traffic is uh getting more congested out here. The more jobs we create locally,

1:54:17much better it's gonna be to get those people off the road. Yeah.

1:54:20Okay. Well, I thank you very much for my great presentation, the great work you're doing. Uh I have one more thing

1:54:29to share. And um you guys notice I've been I've been riding bike on the trails about twenty two miles each time and I see runners every once in a while at twenty two miles and I'm like, I don't know how they do it. But I don't know if you all realize that our own chief of staff Rand the Tampa One Hundred. One hundredth miles I can't fathom it, but I have just a small token of just admiration for you.