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HomeMy WebLinkAboutEconomic Advisory Board - MINUTES - 09/18/2024Page 1 06/26/24 Minutes Economic Advisory Board REGULAR MEETING Wednesday, September 18, 2024 – 4:00 PM 300 Laporte Ave, CIC Room 1. CALL TO ORDER: 4:00 PM 2. ROLL CALL a. Board Members Present – • Tim Cochran • Denny Coleman • Chris Denton • Thierry Dossou • Erin Gray • Val Kailburn • Braulio Rojas • Richard Waal • Renee Walkup b. Board Members Absent – c. Staff Members Present – • Ashley Kailburn, Sr Specialist, Economic Health Office • Erin Sporer, Business Support, Economic Health Office • Tyler Menzales, Sr Manager, Economic Health Office • Davina Lau, Specialist, Public Engagement, City Clerk’s Office • Kimberly Holbrook, Sr. Analyst, Administration, City Clerk’s Office d. Guest(s) – • Mike Freeman, CEO & General Partner - Innosphere 3. AGENDA REVIEW 4. PUBLIC PARTICIPATION 5. APPROVAL OF MINUTES a. Chris motioned and Val seconds to approve the August Minutes. Motion carried Unanimous. 8-0. 6. NEW BUSINESS a. Review of Board and Commissions: Roles, Responsibilities, Memo Guidance, etc. • The board wants to contribute to Council and give them opinions but there is a concern about timing and missing the process. Page 2 06/26/24 Minutes • Boards are struggling to feel useful or effective when it comes to their relationship with Council. The 6-month calendar is a good way to get ahead, but it can also be adjusted. Davina also recommended making public comment at Council meetings if they are short on turn around time for a memo. Board members cannot speak on behalf of the board, and they have to identify themself as a board member. Davina will find out if they are able to read a memo from the board during public comment. EAB is not the only board facing this issue. • How are the other board doing it? • They have not heard of a solid solution across boards and commissions. It is a larger conversation that Davina needs to have with Council to find ways to open a more fluid dialog between Council and Boards and Commissions vs just memos and recommendations. The board can also always invite their Council liaison to one of their meetings. • The board stated it would be nice if Council knew something was coming and wanted EAB’s opinion, they could flag the board, so they had time to look into it and have time to provide a memo for it. • Davina has heard that across boards and commissions, that they want some direction from Council, but Council isn’t supposed to direct their work. They can always ask but the board has the right to say no. • Renee stated this is one of the strongest boards she has seen in her six years as a board member, and they want to help. They are also aware how busy Council is. This board is unique because it covers almost everything. When there is a super issues meeting and they are talking about utilities, water, or economic health, it all affects EAB because it all affects the economy in the city. Part of the challenge is the board feel really hand strung with the timing. They have a tremendous amount of talent and experience and want to help but don’t feel like they can. • The board expressed frustration regarding writing their last memo due to needing revisions to be publicly available. They already don’t have enough time, and it seems like a big waste of time. They feel like they can’t do their job. • Kimberly and Davina explained the differences between Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) and Colorado Open Meetings Law. • If a document is requested via CORA and it is in true draft form before it has been finalized, it is considered a draft, and drafts don’t have to go out. Not sure if that would stand up in court if they push it but a draft form is not submitted and designed to be a draft. • If a draft has been submitted in the agenda it cannot be changed after it has been submitted until the meeting. • Colorado Open Meetings Law states that if more than two board members are meeting or discussing board business, it has to be publicly noticed. That includes text messages and emails which is why the board cannot pass around a document like a memo and make comments. That must be available to the public. • If someone sends out a draft, is there a way to get comments or edits on it before the meeting or are they not allowed to discuss the draft prior to the board meeting? • Individual comments and edits can be made and sent to your staff liaison or staff support, then those can be compiled and that can be Page 3 06/26/24 Minutes discussed at your next meeting. It is just a matter of maintaining that transparency throughout the process. It cannot be a working document where they make comments on the document it has to go to the staff liaison. If everyone is making comments, it could be considered a dialog. • The board discussed different ideas on how they could do edits on a memo, but the issue kept coming down to more than two board members in a document. • Doesn’t Council have closed meetings? • They have executive sessions, and they are a little different. There are very specific parameters under which you can go into an executive session. Lawyers are present and it is still recorded but not open to the public. • How many memos are other boards delivering? We want to do more but how realistic are we being? • There is no set number. Davina didn’t want any board or commission to feel like the benefit of the work they do is based off outcome of memos or recommendations, but we see generally 2-4 memos a year. Some boards send joint memos as well. • The board had an idea to use standard verbiage and then add details to it to make writing memos quicker. The board can also have special meetings to write or edit a memo. Two people could also collaborate and bring it back at the next meeting. • The best suggestion from the attorney’s office is to individually make your edits, send those to the staff liaison to then compile that draft to be discussed at the following meeting. The comments and edits could be included in the posted draft because that is what will be discussed. • How long do you advise memos to be? The board usually tries to stick to 1-2 pages. • No limit but Davina thought 1-2 pages is perfect to get a point across to Council. Some topics need more detail but how can they be concise but still give the full story with details. They board should be comfortable with what they are producing. • Davina wants the board to feel like their time is valued. b. NSF CO-WY Engins • Innopshere is a 503c. City of Fort Collins and Colorado State University were two of the three founders. • Four main functions • Support life science startup companies • Support clean tech climate startup companies • Venture capital • Two Colorado focused venture funds • Founded and involved in two funds that are Israeli based • Real estate • 2023 Snapshot • 49 companies, 50 patents filed, $20 million capital raised, $15 million revenue generated, 250 high pay jobs created, and 200 more FTE in real estate. • Life sciences program • 7 states and 9 research universities involved • 34 companies in the program Page 4 06/26/24 Minutes • Outcome target • Economic growth: job creation and funding • Advancement in life sciences: intellectual property and strategic partnerships • Diversity and inclusion: DEIA relevant and disadvantaged communities • Steps include foundation, acceleration, and momentum and exposure • The program will get bigger in years two and three and want to run a program over entire Midwest in 4 years. • Most companies are based in Colorado. • CO-WY Engine • Covid caused the US government to get back into the business of economic development which led to legislation called the CHIPS act. With that there were multiple programs and objectives. Semiconductors were one of them. The other parts were Economic Development Administration (EDA) and National Science Foundation (NSF) funding. • EDA used $1 Billion to go after technology from a program called Bill Back Better. Innopshere led a program that go to the finals. They were able to leverage university, corporate and government partnerships. Even though they didn’t get it, it created infrastructure to do something large scale, including NSF’s program Engine. • Vision: Colorado – Wyoming Engine (CO-WY Engine) will power pathways toward climate resiliency innovation by translating environmental monitoring technologies and predictive analytics into trustworthy decision support systems. • Engine proposal had to do three things: clearly identify technology of critical US significance, show that you have some ability to create new technology, and create a nationally significant ecosystem. • You have to be a critical technology that is outlined int eh CHIPS Act • You have to have globally significant research and development capability. • You have to have the technology area of US significance. You have to go take it to market (Innopshere owns this piece of it) • 10 engines up to 1$60 million in funding for NSF over 3 phases and you need about $450 million to match. • CO-WY Engine is a two-state region, and they plan to engage in rural and underrepresented groups. • Partners include universities and academic institutions, corporates, federal labs/federally funded, translation, economic development, and local government/policy. • 6-7months into the project now, first two years is 15 million in funding. Executing at a high rate. • Launched a grant program for university research teams ($300,000) and one for startups that are in climate resiliency ($750,000). They received over 50 proposals. • If you are working in any of their specified technology areas in the US, you can get help from their Engine. They are likely Page 5 06/26/24 Minutes recruiting two internationally based companies to Colorado to get access to researchers. They have received 36 applications without any advertising. • Will also be running a life sciences program that is a separate incubation program, and the technical topic will change very year. In November they will advertise a 6-month program for companies that are deploying something called digital twins in climate resiliency. • Their work in workforce is focusing on where does this NSF funded organization have unique understanding to help the workforce development. They are working on some generalized things like internships and postdoctoral programs, but they are also understanding the fragmentation of the workforce system. They don’t want to be in the workforce business or replicate anything. They secured about $2.5 million outside of NSF to run some very specialized systems engineering workforce development programs. They are going to be particular about what the programs are. WY is using a different strategy due to a software gap in the workforce. • Almost all the GDP in the two states occurs along the front range so there is a problem in trying to think about the practical way that a project like this can impact rural areas. Workforce in the rural areas is probably the single best thing we can do in rural areas to help. • Job creation is another big thing. There are about 8,000 private sector jobs in the climate tech sector. They are thinking about the impact they can make to that number in tripling it or growing it even more. They have the clean tech climate assets, but it is not benefiting the economy yet. • 10-year Impact • Employment forecast – current 8k • Employment growth – 22k • Organic growth 5k • Recruitment growth 17k • Growth rate – 300% • Employment total – 30 k • Capital from companies • $1.5 billion organic growth Questions • • What University from SC is participating? • Medical College in USC. The technology transfer director of the university was at CSU for 10 years and said we need your help. • The board expressed their congratulations on getting the grant and stated it is great for the region. • In terms of your talent outreach what is the need for serial entrepreneurs? • We have grown to almost 20 people in 6 months plus another dozen in life sciences and real estate. On our team we have extremely strong individuals that have started companies up and mentored for decades. We augment that with a group called Sage. There are a couple hundred Sage members with branches in Fort Collins and Boulder. Any company that comes into Innosphere can get help Page 6 06/26/24 Minutes from Sage. That is going to look more like mid-level to C level executives from across the board. They have a lot of folks with technical backgrounds. • What is the availability of venture capital (VC); is there plenty of it to go around? • Colorado has fortunately been in the top 10 for VC for a while (raw dollar not per capita). One of the main reasons we are on that list is there is an organization in Boulder called Tech Stars and a major VC fund called Foundry. Tech Star is no longer runn ing acceleration programs in Colorado and Foundry is not recapitalizing. It is not clear that we are going to maintain that list beyond that top 10 overtime and that points to the bigger problem, which is, there is very little VC concentrated in Colorado. That is why we have made two venture funds. We have a very small second fund, less than 30 million. We are a top 5 investor in Colorado at 30 million, that is not good. We are raising at least a billion and a half to two billion. 98% of that money doesn’t originate in this region . That is nothing to panic about but I am concerned with the ecosystem, that we cannot continue to innovate at a high rate and constantly be reliant on out of state capital. We will raise another fund like 150 million to put a stake in the ground that we want to be a go to for early tech companies. • Have you raised that issue with the governor? • The state is aware but there is not a lot they can do. Mike spoke about post covid funding that was pushed to the states to use for high-risk debt as well as the SSBCI reallocation, but they don’t want to raise a lot of money that way due to it being restrictive and surrounded with bureaucracy. • Do you tend to lose a lot of the companies you nurtured? • It doesn’t happen as much as it used to. I only know of two companies where that happened personally. Colorado is on the national VC map now and they are almost always buying into the team and talent. Facebook and Google are in Boulder because they acquired smaller companies and integrated them. So that is what we see happening. • You mentioned a workforce retention program in region? • Last couple of decades CO has built one of the highest educated workforces. If you look at the line of talent and overlay the housing prices, nor surprisingly when housing prices start to go up to the right, the talent line starts to decrease on the right. There is very clear data on this. We are not attracting talent, that is a big factor, and we do a horrible job in this state of educating Coloradoans. I also see this in our work. Jumping to Engine, we are trying to grow an industry and triple 8,000 employees. Where do these people come from? This is a serious problem and then we have a quantum hub that wants to increase employment by a minimum of 10,000 over the next five years. We are all fighting for the same workforce. • Assuming labor and workforce is a key of the ecosystem, how does the City do their part to help in that space? • SeonAh Kendall is on the Innpshere Board, so she is very familiar with this project. Cities generally don’t have a lot to do with workforce. Typically, it is done through the county and chambers. Page 7 06/26/24 Minutes The Fort Collins Chamber just got approved to run an apprenticeship program. There are not many organizations certified to do apprenticeships. We need to rain a ton of people and then hopefully the companies will hire a lot of these people. You have to look at workforce across all of these verticals and where the people will come from because it is not obvious right now. Preparing the Colorado workforce such as those coming out of high school and community college is a critical factor. • Do you know what conversations are around early childhood education? • That is a tough question for us. Previously, the industry was largely white male dominated. These projects have opened eyes to think more broadly. This is a massive project, and we made a deliberate decision to not go below a community college level. There is a high probability we will get the next round of funding and at that point we will start working in K-12. Every district is different, which makes it harder. We are dabbling in some high school level programming in WY. They have been wanting to implement a robotics program in 4- H which will be a 150,000 investment later this year. We will see if that is a gateway. • It is a pipeline issue. Are there things that can be done at the beginning of the pipeline? • I think that is where the limits of what we are trying to do is going to be high school or community college, so the later stages of k-12. There are so many people trying to work in and around K-12, but we typically work with partners. • You are targeting people at the tail of intelligence distribution. There are very few people there. You are never going to train people to be those people. When you are creating these new jobs, you are not really starting with people that are in the middle of the distribution. • As part of the project, we did two analyses. One is a gap analysis on workforce in manufacturing. The second, based on that, was a two- state 5-year strategic net term. It looked at where we can go and try and spend some money to really attack gap areas that were specific to the project. Bottom line is we have more people that are highly educated looking for work and opportunities. There is a single part of the workforce that’s related to ordinary software development and there is a 2,000-job gap across both states. It is really tech training to get people to software development. You don’t need a college degree for this. Internships and apprenticeships are the place to start. It is a little bit of a mishmash; we are trying to experiment a little bit. • If you are looking at engineers, you are looking at 5% of less that are 25-12 years old. That’s a pretty low number of people you are after. So, I am not surprised you have to import. • Think about analytics and software industry support. It is a spectrum. Right now, London is the only place to get climate finance expertise in the world, could that be Denver down the road? That is the kind of thing we are thinking through and validating. 7. BOARD MEMBER REPORTS a. Is your staff or SeonAh reporting to Council on AEDO? Page 8 06/26/24 Minutes • That is a good question, they know about it, but I am not sure if there will be an announcement. 8. STAFF REPORTS a. Tyler Introduced himself as the new Sr. Manager for EHO. He will be taking over as the staff liaison in a couple of months. 9. OTHER BUSINESS 10. ADJOURNMENT a. (6:06PM) Minutes approved by a vote of the Board/Commission on 10/16/2024