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HomeMy WebLinkAboutEconomic Advisory Commission - Minutes - 03/21/20181 | Page MINUTES CITY OF FORT COLLINS ECONOMIC ADVISORY COMMISSION Date: Wednesday, March 21, 2018 Location: Colorado River Room, 222 Laporte Ave. Time: 11:00am–1:00pm For Reference Wade Troxell, Mayor & Council Liaison Josh Birks, Staff Liaison 221-6324 Erin Zimmermann, Minutes 221-4349 Commission Members Present Commission Members Absent Sam Solt, Chair Connor Barry Ann Hutchison Aric Light Denny Otsuga John Parks Linda Stanley Craig Mueller Ted Settle Staff Present Erin Zimmermann, Admin/Board Support Josh Birks, Economic Health Director Shannon Hein, Business Specialist Guests Dale Adamy, Citizen Mark Van Ark Angela Milewski, BHA Design Matt Prosser, EPS Presenters: Angela Milewski, BHA Design Matt Prosser, Economic Planning Systems Meeting called to order at 11:05 am Public Comment— No public comments Review and Approval of Minutes: February minutes approved as presented Agenda Review— No changes Commission Member/Staff Updates— 2 | Page • Ted: Futures Committee status- all systems go for the larger conversation regarding boards and commissions, will keep you posted. • Sam: Feedback we got was consideration on inclusiveness and equity and diversity so that’s one thing to consider regarding this board and commission conversation. Startup Week was very well attended. There is a lot of startup energy in Fort Collins. • John: Cluster Review Grant Process—10 or 11 applied. Most of them got some part of what they requested. Two will not receive any funding. It was a great process. The Poudre River Public Library will put on a book festival on science and technology. It seems pretty neat. Innosphere got their standard 10K and had to compete for it this year. The Bio Cluster was interesting and is looking at issues related to high demand professions and training to prepare high school students for those professions. Josh: This year tried to do a more electronic process. My role and Jackie’s role was to look for any red flags and were ready to support the recommendation that came from the committee. Appreciate the work of the committee and the representation from this group. We may consider rotating this opportunity in the future. Denny: Startup Week had over 130 sessions with more than 1,500 attendees number for startup registration compared to 1,300 attendees last year. Didn’t quite beat last year’s number but this year the count is more accurate. It was great to hear the City helped support it. The winner of the pitch contest, Vortic Watch, also received a $50,000 investment from TechStars who owns the Startup Week brand. So, it was quite a significant event. The quality of the pitch was incredibly high. I’ve seen a significant difference, even in the last three years. https://bizwest.com/2018/03/01/high-end-watch-manufacturer- wins-surprise-investment-pitch-competition/ • Craig: Missed last month as I was on vacation. • Connor: Participated in my first Housing and Economy working group meeting. There will be a community engagement piece and the ideas that come from there will be funneled up. Next meeting will be in late April. Josh: We will keep City Plan update as a 5-minute update and in the future will have you give updates there. • Linda: Had our first Ambassador Training that was focused on how to facilitate and manage wicked problems. I think it will be a good experience. They want to hear from regular people, so I do think that the desire to get people involved will come to fruition. • Ann: I will also do my second Ambassador training Thursday. NoCo Housing Now had a meeting last Friday and had former City Council member, Matt Appelbaum, from Boulder talk about inclusionary housing and how that may or may not have helped attainable housing in Boulder. We do have his slides and will put them on our Facebook page. Talent 2.0 completed its Whitepaper that analyzed the issue of Childcare. These partners identified we have 10,000 kids every day that we aren’t sure where they go if they aren’t at home. We will launch a task force where we will have childcare advocates alongside businesses to identify what solutions we can we bring to the market to address that gap in care. Be watching for that. If you are interested in that, please let me know. AGENDA ITEM 1— National Business Survey Josh: Is this something that is agenda-item worthy where we might want more time to spend on it? Not a lot of surprises, but definitely a lot of confirmation of how the business community views the business 3 | Page climate in our community. They think recommend operating a business in Fort Collins is something they recommend and would keep their business here. What was of greater interest to me was this governance space. What this confirms is that we always say we have two customer bases: residents and businesses. This lends credence that we are not doing equally as good a job of communicating and engaging the business community. We have this data both by industry type, business size, length of operation and geographic. We will be able to see segments that are more positive or negative. One place we have started to look at this is as it relates to retaining existing businesses. 50 percent felt we were doing good or fair and the other half said we are not doing a good enough job. There are probably businesses out there who we aren’t connecting with so who are they? We have been focused on large income, which raises a policy question. Do we want to shift our resources or add resources to provide services to these other industries. We are seeing curve in satisfaction in tenure in citizen survey. The longer you’ve lived here, the less satisfied you are. Seeing same with business survey. See deep lack of satisfaction in those earlier 1-5 years as well. Would suggest this group do a deeper dive for 40-45 minutes as a future agenda. AGENDA ITEM 2—Overview of Employment Land Analysis (Presentation by Matt Prosser, EPS) Employment is growing steadily. Interesting thing is had high growth in the 90s, a minor slowdown in 2000s and now are in another boom. Issues and Challenges are different. In terms of what’s changing. The healthcare is a driving industry. Some things we saw that are emerging base of professional services. Manufacturing and transportation/ warehousing is emerging. Manufacturing- Used to be computer hardware/software. What has grown is more diverse. Example: Brewing, Woodward. Seeing things related to solar power and other technology related. Diversifying manufacturing base. Lower retail/accommodations wage is flat but seeing an increased gap. Higher paying industries are seeing wage increases. (averages 6-7 percent growth.) Economic issues- potential threats: Affordability, Workforce Concerns (employment growth has been outnumbering the growth in workforce, labor force is not expected to grow at the same rate that job openings, ¼ of the labor force in Larimer County is 55 years or older. Greater reliance of workforce living outside Fort Collins, increased competition from region. Our neighbors are becoming more competitive. This is a threat but also an opportunity to promote the region and not so much just Fort Collins. National Trends- In terms of office development, seeing Business Park redevelopment. Traditional parks introducing new uses (retail, entertainment, and residential), Urban Re-Use- rise of reuse of older industrial/ flex spaces for office and mixed-use centers. Attractive for more creative industries. Seeing more efficient office use, putting more people into less space which will impact Real Estate and development. Co-working. Innovation district or medical district to leverage the research opportunities that exist. Rapid growth in e-commerce ($40 billion annual grown between 2014-2017). From bricks and mortar standpoint- prepared food sales have outpaced sales of food for consumption for the first time in recent years. Retail trend is a focus on experience-oriented/ hand-made, local- things that can’t be bought online yet. Desire for the community experience feel. Successful retail are ones that have more of that feel. 4 | Page Industrial- Globalization and automation impact on manufacturing. Really high-quality access to transportation systems. Last thing we did research on is small urban manufacturers. Value-added products. Wanting to be more centralized in locations, but have a hard time finding space. Local Trends- Where is development occurring? Major takeaways- Fort Collins has declining capture of development. A lot of development in the region is gravitating to I-25. Harmony corridor, CSU, and Downtown area growing nodes in Fort Collins- capturing most of the growth. Employment Land Demand Do we have enough land to support employment growth? Development capacity- vacant and underutilized land- much of the capacity is near I-25, large amount of vacant employment in area lacking infrastructure and access to I-25. Likely more redevelopment capacity than estimated. Linda: Appears most of the land is near I-25. Josh: A lot of nuisance and mismatch of market and available land. Those areas aren’t attractive to office sites. Ann: Our bigger challenge is infrastructure challenges. (Transportation access, water sewer, etc.) Demand vs capacity: land acres vs. demand vs. capacity. Then we can prioritize. Capacity is much larger than the demand, which is a good thing. Housing Demand vs supply- land acre demand vs supply- we slightly lack capacity. LUNCH BREAK AGENDA ITEM 3—Montava Project (Presentation by Angela Milewski, BHA Design) Proposed project owned by Anheuser-Busch- Zoned industrial. Have looked into selling it over the years. Last year approached a few developers for re-development have been working on this since early part of last year. Nothing has been submitted to the City yet. Have had lots of conversation with the City- Mountain Vista. Ag/Urban developments. 850 acres at once. Huge amount of outreach. How do you do this with industrial land? Make it mixed-use redevelopment. Agrarian Urbanism- local food production not only as a means of making a living but also live???. Place people want to be. Incorporate local food production for a better quality of life. The group has been doing research on how do you make business and housing successful when not downtown. Fort Collins has its own culture- outdoors- mindset; place where you bike; healthy; culturally innovative; local craft brewing; commitments to family. We did hold a large public meeting (500 invitations went out, 100 attended). Held a week-long design charrette where we brought in experts. Zoned industrial employment, but would be mixed-use. Housing, affordable housing big component, community park, new high school, new middle school and elementary school. Would have an industrial district West of the train tracks would be mixed-use. The commercial center would be community-based: small retail, small employment. Partner with Native Hill Farms. A lot of talk about type of housing. Smaller square footages, live/work units- housing affordability is a big goal to this plan and is integrated into the community. 5 | Page We will be asking Council for a complete zoning change, but believe it aligns with the trends. Will be moving through planning and zoning. Integrating farm to table- concept farmers market, restaurants, venders related to that. Affordable housing. Mix of different housing types. Josh: We wanted to help you understand what are the employment pressures and how does that tie into the City Plan and then provide a real-life example. One desire has been to make our meetings thematic and focused on one idea. This is your time to talk about what you heard. Q&A is there then some action recommendation to council or do we need more work or time. We have taken a number of companies to this site, including Woodward. Distance to DIA, feeling like it’s on the edge of the region and lacks infrastructure. Unless a project like this goes forward, it will continue to lack infrastructure. Whatever use it goes toward- this much of the current zoning is not what the market is wanting. Denny: Based on number units that go in housing, do you have an idea of how many people would work in the community? Angela: Goal is to match housing and employment. Goal is to keep affordability of housing down. Linda: lot of issues with infrastructure- roads and issues of water, so how do those get handled? Connor: I live over there and Vine is nowhere near ready for this, so understanding the infrastructure improvement needs will be important. Vine and Lemay for example. Angie: Reality is this is a 30-year build-out. Ted: Seems to me if this was open today, I would be concerned it would be sucked up by people who just want to live there rather than people who want to live and work there. So, it might make sense to have the employers involved earlier. Josh: Max wants to see high level of solar if not all, so he is looking into can you bring some of those companies in early. For example, have the company that will build the homes come and build manufacturing there first. Some we can seed first, some will need to follow. Angie: Big ask will be can we make this zoning change. In general, we will need to overcome that and get some level of support from you and your peers. Linda: Max is thinking about it from a systems perspective. Hopefully, I just see a barrier if we rezone it and then for whatever reason the project doesn’t happen, then what. I assume you can do a contingency in the zoning change proposal. Ann: One data point to overlay is the fish that have gotten away from us because we didn’t have the right size or scope. Some context of what that economic center would look like moving forward. We need to paint that picture to understand. Josh: Some of those we can talk about some of those we can’t. Woodward is a good example because what they said is very similar to others. Underscores need to look at regional perspective. The challenges we are looking at in Fort Collins are also challenges we should look at regionally because it may then be more balanced. The labor picture changes. Discussion/Q & A: NA 6 | Page Meeting Adjourned: 1:09 pm Next Meeting: April 18th