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HomeMy WebLinkAboutEconomic Advisory Commission - Minutes - 07/19/2017Economic Health City Hall 300 LaPorte Avenue PO Box 580 Fort Collins, CO 80522 970.416.2170 970.224.6107 - fax fcgov.com MINUTES CITY OF FORT COLLINS ECONOMIC ADVISORY COMMISSION DATE: Wednesday, July 19, 2017 LOCATION: Colorado River Room, 1 st Floor, 222 Laporte Avenue TIME: 11:00am–1:00 pm For Reference Wade Troxell, Mayor & Council Liaison Josh Birks, Staff Liaison 221-6324 Rebecca Hicklin, Minutes 416-4349 Commission Members Present Commission Members Absent Sam Solt, Chair Linda Stanley Alan Curtis Denny Otsuga (via phone) Ted Settle Connor Barry John Parks Ann Hutchison (left @ 12:00) Craig Mueller Staff Present Josh Birks, Economic Health Director Rebecca Hicklin, Admin/Board Support Guests Dale Ademy Agenda items added: None Review and Approval of Minutes: June minutes approved as presented. Meeting called to order: Sam Solt—11:08am Public Comment: None • Sam: Final review with Wade when that gets scheduled and talk about economic impact criteria • John: Innosphere is growing, bringing on more people, more funding opportunities, quarterly meetings with around 19 or 20 people attending. How can we move from pure startups to companies who are in a growth stage? • John: Rumors—deepening our relationship with CU—co-locating with tech transfers, improving investor community around Family offices. Sage Program—advisory group kicking off next month in Boulder. • No other comments AGENDA ITEM 1: City Plan Update • Josh: City Plan update—standing item on Agenda. Council has chosen to take another look and create a focus with City Plan, and determine what they should emphasize. Scope and budget are being shrunk to $900,000. All 3 involved/affected : City Plan, Transportation Master Plan and Transit Strategy. Maybe fewer scenarios for land planning concepts, maybe less public engagement, nothing final. Final Scope-within next few weeks. Council will support planning, but not going over things that are working well. Any questions? @ ELT—Strategy Map Updates—City Plan is a key priority for Council. • Ann: Will it go back out to RFP? • Josh: No, more of an adjustment of specific items addressed and what the scope will be. How broad, what topics? Council does not feel it’s worth investing the full amount that was allocated. ELT mentioned there might be a need to engage the public, not a whole lot of people commenting as of yet. What do we do with comments, and should there be a process? Nothing resolved at ELT. We are still investing $900,000, even though we are cutting by $500,000. City doesn’t need to fix what’s not broken. • Member: Do we know what is working? • Ann: Yes, we do need a process. • Josh: City Manager already getting some comments from the public. EAC is very interested in what the scope will look like and the opportunity to review. More to come soon. • Ted: Is this cut a result of the revenue shortfall? • Josh: Thought they were much more linked than they actually are, but may not be accurate. May be a connection, but it’s not the sole driver. • Ann: Council members did not want to put everything on the table, just some items. • Ted: All this is very distressing to me. Previous plan was made during a recession, and we are not in a recession now. It feels like a budget thing, and I don’t have a lot of faith in that process. • Josh: There are commitments in code as to how often they need to be updated/reviewed or maybe a wholesale replacement/major update. Question about how often City Plan was to be updated. All Service area directors were there and Darin, etc. This will be addressed. • Ted: Ryan Mounce and Meaghan Overton will get back to him once they have the numbers. • Josh: I will share out once I have more information. Council will take less time over the next several meetings. Items addressed: Housing affordability, CAP, land use, equity, land-readiness analysis from an employment perspective. Lots of requests to transfer residential land to employment/commercial use. Much of the land is moving towards mixed use. We need to make sure we have the types of land we need for the type of growth. • Sam: Will not ask questions right now regarding City Plan and will wait and see. There may have been parts of previous plan that need to be readdressed. • Josh: We need to make sure we have the right land uses for the plots of land remaining. Hopeful we will have to chance to have some deeper conversations in the future. Some parts of town that are zoned for employment activity from 20 years ago. Maybe we need to look at methods of interpretation? Not sure if there are milestones within the plan. Critique of last update, it has been 10 or 12 years, it will make us more mindful of what we need to do. • Sam: Are there milestones? • Josh: I believe so, can’t speak to the specifics. • Ann: The data was not shaky, it was the data of the time. • Josh: Agreed—it’s good to have things updated. We need to look at a 20-50 year plan. • Sam: Of City Council members, are there some that are for or against? • Josh: Yes, there are some in favor and some that are not, and some are in the middle. • Josh: Hard copy—version 3 from last time. This is the final in word post changes. AGENDA ITEM 2—Final Review of Periodic Review #1 is fine. No further comments on ranking, #2: Denny’s comments. Key outcome areas should be aligned with City Values. Add clarifying language and how they affect TBL, clarification and cleaning up language. • Alan: I’m comfortable with all the language. • Ted: Enhance the role of EAC—not sure why that is in there? If the point is to be more intentional, I’m ok with that. • Josh: Let’s be more intentional on things we want to see and address in EAC. As I made changes, some of the info moved into 3b. Is this bullet duplicative? Yes, it has been deleted. #3a: Key outcomes—Denny’s language changes accepted. #3b: Denny, slight adjustment to language. Sam agrees with the language. Maybe we need to be more thoughtful in our work plan this year? Josh: Fewer topics addressed, but to a greater degree from beginning to end. . • Ted: last comment, addresses what we will not do, not what we will do. We have put a lot of energy into the City Plan effort. Intention is to harvest citizen opinions on economic matters. • Josh: What is the intention of the plan? • Ted: We have put a lot of effort into the City Plan.Bring the city’s economic focus to the citizens? Josh: #3c: Good #3d: Good #4. Board meetings: • Sam: Homework between meetings? Are the meetings effective? Maybe become liaisons to other commissions? • Josh: issue—does not tend to get sustained because of the time commitment. Maybe hold onto idea and revisit. Maybe potentially include colleagues from other boards. (goes to question 2, not under 4). • Ann: The goal of “Supergroup”—to bring big topics to the table. This was a failure. We need to be strategic about any additional meetings we go to. • Ted: I don’t think we would actually do it on a sustained basis. Will Ann’s idea of having a collective meeting be captured? Maybe a multi-board/commission around a specific topic. • Josh: Outcome: Wade’s liaison visit should be quarterly. Some of the boards/commission meet later in the day, maybe they get better attendance? Wade’s visits have been episodic. They need to be regular and consistent. • Josh: Should we make them full time board members? Some of the boards who meet at the end of the day get better participation. • #5. Josh: Should we have more business leaders on commission? Change it to more representation, not more Members. It would be nice to have a business owner to get their perspective. We need to fill the gap of Knowledge without running afoul on our operation of the charter. Stu McMillan (developer) was on the board, worked for Everett, then CSU. Christof also contributed a lot—he was a small business owner. We need more representation, not necessarily more members. • Ted: Craig’s value has been reflected on what happens inside the board and outside the board— Industry cluster participation • Josh: would love to have someone who daily faces the struggles of owning/running a business. It would be a great perspective to have. Maybe a business owner/leader and a developer. • Ted and Sam: both like the idea. We can recruit people to be on the board. • Josh: Maybe we invite guests to come and participate, ie—experts on a topic? #6. Effectiveness between Board and Council--less than optimal. • Josh: Save stronger language when Liaison is present. • Ted: 3rd paragraph—didn’t understand what it meant. • Josh: We need to hold ourselves accountable in our correspondence in terms of effectiveness. We need to make sure what we say is compelling enough for council to listen to. • Sam: We need to sell ourselves and find areas where we can make contributions. • Ted: Maybe delete the second sentence? • Sam: We need to make sure we are focused on the right subjects. • Josh: Maybe we are doing that on many occasions, but not all. Change or strike the sentence. Voted to strike the sentence. • Sam: The highlights were when there was an issue we could add value to. If we have a TBL focus and do what we need to do from an economic perspective, maybe even hosting events, we could contribute more. There was no board or commission that helped Jeff in the homelessness and affordable housing issues. It doesn’t appear that anything ever happens even after all the meetings. • Josh: Many people are getting together to discuss issue and trying to resolve it. There are several staff groups working on it. • Sam: How do we find where we want to play, and play to our strengths? • Josh: We need a focus, and we need Council to be ok with that. What do we need from Council to ensure value is being transferred. List out specifics—liaison present, etc. The way it is written now spells that out. • Craig: Who do we want to determine our focus, our liaison or the commission? • Sam: It would be nice to hear from Liaison. Some sort of direction would be nice. • Ted: Not given a whole lot of direction from liaison. • Sam: We need metrics to determine how we measure our TBL. Everything in #6 states that we will provide our own direction. • Sam: In the meeting where Karen dressed us down, she believed we were a major pillar and we weren’t measuring up. We need to figure out a way to connect the dots, maybe using metrics. • Josh: Community needs a consistent set of metrics to measure success, City, EAC and EHO could be grading ourselves against the same set of metrics. We need to find relevant metrics to look at. ie— unemployment rate—--only tells half the story, our influence on that does not impact that. There are other things contribute to that. Sustainability tool gives us a good approach on how to measure TBL decisions. 7. Other Comments • Josh: How can we as EAC provide meaningful input when we look at something for 10 or 15 minutes when staff has been working on this for months? Are we just rubberstamping policies? If we were involved from beginning to end, and had input from multiple areas, we could give more meaningful input. We could be more educated in the process and therefore provide more meaningful input. We lose the opportunity to comment on more things if we focus more extensively on fewer items. • Sam: If we go back to the reason why this Commission was created, why can’t there be hooks? More convinced than ever that we should be focused on TBL. • Sam: The reason why this commission was created should enable us to tie all three legs of the stool together. After my discussion with Mr. “X” I was more convinced than ever we should be focused on TBL • Josh: The stool is only as strong as the weakest leg. Growth in one leg may create a deficit in other areas. Tension between advocating for our own leg, but realizing that we can’t have a legitimate stool without the other legs. There needs to be a proper tension between the 3 legs of the stool. I never worry about social and environmental being loud enough, I do worry about economic being loud enough. • Sam: The example of recycling program was the best for TBL —connections to all 3 legs of stool. • Ted: Maybe we should have a meeting with the 3 sustainability commissions? • Josh: There needs to be a group out there advocating for economic outcomes that are influenced by environmental and social issues. We need to be able to come together, but we also have legitimate issues that represent mostly one part of the leg. • Sam: Workforce development is a social issue. Underemployment is in the top 10, at least in the past. I think Ted hit it on the head. • Ted: We need a TBL meeting. Maybe the action item—spend more time on the future agenda. • Sam: It drives me crazy when we see one leg going off on their own, and not looking at the other legs. I put together a group and all of HP followed suit. How do we select the topics that will be addressed? I think we should capture that thought “Ted is great.” • Josh: An integrated meeting with TBL boards/commissions, specific topics: TBD. • Josh: There are a handful of themes, give document to Wade in advance. Wade will be here in September. We should have bullets/themes that get presented to him. What would those be? • Josh: Overall: role of liaison and communication, effectiveness of the Board. Themes that will go to Mayor Troxell: 1. Continued focus on TBL, primary focus on one of the legs. 2. Communication and Engagement 3. Scope: fewer, more in-depth topics, rather than more cursory topics. 4. Direction of topics, of interest to the Council. 5. How integrated boards, outside experts, etc. see answer to item #2. 6. Overall board and commission structure. Send the bulleted themes to Wade, not the entire document, in advance of September meeting. Meeting adjourned: 1:02 pm 12:30-1:00 Economic Impact Criteria – Josh Birks/Board (Discuss/Act) Upcoming Topics: August:  Discuss Periodic Review with Council Liaison – Mayor Troxell & Board (Discuss/Act)  Finalize Periodic Review for Submission – Board (Listen/Clarify)  Quality of Place Criteria – Board (Discuss/Act) September:  Sustainability Assessment Tool – Update – TBD (Listen/Clarify)  Approve for Submittal Periodic Review – Board (Discuss/Act)  Alignment with City Objectives Criteria – Board (Discuss/Act) October:  Natural Resource Stewardship Criteria – Board (Discuss/Act)  Open Item Next meeting time and location: August 16, 2017, 11:00am–1:00 pm, Colorado River Room