Minutes 01-26-2018 Retreat - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

35 And if we got a minor league baseball team here, he added, we could call it the Orange County Values. Commissioner Jacobs said that no Board member has ever opposed the extension of water and sewer to the EDDs. Some of us worked hard to change the perception of Orange County from being anti-business, and to a large extent I think we have succeeded, he said. I would like to define a holistic view of economic development for Orange County, he added. “Big game” has to fit into a context. There is a broader mosaic that we’re working on that includes the arts, tourism, agricultural economic development, etc. W e need a conversation about how all these things fit together and how we want to use our resources. In addition, he said, it is no small thing for the people who are affected for us to change the land use plan and have an effect on properties that people live on. We must talk with the residents adjacent to the Eno EDD, and have a public component to this conversation. Finally, he said, I do believe there are untouchable places here. We don’t want to be like Wake County or Durham County, and we sure don’t want to be like Alamance County. It doesn’t even have zoning. We want to look like Orange County ten years from now, and fifty years from now. We’re way ahead of those counties in a lot of respects. We should be talking about the things we have that we are proud of, not what we lack. Instead of talking about our land values being so high, let’s talk about how beautiful our land is. That’s where tourism comes from. Mr. Brantley thanked the Board for devoting time at the retreat for discussing economic development. I’ve been here for over six years, and this is the first time we have had this level of discussion. Please recall, he said, that the SWOT analysis was not intended to be a county economic development review. It is specific to the EDDs and CITANs, which necessarily comes with an industrial and warehousing focus. Also please recall that Article 46 was passed in 2011 in order to create a funding mechanism for extending utilities to economic development districts. Recall that the 2005 economic development plan set 2010 as the target for when all the EDDs would have infrastructure. The County did not have the funding, or start the Phase 1 Efland- Mebane sewer line until 2010-11. It will be two years from now before the Hillsborough EDD line is completed, before the Efland Phase 2 line is completed, and maybe before the Eno EDD is completed. We have not been waiting 30 years for the EDDs to generate economic value, because in truth they have had no zoning up until recent years, no incentives until 2011, no marketing, and no utilities. Article 46 also created funding for small business. That includes PFAP, Launch, the small loans and grants, and arts and tourism. We’re not discussing those areas. I was hired in 2011 to be the Big Game Hunter. It was specific to not only managing the Department’s overall functioning and budget and to include these other areas, but also for the first time to try to layer in some larger businesses recruitment in which Orange County had been deficient for decades. We were fortunate in 2013 to get Morinaga. Our office sees new prospects knocking on the door on a daily basis. We’ve gone over six years from getting zero inquiries to now having seventy to eighty qualified inquiries a year that could help us meet the budget that would have us paying at or beyond the living wage, creating job opportunities, slowing or reversing gentrification, especially among blue collar residents. We’re at a point in market interest now that we should have been at 25 or 30 years ago. I get impatient when I see projects, like Lidl -- $110M-$150M, 200-300 jobs -- that should be here but go somewhere else. It could have been on one of our sites. We need to have utilities in place, and land that can have houses on the sewer line paid for with Article 46 funds to serve Morinaga and other companies. We do have some projects that max out our sewer capacity. The irony is that many of these projects represent the tax base or the salaries at high levels that we want. We need to a have a