Item 2A: Approval of City Council Minutes

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September 14, 2009 Joint Elected Officials Meeting City of Springfield City of Eugene Lane County Page 6 of 14 The ED Task Force recommended option one, which would approve the economic development strategies that created the outline of a regional economic development plan to design our area’s next economy and have the ED Task Force and Technical Advisory Group hold an Economic Summit in October. Mayor Leiken said as a member of the task force, he commended staff for working with a group of people with high opinions and capturing their ideas. The task force included representation from the two cities and the county. He also thanked the members of the task force for working diligently on this. He was supportive of the goals. During his breakfast meetings with Mayor Piercy, they had been on the same page regarding these issues. He also commended Mayor Piercy. Mayor Piercy said she also appreciated this work and was looking forward to the summit. She referred to Strategy #2, Entrepreneurial Infrastructure, and wanted to make sure some of that focus was on private sector small businesses and local businesses that we were trying to help grow. She would like to add some other places that the City didn’t normally network with throughout the community. Some local businesses felt like the cities were looking at larger industry more than small business. She pointed out that much of our economy was built on smaller businesses. She referred to an editorial in the paper regarding health care sectors and the need for employees in that area. We needed to take advantage of that and put our emphasis on that sector. Many businesses also fit into the green category which was the cutting edge. She referred to Strategy #4, Land and Physical Infrastructure. There was some light industrial space in Eugene that was under-utilized and she wanted to look at that opportunity. Councilor Pryor said he was impressed with the work done; it was very thoughtful. This was just the beginning and being well organized at the beginning was a good way to start. He was impressed with how the task force worked collaboratively as a region. The joint elected body had given a mandate and joint staff had worked on making it happen. Councilor Brown said he didn’t understand Tactic #1 under the Entrepreneurial Infrastructure strategy. He asked if it was something the elected officials could do, as it seemed to be something banks and investment groups would do. Mr. Ruiz said one of the pieces was that these strategies were not strictly instigated or resolved by elected officials. Part of staff’s goal was to have a large enough stakeholders’ group from the private, public and non-profit sector that were aligned behind this. It could be any of those stakeholders leveraging that tactic. Councilor Brown asked about Tactic #2 under the Entrepreneurial Infrastructure strategy. Mr. Ruiz said the University of Oregon (UofO) community had a lot of opportunities for technological transfer out into the community in fields such as bio-science, nanotechnology and laboratories. The question was how the community and region could work with the universities to find out how to enable more of that to happen and create more spin-offs to start new businesses. It was a good opportunity. Councilor Brown said it was a worthy goal, but he was not sure how they would do that. Mr. Ruiz said if Council chose to have a summit on this later in the fall, it could include people that would have ideas on how to make some of these things happen. All of the tactics were in flux and waiting for additional feedback from the summit participants.