Board of Supervisors Adjourned Meeting - Joint Meeting with the EDA   6/18/2019

We're having some volume issues with the sound system, so if you're speaking today, we don't wear mics anymore, everything's in the ceiling, so project up and use a nice, loud, full volume, if you would, when we're making our comments.

And I'm looking forward to our time together today.

We as well, thank you.

and more.

Thank you, Mr.

I'm very privileged to work with Roger and JT and their team as well as with the EDA and I'm pleased to play a small part in trying to kind of kick this off as part of the team as we say that

and we get a bit of that team aspect today.

And so the historical review, all of this I believe that you know, but it's good to stay grounded just in our, not in our long history, but in our recent history.

And we're going back actually two years into May of 2017 where these two bodies met to discuss the strategic plan

and economic development director and actually without a county executive.

I think I was serving as the interim county executive at that time.

I believe the timing is correct.

But it was a productive meeting and actually just a week or so later, the Board of Supervisors approved the memorandum of understanding between the Board and the EDA that still governs that relationship today.

In October of 2017, the EDA

and use their time together ultimately to adopt the guiding principles that will be foundational to the work going forward that would result in the economic development strategic plan ultimately that was adopted.

In November, your new county executive, Jeff Richardson, came on board.

You recall at that time we were trying to wait for the county executive to come on board

County Executive, and the hiring of that critical role.

And so it took some time, because a good process does take some time.

But in April, Roger Johnson was brought on board.

This is now in April of 2018.

And it didn't take long.

In June, the kickoff of the project enabled a project, I guess, in earnest, working off of the principles that had already been established.

It was a public engagement process.

supervisors ultimately resulting in the approval of Project Enable in December of 2018.

Now here we are two years later, when you put it all together it's either a long time or a short time, kind of hard to tell.

Here we are two years later coming back together again with County Executive, with Economic Development Director, with Project Enable now

So with the next slide, again, this is a historical review.

This is, again, recent history and is really intended to kind of indicate the momentum that has been created around the economic development program in the recent past, kind of starting with the Woolen Mills Willow Tree Project supported by both the board and the EDA just a year plus ago.

And the strategic partnership with Roger and his team with UVA and with the City

In addition to that, the EDA plays a very strong supporting role in other work of the Board of Supervisors.

We called out specifically the Central Virginia Electric Co-op effort to expand their broadband.

Again, that was supported by the Board of Supervisors using the EDA as a vehicle.

Also, the Southwood Mobile Home Park project also being considered by the

Thank you very much.

My privilege to be here today to tell you about some things that are going on in our community, as well as to ask for your permission to approve a couple of policies.

Before we get started into the details, though, I did want to just take just a minute to remind the folks in this room how we got here.

I'm going to pick up from where Doug left off on Project Enable.

After that, the Project Enable said that we would bring back some opportunities to take advantage of state and federal funding, that we would match funds for VJIP, and that we would connect existing primary businesses to AFIT grants or USDA grants.

So in that became the basis for our work plan which we agreed to bring back three policies for your consideration by this particular day.

As it turns out, when we started doing the actual work, we determined there was a fourth policy that the county was already utilizing and decided to bring it back.

So that being said, the outcomes for today's meeting is to ask you to vote on proposed economic development tools

which will include something called an Enable Grant.

It's been renamed as a result of feedback through this process.

It was previously spoken to as the Capital Investment Grant.

We changed the name based off of the feedback from this group.

You'll hear an opportunity to match Virginia Jobs Investment Programming as well as Agricultural Forestry Investment Programs as well as the Commonwealth Opportunity Fund.

and then after we contemplate each one of those by each perspective boards and as a group and vote on those we're also going to talk about what will be coming up in our next year's worth of work and we want to make sure before we start down that path that these points bring concurrence that this is the type of work you want us doing as an economic development organization.

So I'll pause here and see if there's any questions about the outcomes and the expectations for today's meeting.

So the first item of business is the ENABLE grant.

Again, this was the capital investment grant that you both heard independently of one another.

And for the good order, I'm going to refresh on some of the more salient points that are included in the ENABLE grant.

We have them in two different categories.

To be eligible for this particular grant, you're either in a classic category or a pinnacle category.

The classic category would be classic in the event that, much like other communities, it involves the creation of jobs or the relocation or expansion of a primary business.

I should mention that you are going to qualify for this particular grant in either one of these two categories.

They're sort of mutually exclusive.

It is expected to have a substantial impact, a positive impact on the community.

It must generate jobs and or increase the size and diversity of the tax base.

It must locate in the development area and it must be consistent with a comprehensive plan.

And it's not listed here, but I'll also mention that this is focused on primary businesses, those that produce a good or service here locally and sell it outside the area.

So that's one way that a business or a project could qualify for an enabled grant under the classic standards and thresholds.

It could also qualify as a Pinnacle project and that would involve a catalytic mixed use development or promote a stated county goal or as suggested in our last meeting, demonstrably decrease expenditures on behalf of the county.

That's one set of standards, an A if you will.

The second set of standards on the Pinnacle project, it could involve place making, mixed use, or redevelopment opportunities.

And just to make sure that we're all on the same page, the Pinnacle side does not have the jobs component like the classic side does.

Staff would do an analysis to make sure it met the thresholds necessary as described as either a classic or a pinnacle.

If it does, we would also ask that it meet a but-for provision.

For those of you that aren't as familiar with the but-for provision, it means a project would not go forward but for county participation.

It doesn't mean that the project itself is not feasible.

It means the scale, the scope, or the elements included may be much different but for the county's contribution.

An example of a classic project that I think brought some scrutiny last time, but I didn't pick the best example, but I decided to stay with it this time as an illustration.

When I worked in Wilmington, North Carolina, there was Live Oak Bank, which is actually a primary business because it was their headquartered location.

They were looking to locate somewhere in the general area of Wilmington.

area.

The cost of construction was higher in Wilmington.

There was more landlocked.

In order for the city to procure their headquarters in Wilmington, North Carolina, they provided an incentive that they could locate in Wilmington where they would not have but for the city's contribution.

That resulted in hundreds of eighty thousand dollars a year jobs that were located in the city property itself.

So that's an example of a classic project under this particular definition.

And I'm going to give you an example of what a pinnacle project may look like.

One of the criteria that we said would be a stated county goal.

A stated goal has been, an example of one is the Rio 29 plan included in there are six transformative projects.

If a project would come forward to just build an office in the Rio 29 area, it would not qualify necessarily under our existing proposed policy.

However, if that same office project built one of these six elements that we're talking about that's stated in our Rio 29 small area plan, like a library plaza, like Bergamot Extension, or like the common conservation area, or even the walking trail.

We would then, if those public elements were being built in conjunction with that particular project, it would meet the threshold because those elements would not be included but for county contribution then it would become eligible and we would bring it to the board and to the EDA for your consideration in a tax rebate.

So there's a couple of outstanding items that we wanted to clean up that happened as we went through this process.

First of all, there was agreement that the county participating in a project with job producing components should only apply to companies providing quality job creation or career employment opportunities.

So you will find that in the new draft and that language is clarified.

There was not consensus on whether the policy should include a minimum wage level and if so, what was the appropriate minimum wage level.

So staff has proposed in the new enable grant that we've added a passage that wages would be a consideration when determining a project's value.

Staff would bring back all of those wages on the classic and bring it for the board for consideration.

We are not proposing necessarily that we put a wage requirement in this particular plan.

So I'll pause here and see if there's any comments or questions as to why that may be.

Wages, benefits, and we've tried to define career ladder jobs which talks about opportunities for people to move up within an organization.

In this particular situation, we're trying to help existing businesses and expand here locally.

We feel like the wage provision question will be more germane to the matching grants, and we'll go into greater detail about that conversation later.

But for this, we're really trying to help existing businesses grow or transform the community.

So we just said we would bring forward, you know, how many of these jobs are above $15 an hour, how many is below, or whatever wage threshold this board recommends.

I didn't mention that this would be financed through tax increment financing or synthetic tax increment financing, whereby a company would come here, build their building here, locate here, pay their taxes, and then we would rebate them a portion of their taxes to help them offset the cost of the public elements.

However, the next level of jobs would be jobs-based and wage-based and benefits-based more so

The next set that we talk about, we've invited a guest speaker to talk more about wages and how that will impact the community.

Mr. Randolph?

Aye.

I'd like to introduce to you Ridge Schuyler.

He's the Community Self-Sufficiency Programs from the Johnson School of the City Center.

Ridge has been invited here today to talk to these particular boards about wages and the impact of having wage requirements in a policy primarily because although we had independent conversations

There was some lack of consensus on whether there should or should not be wage requirements and so what those may be and how we would integrate those into our policy.

Ridge, amongst other things, works with folks on wage and career ladder opportunities.

He has done extensive research, not just national research and regional research, but localized

Thank you all for inviting me.

My focus is going to be on what kind of wage does it take to move a family from being not self-sufficient to being self-sufficient.

So if we're really focused on what kind of wage do people need to earn, I'm going to walk through what that looks like.

I spend a lot of time thinking about this because my work at Piedmont Virginia Community College is focused on finding people who've been left behind in our economy

and connecting them to opportunities so they can lift themselves up and out of poverty or out of a position of struggle.

So I'm going to walk through how we come up with our measure of what kinds of jobs we list in our tool when we are out there recruiting the next great job seeker for local employers.

We have a wage in mind that we're recruiting them to.

I want you all to see what we've developed for our program and it might prove useful for you all.

I'll pause here and tell you stories about my youth.

I did spend eight years working in the United States Senate.

So I am, in fact, the Dean of Community Self-Sufficiency Programs at Piedmont Virginia Community College.

And I'm going to walk through what it costs to survive in Albemarle County, Virginia.

So this is, what does it cost to meet your basic needs of food, shelter, clothing, and utilities in Albemarle County?

And that is what makes up the essentials of what somebody needs to survive.

And so for food,

We look at a weekly cost for a single householder with two kids, a weekly cost of $115 a week for food.

the amount determined by the USDA for what is known as a thrifty meal plan and it is very thrifty.

So you'll see throughout here I'm fairly conservative in the numbers that I put up here so this is what USDA says a family can live on on a weekly basis.

So that is a national number and the thought there was that food prices are fairly now because of

across the country.

So anyway, that's the number that the USDA uses.

And obviously, any of this can be modified, but it's what we've looked at.

Clothing, $1,000 a year for your clothing.

That is drawn from a consumer economic survey done by the Department of Commerce.

Again, apparel is a fairly national commodity and so this number would seem to apply in Albemarle County.

The next one is going to be more localized and it's the cost of shelter.

$1,325 a month is a market rate

County.

As of HUD Housing and Urban Development, they do a survey of fair market rents and that is the survey for 2018.

there are obviously apartments that cost more than that there are some that cost less than that but there are not that many that cost less than that and one thing to note so that's fifteen thousand nine hundred dollars a year so just to put that into some kind of perspective if you work full-time at minimum wage you make fourteen thousand four hundred dollars a year so you could work full-time at minimum wage and not even be able to pay your rent

It is interesting to note that when I did the first Orange Dot report looking at these kinds of numbers in 2011, the price for a two-bedroom apartment was $931 a month.

So the price of rent during that time from 2011 to today has gone up 42%.

So if you wonder why there's such talk throughout the community about affordable housing, it's because of that.

42% increase since 2011.

Next, the cost of utilities, $217 a month.

And the cost of necessary items like insurance, like things that are not captured by the others that are necessary costs, like diapers, are not considered groceries, but they are a cost.

So that's another $5,000.

So if you add all that up, in order to survive, to meet your basic needs of having a roof over your head and food in your stomach,

For you and your two kids, you need to earn $30,000 a year, which is roughly $15 an hour.

So you can survive.

In theory, you can survive without transportation.

These are the things that you need that if you don't have these items, if you're living in the elements, if you don't have enough food to eat, if you're not clothed, you cannot survive.

But, as Rick is indicating, or Supervisor Randolph, excuse me, is indicating, that money, that $30,000 doesn't just appear on your doorstep.

You usually have to go out and get it.

And in order to go out and get it, you incur additional costs.

Those additional costs are generally transportation and child care.

Transportation, we estimated low here, but this again is based on a consumer survey of car owners, $175 a month to pay for your insurance, your gas, and your maintenance on your car.

The poorer you are, likely the less good condition your car is in, but I wanted to stick with the conservative number so that I didn't overstate the need.

The childcare costs for anybody who's got kids in childcare, $1,000 a month is pretty standard fare.

So if you've got to put one of your kids in childcare and you're paying market rate, that's $12,000 right there.

So in order to survive and to go work to get that money, you need to earn $45,000 a year.

If you're a single wage earner with two kids, although with most of our wage earners in this

Right, so there's the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is very helpful and fortunately there's a community-wide effort to make sure that people don't leave the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit on the table.

If you're a single person, obviously a lot of these costs are avoided.

So there are lots of different configurations.

I took what the census data indicated to me was the typical household for folks who are struggling.

And it tended to be a single wage earner with I think it's 2.3 children.

I can't remember exactly, but this was as close as I could approximate for a, if there is such a thing, a typical family.

So that is the wage that is indicated by those numbers and then I will go on to show you in Albemarle County

There are 3,655 families who make somewhere between that 30 and 45, which we looked at 35,000.

There are 3,655 families out of the 25,000 families in Albemarle who earn less than that.

You can see which income bands they're in.

I would suggest that folks who are making between $15,000 and $35,000 a year are working full time.

They're just not making very much money.

But all told, that is 14% of the families of Albemarle that are making less than $35,000 a year.

And as you can see from the map, those families are in every magisterial district.

They're in every corner of the county.

They're not just in the urban ring.

They're everywhere.

Hundreds of families scattered about.

There are greater concentrations in some of these.

These are all census tracts that are listed there.

Greater concentrations in some census tracts

And so in our program, when we list a job, we are moving toward trying to find the initial job as one that pays $30,000 a year.

We started at 25 as our minimum.

because of the, largely because of rents, we've moved that to our target is trying to get that entry level $30,000 a year job or $15 an hour job as our starting point but with an idea being that you could climb the career ladder in whatever job that is and make it to 45 within, in our world

a reasonable amount of time.

So imagine, this is how I think about it, you are a plumber's apprentice, you make $9 an hour just hauling tools at the outset, but after two years you're making $38,000 and after a couple more years you're making maybe $60,000.

So those apprenticeship jobs, the career pathway is fairly well laid out.

In health care, it's not quite as laid out, but health care is obviously a huge industry in our community.

So we look for what is the $30,000 entry job at, say, UVA Hospital or Martha Jefferson, and then what is your next step?

And the next step, for example, a certified nurse assistant, is to become a licensed practical nurse.

And so we look at is it logistically possible to go from being a CNA making 30

to being an LPN making 45.

And if it looks like that's a reasonable pathway, we'll put people on that pathway.

And some of these pathways are clearer than others, and there's a lot of work that we need to be doing regionally to craft those pathways, but that's how we think about a career progression given the industries that we have in our community.

And I'll just show

This is what we are trying to accomplish from a systems standpoint, which is there's a family that is struggling.

They're working very hard, but making $14,400 a year minimum wage.

And we are trying to wrap services around them, like transportation, food, skills in education, financial coaching, so they can move from being that $14,400 a year worker to being the $30,000, $35,000, or $45,000 a year worker, so they can truly be self-sufficient.

So that's how we think about our world.

And I've included in the back notes about where I got all my data because people are very interested in where that came from.

Well, it certainly makes it a lot easier to identify that better floor from which to launch your career.

I mean, you're in a lot better shape.

earning $30,000 a year in trying to make ends meet than you were at making $14,400.

And now that UVA is going to $30,000, even with their contract employees, if they can make that work, it is a lot easier to imagine moving that minimum wage worker to that $30,000 a year job, which just two years ago was really hard to do.

I mean, there were not that many entry level jobs that paid $30,000.

So I think there is going to be market pressure for other

for example in the healthcare industry to move their wages up to 30 just because of the struggle for workers.

I will say just on the unemployment rate, and David I think would echo this, is that there are people who have for whatever reason sat on the sidelines, so they're not counted in the unemployment number.

and so there is still a stubborn number of about 38% of people who fall within a working age zone who for some reason have kind of given up on the economy.

They feel like that it just didn't work for them.

So part of our effort and at Network to Work is to grab folks by the lapels and say, no, no, no, there is actually great opportunity for you out here.

Get off the sidelines and get into the workforce and let's move up

So now I will say that in the census data, working age starts at 16.

Buried in that number is some percentage of kids.

And I'm not facile enough with the census data to be able to pull that out.

So I mean, and the census data sets are humongous and very, very valuable.

And so we probably can drill down on it.

It's just I'm not an expert in that level of science.

It's actually the cost of living that impedes people.

You get your full time job as a certified nurse assistant, which is a great start.

but the landlord wants their $1,325 every month and you can't go part-time in your full-time job to go back to school to become an LPN if you've got no way to pay the rent.

And so people get stuck.

So a lot of these career pathways look great on paper, but to make them true career pathways, you have to work out the logistics of how do you pay the rent, how do you put food on the table if I have to scale back my work life in order to accommodate my training life.

We're looking at is front-loading a housing choice voucher kind of approach, which is instead of subsidizing people on housing choice vouchers to make up the difference in what they can afford and what rents cost, which is what a housing choice voucher normally does,

say let's take some of that money and front load it so that you can go part-time status.

The voucher will help you pay your rent while you're studying to become an LPN in this example.

So that by the time you're done, you're making $45,000 a year and don't need a voucher anymore.

That would be a lot cheaper for government than to subsidize you forever in your $30,000 a year job with a voucher that makes up the difference in what you can afford.

We're also talking about the possibility of employers who provide a training stipend allowing that stipend to be applied to things other than the cost of training because there's training dollars out there the federal government through Pell Grants and otherwise can provide for the cost of training so maybe we should

of that 3,655, two-thirds of those folks are working.

They just don't make very much money.

They're not valued in the marketplace.

And so what we're talking about is how do we make people more valuable in the marketplace so that instead of earning $14,400 or $15,000 or $25,000, they're earning $45,000.

And that's, I think, when we talk about career ladder opportunities, that's what we're talking about is how do we

How do we grab those two-thirds that are working for a living full-time likely and move them up the income ladder so that they can support them?

The data is all smooshed together.

There is a huge number of people who do not have GEDs.

I have it in my report.

But given the graduation rates that we are seeing now in our local schools, I'm thinking that those folks who do not have the high school credentials tend to be a little bit older.

There are people who missed out a while back.

Now there's a much greater emphasis on getting that diploma.

And so the number of people who are being sent out into the economy now without it is much less.

But they still don't have, even with that GED or that high school diploma, they don't have enough value in the marketplace to be worth more than $8 an hour.

Not how do we make them, but how do we let them make themselves more valuable in the marketplace?

So if you have two wage earners making $15 an hour, that family income now is $60,000.

And while there's another mouth of another adult in the house mouth to feed, your rent, you're still paying for a two bedroom apartment if you're a couple with still the same two kids that are young, it's still a two bedroom apartment.

So you are sharing the cost across a broader group of income earners.

Is there any evidence for or against the impact of raising the minimum wage on inflation and thus raising the overall costs that you're trying, so it's kind of the dog chasing its tail trying to keep up.

The way we're approaching higher wage levels here turns out to be one of the better ways of doing it.

You have flagship employers in the private market or public employers who impose this wage level and then it forces the market

The problem is that people get more, they spend it and they are in certain groups saving more but overall we tend to live to the level of our income and many beyond so you'd like to

I think what's going to help do that is the uncertainty of the future of Social Security and 401k plans.

Pension plans have already kind of gone by the wayside.

Running your own business takes a whole other level of executive

What?

J.T.

and the rest of the community.

We wrap services around them to make sure they have the transportation, the child care, the health care, all the things that they need in order to be a quality employee so that when we're done working with them, we can turn back to that employer and say, you said you needed X.

We reached out in the neighborhood and found X and we make sure that they have a car that works that can get them to the job site.

They've got child care that is reliable and affordable and that's what we do in the Network to Work program at People.

So in 2014-15, I started this with 19 job seekers and we're now up to over 600.

And we have maintained a fairly consistent 83% of our completers get jobs.

67% of those jobs pay $25,000 or more.

It is that $25,000 minimum that I'm now moving to 30 and that's going to be my new target is how many are making $30,000 or more, but $25,000 is what I started with in

So we're getting a smattering, but 45% roughly are Charlottesville, about 38% are Albemarle, mainly in the urban ring.

We haven't really pushed out to the rural areas yet because transportation is such a challenge.

And then the rest are Louisa, Nelson, Fluvanna.

But Charlottesville and Albemarle by far are our biggest group of job seekers.

And with the help of the Board of Supervisors, we're overcoming the transportation challenge.

And I just wanted to thank you all.

Okay, well so if we turn everyone's attention back to our agenda, we're going to be discussing next two of the three remaining

The feedback that we got back from the board and the EDA was pretty consistent and so we thought we could lump these two policies together.

So I will go through some of the information to refresh everyone's memory about the eligibility requirements and the grant amounts associated with each one.

We'll have a discussion and then we'll have an opportunity to vote on both of them at the end of that.

So in the interest of time, I will go ahead and get started.

But the first program is the VJIP program.

And so that's going to be for companies that are expanding here locally or retooling and retraining their existing employees.

And so the state incentivizes the expansion of companies that are within certain sectors that the state has targeted, and in your handout,

So it's going to be for manufacturers, people doing research and development, corporate headquarters, distribution centers, those kinds of industries.

And the eligibility thresholds for those

And so for a business that's creating a minimum of five new jobs and making $100,000 of capital investment, they would be eligible for this program.

For people who are retooling and retraining, they need to make a $50,000 capital investment.

These are jobs that the state has said need to pay 1.35 times the federal minimum wage.

the state takes that information

and comes up with a proposed amount per job that they want to incentivize the company to create those jobs.

In about the last five years, Albemarle has received 14 of these grants and the state has decided to incentivize anywhere from $710 up to $1000 per job.

This is one of those policies that does not require a match.

Nevertheless,

We drafted a policy that's in keeping with what Roger said at the very beginning.

We're trying to thread that needle between providing certainty for business, but also having flexibility in how we support business retention and expansion.

And so we talk about that two-pronged test during the work session on May 15th, where first we look at, is it consistent with county policy?

Then we look at a variety of factors after that to determine

Well, we would say that there would be a $400 per job minimum match that if a company makes it through the state's funnel, then the county would provide $400.

And then from there, we would look at these six factors as to help us, to guide us about how much more we might decide to match.

So again, the state has done anywhere between $700 and $1,000 per job.

we're recommending a minimum of 400 and then looking at these six factors.

And these are things that you've seen throughout Project Enable.

Is it a primary business?

Does it increase the tax base?

Does it create career ladder jobs?

It has wages and benefits already noted in there, but we have added this underlying portion that talks about what career ladder jobs actually mean.

progressing from entry level positions to higher level positions of authority and responsibility.

Some of the other factors that we would be looking at under this policy, does it contribute to the public good?

Does it achieve a specific goal outlined in the county strategic plan?

And so, looking at that two-prong test and understanding the state's point of view,

There was not consensus about whether or not the county should do that automatic match at $400 per job without a commitment to some wage level.

We didn't arrive at $15 an hour, but that is something that we've heard a lot about and Rich just spoke about in depth.

Staff is recommending that we recognize the wages and benefits that are already included in the policy as a significant factor.

but that it not be something that we disqualify opportunities that may happen in our community.

Because this doesn't require a match, both of these bodies will always have the opportunity to say, no thank you.

But if we put in the minimum wage level, there could be opportunities that come into our community that we'll just have no opportunity to bring forward to you.

And so with that,

So we do not have a but-for provision in the VTIP grant.

I would say that oftentimes we're

Working with companies, the state's policy says that this money is meant to be specifically for human resource development.

So it's funding new training programs.

It's all the costs associated with creating a job, bringing someone on board, and getting them to the point, Mr. Ray, where you could leave and reasonably expect when you come back that something's happening.

So it's meant to incentivize that growth and expansion.

So this is a cash grant that there is not any sort of performance expectation except for the person has to be on the payroll for 90 days, as Mr. Atkinson alluded to.

So it would have happened, but the employer is expecting it at the end of 90 days.

that had a minimum wage requirement and some of our other ones.

And I found a Virginia Opportunities Grant, not this, but a Virginia Opportunities Grant with Jeannie Fannick in 1994 that had an $11 an hour minimum wage.

Now, it didn't go through.

They didn't end up hiring the people because one of the resolutions that were passed at that time required 60% of the people to be Albemarle County residents.

is that when we're actually giving money for a job, and maybe this isn't the right one because it's a training, predominantly for training, but when we're giving money for a job, we like to expect that we're not gonna have to subsidize that person further.

Walla.

I think a higher wage is important.

So to be clear, what we're proposing is a minimum of $400.

In this situation, the state's minimum wage is $9.79.

And then as the wages increase, we as a staff will be recommending to you and to these respective boards an increase in VJ match based off of the variables that you all think are important, which would be wages and career ladder opportunities.

That's what we're proposing to you and seeking concurrence for, not necessarily setting a threshold of $15 per.

I understand the value of the $15, but I will say, having worked in other communities, it's important that people be gainfully employed without regard for what the wages are.

There are certain opportunities for a set number of people that we would like to be employed.

and sometimes those skill sets vary on what those people bring to the table whether it's because they're 18 years of age like you described or some other reason, you know, there are folks out there that hire predominantly disabled folks purposefully, right?

and so the wage is important.

It's not negligible just because someone's defined it as a career ladder job.

Yes, this feedback and this input helps us understand the priorities of each board as we hear about these opportunities, meet with businesses, this is the kind of information that we're going to put a premium on in understanding the ROI for our community and the public good that could be served by those jobs in our community.

And one of the reasons that I didn't share about that is that the city has a full automatic match for their VJIP recipients so in their system the state notifies the city you know we've met with this company they've told us about

and the city's EDA on their next agenda hears about it and their policy dictates that they match it automatically and there's not much deliberation or further discussion about it.

So in trying to thread the needle that we talked about, this sort of provides some certainty that if a business was looking between the city and the county, there is some level of match in the county that would help create those jobs.

When a company came in, they had environmental issues, even though they created jobs that they may qualify for.

if there's a stated policy, maybe someone else who's more familiar with Albemarle.

Well, one thing is, just to remember, it is just a policy.

It's not an absolute rule.

Policy's intended to guide the decision-making that doesn't compel the decision-making.

It's a secondary factor so it may not be as significant as the others but if I understand it correctly when you come to the increased tax base and we're basing it off of a state program where they judge their ROI one way relative to the way we would judge it here because they're looking at income primarily and as Jim pointed out if you're not hiring people

Community Partners to help provide an independent analysis of what the impact of that job creation is.

So we have one more very similar policy to get through and we can do more discussion before considering a vote on those.

So the next one is the Commonwealth Development Opportunity Fund, and this is a much bigger opportunity.

Whereas the county had 14 VJIP opportunities, we've had in recent years one COF opportunity, and that was Willow Tree.

When you look at some of these numbers,

50 new jobs and $5 million of capital investment, or you can create 25 jobs at $100 million of capital investment.

These jobs pay the local prevailing wage, which is calculated by the Virginia Employment Commission, of $54,000 a year.

That's about $26 an hour, to put into perspective some of what Rich talked about.

Again, the state's going to do an ROI on the numbers

make them an offer.

This is meant to be a deal closing opportunity where there's real risk of the company not coming to Virginia unless this grant is offered.

This used to be called the Governor's Opportunity Fund and so it was whatever needed to be done to make the company stay here was what was going to happen.

And so if accepted, that's when we get to think about the performance agreement and all the provisions that would make the most sense for us.

And so the company would commit to providing annual reports on all the things in that performance agreement.

So under the revised policy, we just added that same language about career ladder opportunities.

We heard that that was such a critical part of the consideration.

This does require a local match.

You don't have to match it all the way up to the level that the state wants to provide, but this would provide some basis for how we get to what

Yes.

And so the VEDP's website, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, has a really robust explanation of how this policy works, in part because there's a lot of desire by the public and companies to understand those clawback provisions.

And so included within the performance agreement are examples of how we would calculate a clawback scenario, just to be clear with

Dave, you pointed out in the EDA is although the average wage, prevailing wage, is $54,000, that doesn't mean that they're paying some folks much less than $54,000.

And so the question, I believe, at that time is should we set a minimum wage level as well as an average wage level?

Just to be clear, since a local match is required in order for the company to receive a COF report, if for whatever reason

Yeah, we know when there's a company that's doing really well and considering a big expansion, there are a lot of other communities that would love to have that.

So, just to be clear, would that help us on the back end, but that wouldn't help us at the front end of the decision making?

Yeah, that's the problem.

That being said, and I mean, I would look to my other partners here, in meeting with businesses, in looking at their expansion plans, they do typically list the jobs that they're looking to create and the wage levels.

It's in the application.

It's in the application.

So, okay.

Thank you.

So if there's no further discussion, we do have motion slides for both the VJIP and the COF policy.

So here we go.

We're going to go through the AFIT grant.

This is some of the most fun opportunities.

with our agricultural companies.

They're one of our target industries, which is not a target for the region, so it is an Albemarle-specific target.

To be eligible for this grant, this is through the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and the Governor's Office.

A company needs to add value to Virginia-grown agricultural and forestal products, and they need to be using a minimum of 30% Virginia-grown.

And so companies that are creating jobs, making a capital investment, and using that amount of Virginia grown submit their numbers to VDACs in the governor's office and

Bdax offers them some grant amount.

It can be up to $500,000.

They can use it for a variety of things.

Our experience with this has been that the companies tend to weigh over, they make way more capital investment than they planned on.

but they have difficulty creating the jobs as when they first started.

So this requires a local match, it requires a performance agreement that would be subject to clawback provisions, and we'd have the same policy that we've been discussing in terms of consistency with county policy and then the six factors for consideration.

During the discussion in the work session in May, we heard similar concerns about minimum wages.

We also heard concerns about agricultural operations and how the county defines them in the county code.

There was also some consideration of competition.

Are we incentivizing agricultural producers that are competing with existing local votes?

So, competition is a consideration that VDACS looks at when they make their grant, their grant offer.

And so, staff is seeking consensus on whether or not this body would like to see, or both of these bodies would like to see competition added as a factor.

I feel like the agricultural operations question can be figured out through the first prong of our test.

Is it consistent with county policy?

We'll be looking at project enable, strategic plan, the comp plan.

So I feel like we're able to accommodate that concern.

And then there's also the wages.

And so I open it up for discussion.

The state looks at it regionally and I think the discussion in May talked about local competition within the county.

JT, can you tell us a little bit about the history of the AFIT grants, either locally or statewide?

Yeah, this is a

The state recognized that through its COF program that there was not a sister program, a parallel program for agriculture.

And agriculture is such an important industry to the state, that's when VDACs created the AFID program.

And so I think it's been pretty consistent across the state that agricultural

and the

than the co-constructs and the customings and the other kinds of companies.

So looking across the state, there's a lot of breweries and wineries that are making significant capital investment and creating many jobs.

That's where I see this program being used outside of Albemarle.

Inside of Albemarle, we've had goat cheese producers, we've had

They have found a way, whether it will work or not remains to be seen.

They found a way to create a good product, but they didn't stop there.

We're pleased we do that.

We've done that.

So now we're about to spend the next six to twelve months on our next set of priorities and we wanted to make sure that this board was aware of what those were and had a chance to talk about any objections and or any additional things they would like to see the economic development team

We're absent any other feedback from this group.

The next time that these groups get together and talk about things, it will be things associated with technology zones, tourism zones, and how to review the existing Board of Supervisors and the EDA Memorandum of Understanding that's in place.

There's rules and regulations that have been put in place by this MOU.

We said that the actual minutes from back a year or two ago says that once the strategic plan is adopted, we would bring back the MOU for further consideration, so we believe it's time to do so.

So this is what our next set of work criteria will be focused on.

For example, I think if you think about this, the city of Charlottesville has their own zone, the whole city, and then as a result they give 50% rebate on the Beephole tax.

It obviously would not, that same philosophy wouldn't be applicable to our county.

It wouldn't make sense for a lot of reasons.

You might need buildings of smaller size.

I think the people that could be pulling this promise out could do it.

That's a good point.

We don't need an MOU.

A little list and check to make sure I capture something.

You had some more?

On this particular slide, am I correct that these are, let's say, new priorities, technology zone, tourism zone, but it's understood that the emphasis on redevelopment, on growth and expansion and expansion of existence is ongoing.

Our core services would remain the same.

These would be the things

So a little listening check, there was a request to get more granular information about the 38%

There was considerations for investments in Rio 29 area, get us involved in that particular project process, get us involved in form-based code and creation of those, and then get the EDO and the EDA engaged in the form-based code discussion.

The last thing we wanted to talk about today I believe was a suggestion by staff to have a retreat with this group.

These two folks will get together and these two boards will get back together in a retreat format and talk about some of these things we just mentioned as well as proactive rezoning, public-private partnerships and the like.

So there will be some date forward down the road we'll schedule a retreat for us to get together

engage in a specific process.

Can I just remind the EDA that Richie will need us for about 10 more minutes.