The subcommittee met, had their first meeting, and reviewed the 10 goals. Curious what you think, does this seem like an economic development strategy that makes sense for the City of Madison? (Sorry for including all their stupid jokes, but they were so absurd at this meeting I just had to include them.)
Here’s the audio if you want to hear it for yourself.
GETTING STARTED
Clear starts the meeting, they elect Ed Clarke the chair, Meghan Blake-Horst the vice-chair. (sorry about that coughing and talk about going to the restroom)
STAFF PRESENTATION
Dan Kennelly, Economic Development Specialist for the City of Madison asks if they all got a chance to review the report. It’s unclear if they did. He says they have three things, a draft of an outline for the whole report, part one of the report (section 3) and the part 2 of section 3. He says the outline is a one-pager, a first look at what the report might look like. (Crashing noise as someone drops the report on the floor, lots of laughing and jokes, they say “its just a draft”, bah, ha, ha – eyeroll) Preamble, introduction, public process and the four sections. The first one is basically done, they took a deep dive into the data. And part is aspirational vision, big picture with a lofty visions statement. The 3rd part is the strategy and goals, there are two parts, city-wide and spatial framework. Mark Greene comes in (the crash is him slamming his bag on the table I was recording on) he is invited to sit at the big table with the adults, but he has to behave. The 4th part is the implementation plan, prioritizing, identifying partnerships and responsibility, funding strategy, timelines and metrics.
Ed Clarke likes that he put the goals in.
Craig Stanley asks what their goal for tonight, they don’t want to dive too deep they lose focus, but get the staff what they need.
Kennelly says that they could just talk about the first part, the goals and citywide strategy. They agree and Meghan Blake Horst says that they need to finish the goals to think about the geographic strategies. Kennelly says they will focus on the goals document and next time talk about geographic portion.
Kennelly says the timing is that in September they did the Economic Symposium to talk about the data to get input on the strategies, much of which is reflected in this draft. They will have a similar event in March, invite the same group of people and share the draft with them. That leaves 2.5 months for them and they can meet a couple times to fine tune the work for a public unveiling in March, but it will still be a draft.
Clarke talks about the internet article he read about in the paper this morning, he says that is going to be an election issue and he wants to know what kind of input they need to get from the mayor. Poor Kennelly say “uhhhhh” and you should have seen the look on his face! I wish I was quick enough to answer the question, he looked so uncomfortable. Matt Mikolajewski (his boss, the new Economic Development Director) after laughter saved him and very diplomatically says the council and mayor assigned the Economic Development Commission (EDC) to come up with this report and they should feel comfortable taking it in the direction they want to take it in. (Oooooohhhhhh how times have changed since Cieslewicz) He says obviously as they are working on this they work with the mayor and if he has questions or comments or concerns he will relay them to staff and staff will tell you. Mark Clear says when it is all done it will go through the formal review process of the Council.
Kennelly says that the timeline will be they work for 2.5 months, public input at large, fine tune it and then work on tactical implementation plan and that will be spring or summer when it is completed. They decide to go through the goals one by one. (The documents have more info, but I summarized in the post so you get an idea what they are talking about.)
Stanley says his business coach is in his ear and themes are good, but he thinks we need to be specific with the goals. Only one has specific numbers. To be successful we need less goals but be specific. Clarke says some of the goals are strategies instead of goals. We need to have a big idea and have strategies to accomplish it. Kennelly says that a piece of this isn’t here yet, he was thinking tat the implementation plan would have metrics or measurables. There would be multiple measurables under each goals. Maybe goal is the wrong word, maybe it is strategies. Clarke thinks some of them are goals. Clear says that you have to have goals to answer the question. Clarke says they need to keep talkiing about what they think a goal is in that context and they can talk about how to measure goals as they go through. For instance, we can’t measure new startups, we have no way to do that, so maybe our plan is to figure out how to do that.
GOAL 1: Become the Midwest’s leading hub for business startups
This includes supporting and connecting with UW’s technology-based programs like D2P and the UW Research Park, focusing on the development of local service businesses including cooperatives, and becoming the best city in the country for women-owned business startup and expansion.Strategies:
1.1. Continue to support the StartingBlock project
1.2. Increase Coordination with UW Madison
1.3. Support Non-Technology Entrepreneurship (e.g. Food Entreprenearship)
Clarks asks about the second line, what is a “service business including cooperatives” and how is that related to startups. What are “local service businesses”? Lawyers, accountants? Other say body workers, laundry. Kennelly says that the city is starting an initiative starting cooperatives and there is opportunity there for where owners are about to retire or new businesses to convert to cooperatives and many of them will be service industry. Stanley asks where that comes from? Clear says its in the budget. Stanley asks what the demand is? Ruth Rolich, Economice Development staff says it is a business model. Blake Horst says that for people who are retiring may not want to sell or close their business but might have employees that want to take over. Or new businesses like her own might want the vendors to cooperate, within their start up timeframe. Stanley asks if there is proof of demand or is this a policy. Rolich says policy. Mikolajewski says that it is a little of bother, there is business conversions. Stanley says he probably just doesn’t hear about it. Mikolajewski says that there are IRS tax benefits if the owner decides to transition that way. But it is also a policy decision to explore it and see what opportunities are there. He says this isn’t solely about coop conversions, but it is an area the city can work on. Pat Schramm asks if they are limited to service businesses because that seems limiting. No. Rolich says that they don’t want to create a plan focused on technology because that has the highest growth potential and from an equity point of view them need to include other sectors. Clarke says staff understands our concern, we don’t want to ignore other sectors, but we don’t want to focus on it. Schramm just wants to take out the service word. They invite Rolich and Mikolajewski to join them at the table because “we are a family here”. Kennelly says the intent is what Rolich described, when we talk about startups people think about technology.
Clarke moves them on to the strategies, he’s going to push them to move on. He is concerned that they pull out Starting Blocks but we ignore the other incubators in the city like the food kitchen. This seems to be limited to Starting Block. Clark says 3 covers it, Starting Block is specific enough and the city is supporting it so it deserves to be singled out. The discuss that 3 has “non-technology” in the goal and he is talking about other co-working spaces that are technology are there. Someone (or two) says that in the future it might include things we don’t think about now. Clear says the point is that 1 the city financially supports so that is why it is a specific strategy. Clearke says we should not just focus on one, there are others that should be mentioned in 1.3. Clear asks if we need to financially support all of them. Blake Horst says there are other resources to support them that are not cash. Schramm says that when we say technology people think IT, it can be lots of things. Blake-Horst says think about 100 State and the art and the technology. Technology can be lots of things. Stanley asks how specific they should be, what does coordinate or support mean, what resources can they bring, maybe when we break down the action steps we can talk about what we can do as a city. They refer to that as technical assistance like helping find a web developer in the start up phase. Clarke says its hard to know what the outcomes would be, for instance number 2 it would be good to say that UW professors would coach people, he’s not sure that they can say that now. Rolich says we wouldn’t set up mentoring programs, but support others who do. The city would help support the larger idea financially or politically, but not operate them. Stanley says that they will have to go through the strategies and find ways to measure it, but maybe we want to go back and put them into goals. Schramm asks if this is the big goals and then it will drill down into more specfiics and Kennelly says that there is also the implementation plan like Mark says – laughter cuz he points in the direction of two people named Mark and they laugh and ask him to clarify which one he is talking about (they are just so chummy and “funny”). Schram says they have to have board goals to start. Kennelly says that if they have 1.2 to work with the UW, then they take the draft to the UW and someone says yes, they want to work on it and tell us what their role is and when they do the implementation strategy they will be more specific about what they will do with the UW. Clarke says that what they are saying is that if they want more start ups the UW is such a big freakin’ deal that they have to work with them in order to get that. Kennelly says they will figure out how to do that, they are early in the process, the question is do we want to support this at this time. Mark Greene asks who we are talking about when we want to surpass others, what are other people doing, what are their measurables, maybe we are already doing well. Clear makes a joke again, but I didn’t hear it. Clarke says that if we want to be a number one bike city maybe we look at the magazines and see how they decide who is the top 10 and how they make the ratings. Greene says we can look at that and decide from there. Clear thinks we might change from become to remain. Blake-Horst says that sometimes when you are involved in doing things you miss some of the insight on what you are doing well.
Blake-Horst says that this is about non-technology but the first few sentences are about technology and how can they beef up the second part of this section to build on the nonfood part. Clear says they shouldn’t take up four sentences to say why they should focus on something else.
GOAL 2: Guarantee every Madison kid the opportunity to be inspired by a pre-career experience while in High School.
Every Madison HS students is guaranteed/required to complete an internship, mentorship, apprenticeship or other opportunity to explore out-of-the-classroom career opportunities as part of their high school education.Strategies:
2.1. Mentorship match-making
2.2. City Match funding for intern wages
2.3. City internships
Clear says its not a goal, its a strategy and what are we trying to accomplish, he thinks we want to develop and retain talent here and make sure that every kid in Madison schools has strong knowledge of opportunities availalbe to them, they need something more aspirational. Clarke says youth employment. Rolich says that there is 35% that don’t know what they want to do when they walk out the door. Mikolajewski says that we are also assuring we can work with ? Stanley says they should by 2017 each student has experienced ??, Clarke says this is a goal. Stanley says the strategy and benefits should be under the goal. CLarke says the goal is that every high school graduate will have a career path that they will be headed towards college or a job. Realistically and expectations that they will get there, and one way to do that is give them experiences. Stanley just wants specificity, he is struggling with where that goes. Greens says they should say 2017. BLake Horst says that we might use 2020 since that is when the freshmen class will graduate and then there is 4 years to get them some experience and opportunity and we can then do it every year after that but we start with one class. Green says that he likes Ed career path and the pre-career experience is useful, is our education system getting kids to right skills that we need, we need to look at if our curriculum is set up for people to get jobs today or even 5 years from now, are they taking the right classes. Maybe we find it won’t be set up that way and we need to change. That should be part of the bigger picture and the goal needs to be more clear on that. Clarke says the staff can see where they are going with this. Kennelly points out that this is the City’s plan, and we have to think about what we control. We can also be radical and just keep asking why, you can resolve that however you want. Ultimately the goal is a more prosperous economy in Madison. Someone says that having every kid that graduates have a career path, that is a goal, and we have to look at what resources we have and how we can push that ball forward. Clarke says that we want our students to be career/job ready. Blake Horst says that they could be trained to go into work at a restaurant or a doctors office. Her mother in law is a pharmacist and when she was in high school she was a pharmacist aide, do they even do that any more? In a small rural hospital they would, but not in the city of Madison. Clarke says they shouldn’t beat it to death. Schramm says that they should be framing this as economic development, we can’t educate kids, but we can engage employers to create the opportunities. Clarke says that when this idea came up, one element was that the students would be paid, to make it real. They talked about paying companies, but it doesn’t say paid in the goal. Greene says that we say Madison kids will blah blah blah. But something where we say that we are going to put a stake in the ground and every damn kid will have an experience sounds more like a headline. Whether its a goal or a strategy, he doesn’t care. Clarke says that we should not talk about this any more, we can say students will be career ready, and drop the goal as a strategy, or you can leave it, we have talked enough about it. What about the other strategies. Clear asks if there is a 4th one in terms of matching kids to trade and having apprenticeship programs, he thinks that it might be underway, but there can be more. They might be treading too much on the school district. Clarke like them, he appreciates matching funds, but are we really going to support MG&E to pay wages, should we say smaller businesses. Schramm says that medium and small businesses can’t afford to pay them. Blake Horst says that is why she hired through Commonwealth because she got a stipend to have interns and they paid half the salary at minimum wage and I paid half, but she had to do work, paperwork, but that was a huge reason why I was willing to hire. They agree to say small to mid. Clear says that he has no problem with MG&E hiring interns, just don’t let them touch the wires. (ha ha) No climbing poles says Clarke (ha ha) Someone asks if it is legal to have unpaid internships. They say that is hard to do. They can have training stipends legally. Clarke says that when they have had internships some kids couldn’t participate because they needed the paid job they had and needed the money. Clear says that they get push back because they already have employees. Clarke says it is short term.
GOAL 3: Lower Barriers to Economic Opportunity for Historically Disadvantaged Populations and Reverse Course on Racial Inequity trends.
Make Madison known as a city where women, immigrants, people of color, can start businesses and economically thrive.Strategies: (most strategies have additional language, this section is really sparse)
3.1. Minority Contracting Training
3.2. Support Cooperative Conversions and New Coop Creation
3.3. Support Workforce Training Programs Linking to Existing Large Employers
3.4. Focus on Workforce Transportation
3.5. Target City Programs and Incentives Toward “Opportunity Zones”
They say that is is a really long goal. Pause . .. jokes about how they need sugar . . . there are huge piles of candy on the table. They talk about treats. Clear finally says that he thinks the goal is wordy but can’t think of how to make it more succinct. He says that was a useless comment. Clarke says they will leave it, he says it is really apple pie, it is hard to disagree with, hard to know what it means and hard to measure. Rolich says that this is hard to accomplish, but they can measure it. Clarke says that in the sentence under it, it seems to say women and people of color are going to start businesses and maybe just getting them a job would be easier to do. (Ugh. Seriously.) Someone suggests that they might need more education. Clarke says it could be broader based. Access to education or training suggests Rolich. Green says that they need to look at the barriers since there are inequities. Rolich says that there is some information presented on this. Others talk about access to capital and they might want to look at numbers of ownership. Mikolajewski is that we might need to define the barriers, that is a project before we get to a plan. Green asks why are we struggling with this. Stanley says this is about career readiness, this is too high, its not a goal, no one can argue with it, its just not quantifiable. Someone says that they need to word the goal. Kennelly says that if there is a different hierarchy, we can have 3 or 5 goals and different strategies we can rearrange that, maybe this is one of three big goals. Maybe this is part of a piece of the first goal. Schramm said she was surprised that we didn’t start there, some of these things can be combined, look at 6 and it could be combined with central city. There are some things in here that can be combined and feed up and then they can have less goals. Someone says it is about the barriers and if you look at it, it could be transportation and that changes the whole thing. You can wrap 6 into that. Schramm says that you can wrap these together. Clarke asks if we should just say we want to help lower barriers and we should just say that we will help historically disadvantaged populations overcome low employment rates, low business ownership rates and poverty. They say yes. And then how would you do that. Clear says put some numbers on it like double the number of historically disadvantaged entrepreneurship. Rolich says that some of the issue with the language in the goals is that it is inconsistent. Kennelly was writing on the board and Clarke wants to know what he wants to do with that.
He says that they can reorder things and have goals, strategies and outcomes. Clarke moves them on again. The might want to reframe the original goals.
Ok – the rest to come later . .. .
GOAL 4: The Madison “10-10-100” Local Food Target
Within 10 years 10% of food consumed in Madison will be grown and/or processed within 100 miles of the City limits. In the process of striving for this goal, build on Madison’s position as one of the nation’s best food cities.Strategies:
4.1. Madison Public Market District
4.2. Food Innovation Center
4.3. Food Entrepreneurship Startup Grant
4.4. Neighborhood Business Local Outlet Network
GOAL 5: Make Madison North America’s Undisputed Bicycle Capital.
There are three parts to this goal. Part 1: Improve bike infrastructure and amenities to Increase bicycle ridership and make Madison the nation’s top city for mode share by bike by 2020. Part 2: build on Madison’s existing bike industry cluster by working with local companies in the industry to attract and co-locate suppliers, customers, and businesses in parallel sectors. Part 3: Make Madison a recognized destination for cycling-related events and tourism.Strategies:
5.1. Direct outreach to area bike industry companies
5.2. Recruitment of suppliers and customers to grow the cluster
5.3. Build High-profile Bike Infrastructure Projects
GOAL 6: Keep Madison’s Taxbase Growing and Keep Madison Strong and Thriving as the Economic Center of Southcentral Wisconsin.
Actively bring tax base considerations and impacts into conversations about development projects, neighborhood plans, and the development review process. Also, build a robust program to make strategic investments in real estate to achieve redevelopment priorities with capitalize on the opportunity to reposition land and grow the tax base.Strategies (also have no explanations, I’m intrigued by the last item, they just got done reviewing the policy and they want to do it again?!)
6.1. Create a Robust Land Banking Program –
6.2. Introduce Fiscal Impact Analysis Into Development Project Analysis –
6.3. Maximize Development Density & Support Transit –
6.4. More Aggressive and Comprehensive TIF Strategy…
GOAL 7: Become a best connected mid-sized city in the U.S. – connected physically, digitally, and economically.
This includes creating transit system that links every resident to employment centers, building universal access to high speed internet (in homes, libraries, schools, and community centers), and striving create improved global connectivity through improve inter-city transportation and business relationships.Strategies:
7.1. Improved multi-modal transportation
7.2. Wired Homes, Businesses, Schools, Libraries, Community Centers
7.3. Stronger Connections to the Outside World
GOAL 8: Make Madison a Model of Innovation in City Government
The Madison municipal government will itself be a model of innovation, responsive governance, and customer service, and will use technology to empower residents and improve city services.
8.1. Improve the City’s committee structure
8.2. Establish customer-service kiosks for some city functions
8.3. Create “Digital Comment Box” App for City Services
8.4. Crowd source governance
GOAL 9: Train a next generation workforce in Green Building Technology
Madison will leverage its existing and current build a cadre of expertise in the green construction sectorNo strategies.
GOAL 10: Build the next generation of Madison’s Central City
Maintain and increase the appeal of Madison’s central city (downtown and interior neighborhoods) as a place that attracts people to live and work and is the awknowledged cultural, business, and entertainment center of the region.No strategies.
