Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name is Natalie Fanny Gonzalez. This is the Economic Development Committee. Work session, we have three items today. One is going to be on the quarterly economic indicators, and it's going to be led by the Montgomery County Planning Department alongside MCDC, but mostly the planning department. Then we're going to talk about as we did last week with incubators, we're going to have a couple sessions for the FY25 budget follow-up, one on MCDC, and then after that we're going to have the economic development fund. With that, I'm going to ask council staff to kick us off and then please share the mic with planning and MC. Thank you. Good morning. Yes, this is just the briefing on the most two or most recent quarterly economic indicators reports from MCEDC and planning. They typically provide an overview of data and trends on employment, real estate development, and venture capital. And then also provide a few special briefings that do a deeper dive into specific economic issues. I'll defer to planning to cover those but today the two special briefings are related to the labor force as well as child care Austin the county. Yeah, this slides up. So while he's doing that actually, one of the I just want to acknowledge that that these are, slides up. So while he's doing that, actually, one of the, I just want to acknowledge that these are, first, there's a lot, there's two issues since we didn't come for the third quarter of 2024. So there's a lot of information. But also, these are, as we've constantly knowledge, they're know, looking in the past because we're waiting for the data. So we're, you know, we're a quarter behind. And some of the things you've, you know, talking about labor force may even seem a little kind of like, you know, out of place at this moment because clearly, you know, the thing that's on everyone's mind is the, the federal layoffs for so much of our county that's really affecting people. you know, people are really struggling with this right now and all the uncertainty. So I just want to acknowledge that because this we don't we have a little bit that we'll talk about that but we don't really have you know the full set of indicators to do that. So just want to acknowledge that you know that's that's on our minds and it's something that we will be tracking as we go forward. But with that we can get we can dive into dive into the indicators. And thanks, Frankie's going to start us off. There we go. Hi. Yes, nice to be with you this morning. I'm Frank A. Klogsten. I'm the Vice President of the Research and Policy with the Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation. And I believe there may be a slide coming up, which is going to give you just some highlights. We're going to spend a little bit less time on demographics and characteristics of the economy and the real estate market than we usually do, so that we can get to this special reporting on the labor force and the child care, which is quite important and which we'll be hearing more about shortly. But I will take you through a couple indicators. And first of all, the unemployment rate is 2.4%. And that's actually gone up a little bit, but it is lower than 1.8%. And it's certainly lower than the national rate. So on the one hand, we should feel good about our economy having such a low unemployment rate. On the other hand, we should really be a little bit concerned that there are not more people who are in the labor force. So moving on to the office vacancy rate, everybody's always concerned about that figure. It's at 18.5% now versus 17.4%. and let me just say that this is this fourth quarter versus a year ago quarter four 2023. So it's up to 18.5% versus 17.4%, but that actually conforms with what we're seeing in the DMV and you can see that in the various quarterly indicators that are listed for Maryland as well as Virginia jurisdictions. And then moving on to median home price, that's gone up and has gone up from 554 to 650,000. And that's a significant increase of 11%. Since we started tracking it by product type, which we were asked to do, we saw, for example, that single family housing, you know, went up to over just over a million dollars. So it's very, it's quite, people are quite cost burdened out there, regardless of what product type they're looking for. And the supply is also constrained, is what we're seeing in many different product types. However, that is something that's potentially in flux, given where federal employees end up if they faced burdens in the housing market and whether or not they are able to stay in Montgomery County. And again, that's kind of one move that moves this over to look at the condo sales prices. Now, those are actually going up. it's indicated and then building permit data is going down but that's just a little bit and actually while it's going down quarter of a quarter for the year if you look at 2023 to 2024 for the calendar year at a whole we actually are up on that so you know we are kind of taking upward with sales. VC raised, it looks like it's going down, but if you look over the last three quarters, you'll actually see that the number of transactions and deals is about the same. So you're just talking about deals at a lower level and you're talking about a VC market that is affected by low interest rates. So, you know, that's kind of a macro conditions that we are partially facing, that other communities are also facing around the country. So those are highlights, and otherwise you can see here that we're moving on to Ben's topic, which is to start in on the components of the labor force and really break that down for us. Yeah, so this is, well, maybe this isn't so it's part of the partly about the labor force, but mainly what this is about the federal employment. We do kind of a periodically a census or a survey, whatever you would want to call it, where we really, you know, we want to figure out exactly how many people are working for the federal government in Montgomery County, believe it or not, is actually not as straightforward as you may think. Some of the data sources are not perfect. So what we do is we did this last in 2018 and we updated it, we're working on it towards the end of last year, where we look at all of our data sources, we even look through media reports about, how many people might be working at a certain federal campuses or changes in that, and we contact all of the agencies because we want a really good updated number for what's actually there. So this is the result of that. So it's kind of serves, and we really stopped, you know, basically, at the end of last year. So it really kind of serves as a benchmark. There's actually two, there's two full, if you go to the next one, it's a large table because we fit all the agencies that we have on there. So there's two full slides there. But it's really large table because we fit all the agencies that we have on there. So there's two full slides there. But it's really the most updated number. It's our estimates. None of it should be construed as like exact because it's kind of hard to pin that down. But it's our best estimates from planning as to how many people, prior to basically the inauguration, were working on federal sites either tied to them, working for them remotely, and the contractors who work at the site, not the whole contractor industry that may work for other firms. So it's about, we're up to about 78,000 is what we counted, and of course we'll continue to the extent that we can, we will continue to track that as it changes. So I think we can probably skip this slide because that's just kind of going over the same. Okay, so we'll be jumping around for a lot of topics here, but when we hear we are at multi-family rentals. And one of the reasons, so I want to, with real estate here, just wanted to do a breakdown by, to show, to illustrate the segmentation in the housing market. Because all the times we just talk about, like here's the housing prices, here's vacancy rates, but there is, it differs by depending on ownership or rental based on size, whether it's attached or detached. So first, just starting with multifamily, I think the point here is to look at, this is just showing at overall average effective gross rent from 2023, quarter four to 2024, quarter four, and it's gone up a bit, actually not quite as fast as inflation, inflation has outpaced it. And the other thing about this is that, if you look at just looking at the quarter for average rents, they're about kind of between what is somebody at 65% of area median income, family of three, but about between what a family of three and a family of two would be expected to pay under most of our housing programs. So, you know, the county wide average rent is not necessarily, you know, astronomically high. I mean, I don't mean to suggest it's cheap, you know, that's not that's a lot of money to shell out for somewhere to live, but that's, but it's not astronomically high. Now this varies a lot, of course, by geographic location. There are some places that are quite a much more expensive than this. And this isn't accounting for bedrooms and quality and things like that. So you're going to have a lot more on the higher side of this. But just as a data point, it's not excessively high. And it's on par. It's a market rate that's on par with some of our actual programs, you know, our housing programs. And so moving to the next slide, we're talking, here's where we're breaking down home sales by size, basically by bedrooms and then by whether whether it attached or detached. And so, you know, just some of the things to focus on here. If you look down all the way at the four or more bedrooms and you compare just looking at the fourth quarter of 2024, you know, you compare the detached versus attached, you know, detached traditional single family attached with basically a town home. And, you know, neither of them are what anyone would call affordable, right? They're, you know, even town homes with four bedrooms are almost $750,000. But they are about $350,000 cheaper than the average single family detached house. So, you do get, you know, you pay a premium and you, or you could think about it it as getting a discount for the idea of basically something being attached. And so it's affordable to not everybody but a lot more people than a single family home would be. And that goes for all, whenever you get to attach versus detach that kind of goes across the board, then, and Frankie earlier had highlighted the idea of the condos and co-ops, which we haven't paid much attention to, till now, but they're actually one of the things and we'll get to this slide in a couple slides from now. They really serve as like the kind of affordable ownership entry points for the county. And I wasn't aware of how many there are again. This will be on another slide. But they really, you know, the average one, it's, it has risen significantly, but at, you know, about $400,000, it's pretty, it's a pretty affordable option for home ownership in the county. So if you could go to the next one, we'll talk a little more about that. So this one is just looking at, again, It's another way to visualize the segmentation of the four sale market. And this is just looking at all of 2024, the totals. Looking at again, it's another way to visualize like the segmentation of the four sale market. And this is just looking at all of 2024, the total sales by basically whether it's attached or detached. And so there's a lot more detached kind of, that's the blue green bar that goes, those go know, they skew to the higher end of the price range where you have in contrast for the attached and the townhomes, you have them more, that's the red bar, the red bar where you have them more on the lower end. So just once again showing that you can get that discount for the the the attached versus D-tatch. Now if we go to the next one, this is, this This was actually surprising to me. I hadn't looked too much into condos or co-ops before, but there's about 2,500 sales represented in this chart, which I was surprised that there were that many of them now and a lot of them, more than half of them know, under the $400,000 range. So it really is. Now, it really is an affordable option. There's the problem with this and I don't really have the data yet, but this is something that we can look into and I've heard from talking to people kind of anecdotally that this, a lot of these, you know, it's obviously the owners of these are going to be on the lower income side and I think a lot of the board, the associations are really struggling with backlogs of maintenance because it's just really hard to raise that kind of money. And the problems can continue and grow on themselves. So I think, again, that's just kind of a little anecdotal data point there, but just something that I think is worth raising. So I think we'll go, let's, you know, since time's running short, why don't we skip building permits? The point of that slide was just to show that the most of our permits are for multi-family housing. 70% of our permits over the last six years have been for multi-family because that's, you know, what we got space for in zoning force. So I'm going to talk quickly here about labor force. And again, I understand that with a lot of people losing or fearing, losing their jobs, this is, it sounds a little bit anachronistic, but it is a long-term structural problem that I think we still is gonna always apply. So main facts here about this is that first, you can see from this chart that labor force was actually growing fairly steadily well until about 2013. Could debate a lot of reasons for that. Probably sequestration had to do with that. That we've seen a lot of our economic data points kind of flatten out at that, right around 11, 12, 13, probably various reasons that we don't really have time to get into here. But we definitely see the labor force flattening out after 2013. And then actually if you look to around 2018, that's when the dip happens. So two years before the pandemic is when our Montgomery County's labor force actually started declining. So it's really not necessarily even pandemic related, although our failure to get kind of back up to where we were probably does have something to do with the pandemic. So if we want to move to the next one, this is just showing that Montgomery County, which is that red line at the bottom, is our labor force has grown slower than all of the larger geographic areas that contain us, the state, the region, the country. So we are kind of, we've been slow in that. If we go to the next one, sorry, I'm going, just trying to get fit everything in here. That's just size, let's skip that for now. That's just labor force size by 10 year age group, you know, most of the labor forces in 25 to 54, and then, you know, as people age, and it becomes much more common to work, you know, 55 to 64, so that's a big chunk of our labor force also. Okay, so with this one, this chart is showing the net change in labor force for each of those 10-year age groups. The main one to pay attention to here, you know, someone up, someone down, I'll show you how that was, how they went up and down relative to other places because there's a lot of like larger demographic trends going on here that are the same for everywhere and it's a matter of whether you're keeping up or falling behind. But really it's that 25 to 34 year old age group that's the group that lost the most. It's that entry level kind of just starting their career. That's where Montgomery County has been has been struggling to get you know, keep or retain. So we lost about 12,000 of those. This is from 2013 to 2023. This chart shows that this is, you know, showing where Montgomery stacks up relative to in this case, the DC Metro region and national trends. And so what you can see, except with the exception of the 16 to 24-year-old age, which is a very small portion of the labor force for Montgomery County, which is that red bar, whenever we gained labor force, we gained slower than all of the other places. When we lost labor force, we lost faster. And for any age range, other than that, the very young 16 to 24 age range. And if we go to the next one, we can see that the largest, now, of course, we're very far behind in the 75 and over. Again, that's a very small age group. That's a lot of retirement has a lot to do with that and moving. but the main one to focus on is the, again, the 25 to 34-year-old age range, where we're basically 20 points behind the national trend. So really, really slipping in that kind of, you know, that young starting out their career group, which is, you know, which is concerning. Okay, and lastly, sorry for this kind of whirlwind, but we're gonna gonna switch to childcare. And I will go, this is from the third quarter issue. I will, yeah, so really there's a couple main points about it. The one of the interesting things is that, so, demographically, fertility is down. This is a global. This is not just Montgomery County. People are having less children. So Montgomery County has fewer children than it used to. The interesting thing though is that Montgomery County's young children, or that we have about the same amount of young children, even though we have less fewer children overall, we have about the same slightly more young children with no, basically stay at home parent, with either one parent who's in the workforce or two parents, both of whom are in the workforce, which ostensibly means you would need more child care than you may have had in the past. Again, it's not a direct indicator, but it is some sort of indicator. And then the other thing, private sector child care employment has not recovered to its peak from before the pandemic, but it's a bit higher than it was a decade ago. So kind of rose a little bit and then got flat. There, we've got a little bit more child care establishments. And these by the way we're talking about the private child care sector. So this isn't any sort of like, you know, public school related program. This is all private. The, the, gone up. They're more than they were again, a decade ago, but they numbers have been declining since the pandemic. Wages of childcare workers, no surprise are fairly low. About 40% of the county's area median income. And they've gone up. But they haven't, since 2021, they have not kept up with inflation. And then just lastly, it's a tricky. There's definitely good and economic argument for child care. But there's also obviously a social one and because it benefits so many people on many timescales. So I think that we can probably skip all the charts that went along with that. And I think that actually concludes this section unless anyone wants to get and dive into more of the data, but I know there's a lot to do today. So. Thank you so much, Dr. Kraft and Dr. Clarkstone for your presentations. I thought it was detail. And again, it reminder that we need to change quite a few things, especially things that we should be doing targeting young professionals so they can move and stay here Montgomery County. That's a big thing. I wanted to highlight a couple of things you said, especially at the beginning, I think it was like the second slide on the office market and housing. As everybody knows, this is an issue that the economic, on the office market, the economic development committee for over a year, we held a couple of work sessions focused on the office marketing, what we can be doing as a county to tackle the situation of vacant buildings. And then at the same time, the issue with housing as you very well explain the attached versus the attached homes, the price of them, it's really, it's a big deal. In the need of having more homes in the county, it's not just an narrative or people you're talking about, it's a fact that we need more housing, especially for people who are making, you know, just putting numbers, 70, $, $80,000 a year, couples who are making less than $150,000 a year. It's critical that we do that. That is why, and we, this is a session, so I think I can say it. We are moving forward with a packet, called the, that I'm doing together with cancel member Andrew Fritzman, who's here tomorrow, right? By the way, tackling those two issues on the office market and on the house in front, everybody should know that we have or public hearing tomorrow, March 11, look forward for MCDC to sign up to testify and show the data. That's all you need to do, show the data, and I'm gonna be taking quite a few of your slides for my next presentation, by the way. Especially the ones talking about the medium hassle and the need is real. So I wanted to start there. And then perhaps in the next item, the next two items, they each own on your professionals. We probably won't tackle this, treat the budget, but at some point we should need, we need to let come together and see what's the strategy from MCDC, from the business center, from the county as a whole, talking about that. I'm gonna open it up for questions right now. I'm gonna start with Council Member Glass and then Council Member Lorraine Sales and Council Member Balkham and then we'll take it from there. And please be mindful of the time because we have two more items after this. Thank you Madam Chair. I will be brief. I know we have a lot to discuss this morning. I just want to highlight two data points that I think are critically important to this conversation and more broadly, the discussions that we're having here in the county and in the DC region. The federal employment data as of January 2025, important distinction there, as of January 2025. Important distinction there as of January 2025. The number that you came up with is 78,000. Is that correct? There's been lots I've seen on census anywhere from 50 to 70 70 has been the preferred number in the media, but you have determined it is 78,000. So give or take on it under understood. I will start using 78,000 as of January 2025. Unfortunately, we know that number is lower now. Can I just I'm going to harp on a single unannue once here, if you don't mind, just because this is important. 70,000 people that live in Montgomery County that work for the federal government, about 78,000 who work at locations for the federal government in Montgomery County, regardless of where they live. Probably a lot of them work that. Yeah, so 70,000 is about right. Yeah, they might work in DC or 70,000 Montgomery County residents work for the federal government and 78,000 federal employees. Exactly. Yeah, okay. The other data point that is alarming is the home sales price year over year and the 30% increase for detached to bedroom homes. Otherwise known as starter homes. The demand is real. We are not supplying enough starter homes, which is the through line for all the other data about why young people are not moving among Montgomery County. You know, we we've talked about this now for more than a decade going back towards going back to former County executive legged in the economy task force, trying to figure out why young people were not moving here. And this is a persistent problem. It needs tackling and we need to fix it. I yield back. Thank you, Council Member Sells. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you for the quarterly report. I think as we all know now is more important than ever before to look for trends and also be prepared for opportunities. In addition to the numbers mentioned by Council Member Glass, I am curious to see if we've drawn any conclusions about what's causing Montgomery County to lag behind the national and regional labor growth trends, being the economic engine of the state, the third largest biotech. I'm just wondering what are we thinking? Is it education? Is it the housing? If there's any conclusions or ideas behind why we're seen as trend? Well, I think just, I think Council Member Class said it. You know, and so did Council Member Fanig and Salas, is the conclusion I think just, I think Council Member class said it, you know, and so did Council Member Fanny Gonzalez, which is the conclusion I think I personally keep coming back to, which is largely housing. It's not the only thing. I think there's a bit of some, there's some circularity going on when you don't have enough housing and then, you know, you know, jobs don't come here because of housing costs, because maybe the talent, the labor pool isn't there, because they haven't been there, because of housing in the first place. So it does create kind of a circular process. Again, I don't think that we don't, there isn't a public large university in our county. There's one nearby, there's a lot of universities in BC that could have something to do with it. You know, so there's probably multiple trends, but of course I would say that that probably is one of the main ones also. You know, I think the industries that we have, we have every industry, we have a lot of all, especially high tech industries, but there's other places that if you're going to be in tech, which is, you know, probably a, you know, it just, it's not, we're not the first place on the list that you would come. So things like that, governmentness, isn't necessarily that, and we'll see what happens in the future. But I think it's all the above, especially housing. And so what are we doing to mitigate some of these impacts? Well, hopefully, it sounds like we've got some housing, some housing bills, some coming, coming online. And it sounds like. So I've got any ideas about how to attract different industries, how to attract people to stay here. Any incentivize measures that we're working with our businesses to be. Yeah, I'll probably let I think that some of those things will come up when MC EDC. Just the show. Yeah, in their sessions later. Yeah, and I will let my colleagues speak more to this, but I think council member glasses. honing in on the fact that it's the attached units that are those that are in demand is I think really important as we all kind of target our efforts and think about, you know, honestly, well, we would like to have what we want to have. We may want to have density. We may want to also trade that off or what the market is telling us in terms of what kind of housing people, especially young people who are settling in and represent kind of today's workforce and tomorrow's workforce really are looking for. And I know that some of our young people are also thinking about becoming their own bosses. Are we seeing a trend towards more entrepreneurs? We just had a discussion about our incubators. Are we seeing an increase? I am not familiar with either entrepreneurship or like sole proprietorship trends. That's definitely something we can look at. We'll see if we have, I'm not sure if it's available. It's like a county level, but we can definitely focus at that level. Yeah. I mean, if they're following their taxes and with that requirement that was due, I believe March was the deadline for people to follow their taxes if they have an LLC. So it would be good to see what if there's an increase in the pandemic on people becoming sole proprietors, starting businesses. Yeah, and the county, rather the county business patterns that come out of the census track, new business starts. So it's possible that that's something that we could track and see if it's changed over the last year. During COVID entrepreneurship was on the rise, right? Because a lot of people lost their day jobs and had to find a way to make ends meet. And entrepreneurship by people of color was also very much on the rise disproportionately. So these are things that we could perhaps track. We're early, very early, yeah, I'm, into the effects of knowing what changes we're seeing as a result of kind of structural changes in the workforce, but it's something we can track moving forward. Yeah, I'd like to see those numbers. Thank you, I yield. Just alongside that, and we mentioned it last week, and thank youBIR conversation. I wasn't a column Friday with the executive steam and MCDC and the small business center team regarding this effort and I'm very proud by the way. This effort that is going to be launched probably by Thursday of this week, making sure that we are all the folks who are being laid off by the federal government. They have a way to see Montgomery County as a place to start a business, to connect with that private sector, also the different chambers where it's called on Friday, by the way. And basically it's going to be a landing page where folks can can see what we're doing in Montgomery County to support them either by connecting and to a job or by helping them start a new job, which was, you know, goes by the same line of thought as Council, so stay tuned on that one. Council Member Bocchan. Thank you. Thank you for the data. It's always very interesting to get it, and I like the focus areas as well. Just a couple things. From the federal employment, I think it's important for everyone to understand that distinction between the number of federal jobs in Montgomery County versus the number of residents in Montgomery County who work for the federal government. Both of those data points are very important to our economy for different reasons. They're different data points. So it's important that we're tracking both of them, but at the end of the day, they're both humans who are losing their jobs and families and that impact. So it's important to make sure we keep that distinction in mind when we talk about federal jobs here in Montgomery County. The other thing is condos, I think it's important to when we look at condos and the cost of condos from a financial affordability concept, we think we remember the condo fees and the issue with that is that but homeowners don't have a lot of say in how quickly those fees raise. So I think it's always important to remember that element when we talk about affordability of the condo market. Young adult labor force, it's an issue that we've talked about a lot in the past. One of the things I always think about is, you know, our world class education, MCPS, K through 12, and we provide a world class education, and then we send them out into the world world and they leave and the issue is do they come back? And so I am concerned about that data point and I believe that housing is the number one issue there and so we have to be able to do something about that. And then just one last comment about the childcare, very important information. Are you, is there a connection with the children's opportunity alliance with this data? I have not, I have not discussed any of it with them. I saw this session. I think when they, they came to you all. It's a full council. But no, I haven't, I haven't discussed it with them. Yeah, I think that would be a really important connection for them because you have the data and you have the ability to mine the data. So I think that would be a great connection for you. And this is really rich data. And I was soon would be of great, great service to him. So thank you. It'll be great. So let's make sure that we connect and send the data to them. I can still remember Fritzon. Thank you very much. Appreciate allowing me to join the committee. The data is sobering. And it's getting more sobering by the minute with everything that's happening at the federal level. We're losing workers at a higher number than other jurisdictions around the region throughout the country and we're gaining at a lower number. I mean that should be blaring flashing red lights for all of us. The region is not doing particularly well compared to the country. That's part of the story that has been lost. And we're not competing particularly well within the region. We had historically been a region that was stronger than nearly any other region in the country. And within the region, we had gotten a disproportionate share of the strength of the greater capital area in Montgomery County. We were the strongest and we no longer are in that position. And we need to make some changes. We need to be much more intentional, much more aggressive in what we're doing. And the 25 to 34 age bracket is just a huge, huge challenge. I'm glad that the through line of housing and jobs and jobs and housing has been really lifted up here. This is something that the data is screaming at us. And it's something that our businesses have been saying for years and years, that this is a huge challenge. Their inability to recruit and retain employees is directly related to the inability for their employees to afford to live here. It's a huge challenge and we need to be really serious about it. I'm glad childcare is also part of the Presentation. There's a reason why Montgomery moving forward is a coalition that's not just nonprofits and childcare providers. It's businesses and employers who have been at the center of that issue. We really need to be moving forward with much more urgency on those issues. and it's whyS. Chamber of Commerce has taken this up as a huge issue because there's a real recognition that if you want to support the workforce, you need to make sure that you're supporting the people who are in the workforce. And that means parents, working parents who have kids. I'm glad that the county has stepped up in this area with parental leave and other changes that we have made, but we need to really be focused on that as well. And in terms of, what we're doing about it, we'll talk about this later, but we do have an economic development strategic plan. We need to be executing that. We need to be focusing on the metrics and holding ourselves accountable to that. We'll talk more about that in a minute. I did have a particular question here. In terms of the federal workers, and I understand the distinction, both are important. I'm glad Councillor Rebalkham noted this. Workers are important, even if they don't live in Montgomery County because they are part of the economic activity. They support other businesses. They support other workers. There are indirect and tertiary economic impacts and benefits from workers. There's a revenue impact. If you live here in terms of your income tax and other revenues, so both matter, both are things that we should be focused on. Do we have data on federal contractors? I know it's harder for us to figure out. And particularly not just those who work at a federal contractor, but those who are federal contractors who are receiving their paycheck directly from the federal government. I think of USAID workers in particular, the overwhelming number of USAID workers are contractors. They're not officially federal employees. They're particularly at risk with everything that's going on right now because they have no federal protections. That's a separate dynamic, but related. But do we have any data or understanding of what that number would be? at the, but I think it's a good point and it's something that yeah, I think we should definitely be looking into in the future. So I think there's probably a few ways we can get at that if there isn't a dedicated list of contractors. I think we can look for that. So yeah, not at the moment, but definitely something we'll put on our agenda. I think that's really important because it certainly matters for the employee of what protections they have and how this is all going to play out. There are different impacts for the county, for the impact that it has on our communities, on the county budget, on our revenues, on the strength of the fabric of everything that we do. It doesn't really matter whether they're a contractor or a federal employee if they're at risk, if they're going to lose their job, the impacts on them and on their family and on the county and our community are the same. And so if we can hone in on that number and those data points, I think it's going to be really important for us to work through and figure out just to understand the magnitude of the challenges that we're going to face. Thank you. I can say that that is one thing that MCEDC is working on. We're doing it on really a business by business contractor by contractor. methodology's hard to kind of capture the universe of just how many contractors are out there. You know, we found certainly at least a thousand among the companies that we've talked to. We approach these companies when we can and what we do, we approach these companies that we know have been affected and we continue to try to add You know not head counts, but add add and to the list and get a better and more enriched understanding of who's being affected not just USAID But we've seen potentially NASA. We've seen other agencies that have had federal contractors and We've seen the effects of go ahead, Councilwoman, because that's, yeah, that's, no, that's a bit, I was just finishing my sentence saying that that is an effort we're engaged in, but it's a it's a difficult net to cast that net. I appreciate it. I mean, I think it's going to be very difficult to go business by business and try to figure out what that number is. We're going to need to find a more aggregate way of doing it through federal agencies or through some other data point that we figure out. I think it's important to do the business by business work. I think that's a key part of what we want to occur, but to get a real grasp on the number, I think canvassing individual businesses and adding to the number, one job, or 10 jobs at a time, it's just gonna be very difficult for us to have a meaningful data point there. Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna speed this up because we are against the time. So, comments and questions, please brief. just also want to highlight that there. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to speed this up because we are against the time. So, comments and questions, please brief. I just also want to highlight that there have been 12,000 unemployment filing in CDC that includes county residents. That's data right there. Thank you so much for your time and your presentation. We look forward to continue working with you all. Next, we are going to have FY 25 budget follow up with Emma Montgomery. presentation. We look forward to continue working with you all. Next, we are going to have FY25 budget follow up with Emma Gamri Khan economic development corporation and CDC if it can have the poor president join us. I think it's her first time here. Miss fine. More second and that's why second time here. It's been a while. Well, thank you for being here to... I think is her first time here. Miss Fine. Or second. And that's why second time here. It's been a while. Well, thank you for being here today. And before we kick it off, I just want to stay on the record. The MCDC, as you all know, you're required to submit a draft of the county's economic development strategic plan by July 1st, 2025. We all know there are some important transitions happening within MCDC. There was a letter that was sent by MCDC to the then Council President Fritzon, who's right here. here and to me as chair of the Economic Development Committee We and then we responded to that letter through the new Council President Stewart and we have decided that We are gonna wait until May of this year to hear from you on your schedule for this important plan that needs to be delivered. And so, and then we're going to take action by July 1st, but we need to have an idea for you by May that keeps you more time to figure things out internally. Keep us posted because at the end of the day you guys are a partner and we want to see you succeed. Okay. With that, I'm going to pass this to Council staff to brief us and then MCDC for updates. Thank you Madam Chair. I'll just sort of run through some of the highlights of the packet and point out some of the key topics and then turn it over to MCDC for a slideshow. This is again part of the FY25 budget follow-ups where there's revisiting some of the discussions from last year, getting a sense of what has progressed during this fiscal year and trying to get an idea of issues to anticipate for next year. By way of background, the council approved a budget of $4.67 million for MCEDC last year. The county executive had recommended a budget of $4 million. MCEDC had requested a budget of $5.95 million. And ultimately the $4.67 million was the $5.95 million difference to the budget divided by three to three tranches and then one was ultimately approved as part of the broader discussions. MCEDC had raised some concerns about their funding level during the last budget work session and in fact provided a few scenarios to sort of outline how they would have to adjust their level of service and response to different budget amounts and that discussion is provided on page two and three. Moving on to their progress and accomplishments to date. I'm sure MCEEDC will cover those, but we asked some detailed questions about some highlights of their metrics related to attraction and retention specifically and they've provided their work plan and their metrics tracking each element and how the extent to which they've made progress on that and that's in the circle or the attachments to the packet. And they've also provided a summary on page three. They've noted that they have some significantly improved metrics. They've also provided an update on their FY25 marketing strategy, which was in their work plan. And the Council staff also asked them to explain some case studies from the fiscal year that were noteworthy and interesting for the committee to hear. Just to tie this into these more sort of bigger conversations that you all have been having with these work sessions, we also ask them to provide some information about their role within the innovation ecosystem, time back to last week as well. They provided their response there and note that they certainly connect prospective businesses with incubators and provide other connective services there. And may there may be an opportunity to grow their role within that. And of course, they also provide support to the UM3IHC, which is a key part of that innovation ecosystem. Council staff, again, as part of this sort of exploring the topic of economic development, ask them to explain what they think some of the gaps are and the economic development apparatus and programming within the county and they provided a few answers to noted a comprehensive international business attraction strategy might be something worth looking into growing industrial spaces and then also looking more broadly at the talent pipeline ecosystem which is also alluded to on Thursday. Again, keeping with the theme of the follow-ups, Council staff asked them how they might adjust their level of service going forward. There's the wave increase or level of service generally are discussed on page eight. But in terms of their FY26 budget, Council staff noted that they didn't actually ultimately, they've ultimately spent more than the $4.67 million that the council budgeted in part because they tapped some one time funding through reserves and such in order to maintain their level of service that they think is necessary to complete their work plan. Ultimately that, because that That number what the council appropriated there may be implications about what the budget level would need to be for FY26 and so we've explained some of that on page 7. Finally the increasing level of service, this is just that general question I've been asking all the agencies about what other work they could do with additional funding or to just enhance their level of service. They provided a few ideas, although no specific dollar amounts associated with some of these things. But yeah, so there's a summary of all those discussion items on page 9. I know we have a presentation, so I'll just pull that up. Before, thank you so much. Before we move to MCEDC, just want to remind the committee a couple of things. One, about a year and a half ago, we have different work sessions on the role of MCEDC. Business, you know, we had a session on marking, another session on retention, another session on attraction because at the end of the day that's how we see you roll those three different areas. They're very important for us. So that's one that I wanted to remind people. The second thing is that this Friday we're going to hear from the Canon Executive. We're going to see his his budget. We cannot wait. So I don't expect you to tell us, this is how much we need, because we're going to know what the count executive is going to say on Friday. But take this as an opportunity to highlight the work that you have done with the money that you received, which was less of what you wanted. We know that. And see, and tell us about the opportunities, you think we can tackle based on those three goals that you have, marketing, retention, attraction. With that, the floor is yours. Okay, all right. Thank you. Good morning, I'm Ilana Fine. I'm the CEO of VWGU Health Management, but today I'm honored to be here as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation. First, I want to thank the members of the Econ Committee, the entire County Council, and the County Executive's team for your support and patience as we go through an important transition for our organization, especially as you alluded to, the postponement of the delivery of our strategic plan, and we will provide you an update as you have asked. While it hasn't been as traditional for a board member to be part of our regular presentation to this committee, I do hope that this set to new precedent to engage more of our board members in this important dialogue. My remarks come at a time when engagement of our board of directors is at an all-time high, underscoring the importance of engaging the business community as much as possible. As you know, we are in the process of searching for our next leader. Andy Chad, president of Minkoff Development and Ancadamian Executive Director of University of Shady Grove are leading our search efforts. In parallel, Jennifer Sin of Clark Enterprises is leading our transition committee to help prepare the organization for new leadership. We have selected a search firm to lead a national search and we will have the official job posted shortly. At this point I do want to thank Bill Tompkins for his service as both our COO and CEO. He has helped us stabilize this organization post-COVID and is helping us transition for our next leader. As part of reading for this important search, we have had discussions with many of our stakeholders to help create a profile of an ideal candidate. As you can imagine, we've heard a lot of different opinions, but there's clear consensus that our partners are looking for a leader who can set a vision while also building a strong economic development organization. Through this process, our board also has a clear understanding of our role and have a better understanding of where we need to lead and where we plan to collaborate with many of the partners here in this room. We're in this room, the county executive's office, and partner organizations like the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce, WorkSource Montgomery, Visit Montgomery, MCPS, USG, Maryland Tech Council, and countless others. We are already seeing some green shoots of these collaborations, which you will hear about more in a few minutes from our team. Given the many issues our county is facing is clear that our success is dependent on finding ways to collaborate, communicate, and support each other. Before I pass this to the team, I want to leave you with one last thought. This is a time to be investing in economic development. As my colleague on our board and your colleague on this committee, Marilyn Balcombe clarified for our board to retreat this fall, our role is to create the economic activity necessary to support the aspirations of our community. Without an investment in economic development, through MCEDC, the organization specifically tasked with leading economic development, will not be able to track the leadership or staff necessary to build this organization. And we certainly will not be able to create the economy we need or the community we desire. I will now turn this over to Lori Bob. Good morning, everyone. Lori, we have Director of Economic Development at Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation. I'm just going to go through a couple of slides. In your packet, we gave you a lot of detailed information, so I'm not going to repeat a lot of what is in there. But we do want to highlight a couple of major initiatives that we've been working on. Next slide, please, it's Charlie. Some of our key initiatives, of course, I already mentioned the University of Maryland Institute for Health Computing, the county executive was very instrumental in making sure that that came here and was open. And we've been working very closely with them since they opened doing some coordinated joint outreach to the local life sciences community with them. We are co-hosting our first biotech connections event with them on April 10th this year and that's going to be a great way for us to help facilitate some collaborations with the Institute for Health Computing and some of our small local life sciences companies will continue to support that overall outreach. As you know, with the universities at Shady Grove, we will be co-hosting the second annual Innovate ED Summit Empowering Economic Advancement Through Education and Workforce Development. So we're very focused on that right now. There are some fantastic speakers who are going to be involved that day and we're looking forward to that. This is a great way to connect government industry academia and create those pathways to success for our local workforce, which I think leads into the, how do we get our young folks to want to stay here, work here, live here, by trying to align industry with the education opportunities and those pathways that we're creating. And the job Creation Fund, again in partnership with our Department of Finance team and referring and advising a lot of the prospects that we're working with to submit applications for that. And the marketing that our team to highlight that that program and doing some direct outreach to our local brokerage community to make sure that they understand when they're dealing with the tenants that they're working with that they are also promoting these programs to the companies that they're interacting with. Has been a great initiative for us and we're looking forward to seeing more applications coming in through that portal. Next slide please. Some of our other major collaborations with Montgomery County government happening now and coming up in the very near future. We have recently been working with the regional service centers highlighting to put together documents that are highlighting major existing assets for each of those regions in the county and plan developments that will be coming up for each of those regional service centers. So we're trying to create a fantastic opportunity so that we have a universal look for how we're highlighting those assets and plan developments in each of those service centers. The bio international conference is coming up. We're partnering with Judy Costello, the County Executive and the State of Maryland folks to attend the largest life sciences trade show which has over 18,000 attendees every year. It's a great opportunity for us to highlight Montgomery County and the state as the third-highest biotech hub here in the U.S. and leveraging those collaborations to meet with and talk to potential companies who may be interested in locating here and creating those synergies. And then also the Select USA Foreign Direct Investment Summit, again partnering with the County Executives team and our state partners to coordinate our outreach efforts to reach international companies across industry sectors. So in a variety of sectors, but mostly in the technology and life sciences sectors who support there. But one of the big things with that is we do support an exclusive local tour of Montgomery County as a spin-off event prior to the beginning of that summit. We've had great success with that where we get 40 to 50 people on a bus and they get a great bus tour of the county and again Judy Castello is very instrumental on helping to pull together the business visits that we offer those international attendees but one of our great collaborations that we have and that's going to be coming up very soon. Thanks, Laurie. So I'll talk a little bit about the federal workforce. I know we've had a lot of partnerships. Are these yourself, please? Oh, just, pre-esting planning, direct-graph, economic development here at MCEDC. Just want to talk a little bit about the federal workforce and what we're doing to support both employees as well as employers that have been affected. So I know there's been a lot of conversations about the numbers, so I'm not going to go into that. So we know roughly around 70,000 workers here work for the federal government as well as contractors. So we looked at the number of employees that have been laid off nationally. So the average is around 14%, 13.5 to 14%. So if we were to factor that in with the current workforce in Montgomery County, so we predict that around 9,300 employees might be affected by the federal job loss at this point. And that's just on the layoffs. But if you look at the employees that actually took the buyouts, so the average was around 4% nationally. So if you look at that in Montgomery County, that would be roughly around 3,000 So all in all, you know, we're already talking about upwards of 12,000 employees that might be affected by what's going on right now. And that's just on the federal work-for-side, right? So we have a federal contractors that are equally affected by this. So we saw this with USAID where roughly about 1200 employees lost their jobs within a span of couple of days. And we're yet to see the impact of that come in. And that number is really hard to come back and Council Member Freesthan talk about the importance of that. And we do recognize that, but it's been extremely difficult to gather that insights. We are partnering with the Department of Labor, our WorkSource Montgomery to figure out a way where we get information in advance so that we can respond to it. And in terms of the real state that the federal government owns, so I'm sure you guys saw the list that GSA came out with where there was 39 properties located in Montgomery County, just over 3.6 million square feet. But that changes every day, right? So I looked at it this morning, that list is completely gone. So we're actively trying to review what's going on there and we'll update the council as more information becomes available. We was gone within 24 hours, but it's just... Mm-hmm. And in regards to the federal contractors, so within our strategic industries, We know there are just about 2400 federal contractors that work in Montgomery County. So the challenge for us now is now that we have identified the number, we want to know how many employees work for that, those federal contractors. And that's going to be a slightly longer process. And we look forward to working with planning as well as the workers Montgomeryource Montgomery and the party member to get that information. So talking about the response and definitely one of the things that county executive team on this because they have been a great partner with us. So when we found out about the federal layoffs that was happening, we wanted to make sure that we were here as a resource both for employees but also for employers. So in terms of employees, WorkSource Montgomery is our lead agency, and they're doing an excellent job of communicating the resources that are available to employees that are affected, whether it's job fairs that they're hosting themselves, or job fairs that are being hosted by partner agencies. But the main goal for MCDC was to bring all the partners together. So we've been having this weekly calls with all the major partners from different county government, to city governments, to Chamber of Commerce's, as well as the county executive's office, to talk about what are the resources that are out there and how do we communicate that to our constituents. And a part of that comes from a member you talked about launching talked about launching a site, which hopefully will have it done by Thursday. And that will be the go to site for everyone that has been affected. And part of our messaging around this is, hey, we understand this is a difficult time, but there are opportunities out there in Montgomery County. So we have more than 13,000 private sector jobs that people could benefit from. And we're in the process of identifying what sort of skill sets is necessary, and what kind of job titles are there. And we're working very closely with the workforce to kind of identify that and message that to our community. So the message here is collaboration, right? We're all in this together and MCDC, along with the county executive's office, will continue to work in this space. Happy to take any questions, but I'm gonna turn it over to Stacy, who's gonna talk a little bit about F-26 budget. Good morning, council members. I am Stacy Hardy. I am the Chief Administrative Officer for MCDC. As FY26 is coming up, we won't spend too much detail in terms of going through the numbers, but just to say that we plan to continue our investment on some of the initiatives that we've done this far, we wanna make sure that we're intentional with our time and our resources. So some of the things that Lori just spoke about in terms of our continued investment key initiatives we plan to do that again in FY26. One of the things that Lori has not talked about is our investment in our long-term relationships. So part of our secret sauce is us getting out and talking to the businesses. So we want to make sure that we're talking to our key employers, our large employers, employers that have recently had investments. So we want to make sure that we're maintaining those connections and deepening those connections as we move forward. So we really want to prioritize that in our FY26 budget request. Another thing that we really want to make sure that we focus on next year is looking at marketing and communications outside of the region. So in the past we've done a lot of investment here locally and we want to broaden that in terms of those larger markets that we want to have access to. So we will be focusing on Boston and San Diego, some sorry San Francisco San Diego, because we know that those are prime markets for life sciences and technology. So we're going to continue to do that. And then in terms of engaging the business community, we want to have our economic development forum. So this is another opportunity for us to convene and to get more information on business intelligence that can inform our efforts as we move forward. So we appreciate the opportunity. We appreciate your support, the support of the county. We look forward to having more conversations as we go through the budget process. Thank you so much for that. Before I open it up, I have a couple questions. Maybe, Laurie, you may want to have a chair, close to. Yeah. Otherwise, yeah, you guys can squeeze it. There you go. There you go. We can all fit in. Beautiful. So you mentioned the M thing and I before I even say that miss fine, I think it's a great idea to have more members coming in as you suggested and we look forward to seeing that happening. It doesn't always has to be you, which we love having you, but you could rotate because we know that you also have full time job. So besides this role, so thank you for suggesting that. You mentioned the idea of having more coordination, having some top of rapport in each regional center in the county. I think that's a great idea, but I'm going to ask you right now, and I'm going to say this as a district council member, you better talk to each council member from that region. There is no way you're coming to my district without talking to me. I'm just, I'm just talking to the regional service because it's a different world. Let's just put it that way. So I'll tell you, I'll tell you where it came from, and then the vision for how we can use it more broadly is when the board our board of directors was working on putting together recruitment piece for the CEO, the president CEO position. There was discussion of can we create a piece that highlights major projects and things that are going on all around the county? So it made sense to coordinate with the Regional Service Center directors. So we did hear from all of the Regional Service Center directors. Each of the reports that we got from those directors, of course, was completely different. Well, shock team. So our Manu, Luzio Hashimi, and marketing team is working on compiling that into one uniform look, picking just a few of the major assets in each regional service center area and creating that. So it really came out of recruiting for the president's CEO position piece so that there could be general explanation of what was going on and the assets in each of the different areas. And but then there is there's been discussion about how can we use this more broadly for other other things as well. That's where it came from. Yes, and I want to thank Lori for also taking the question because this was certainly something the board and the transition committee along with Ken Hart and kind of brainstormed and never and as something that wouldn't that be helpful for us as the board. So there was never any way to we didn't want to ruffle any feathers certainly by saying we're going into we're not. We're just trying to create like a lookbook to say I love it going on and I think to really help prioritize because can do everything at the same time and to say thinking through like where if we where can we start that would create additional economic you know activity etc. so I think that's so we look forward to it's not quite ready for prime time so we don't have it yet for this that is that is a great starting point to show collaboration that is is a great. I think it's great. Great timing to. I will say to you, please take that draft that you have for each region and connect with each council member that district council member. Sorry. The two of you have to look left. The district because they're at large. Each district council member. and well, well, you can do that too, but have meetings with each district council member. And, well, well, you can do that too. But have meetings with each district council member for each region. And before you release it, I will ask that please. And I think it's a great initiative, great idea. So, okay, I want us to start there. Then the second thing on the three shows, just because I have had the privilege of going overseas with a county executive in MCEDC, I went to Taiwan, feels like ages ago. Did this place, guys? It has to be Montgomery County, Maryland. Nobody cares about MCEDC. It's just, please, no. It's like, if you go overseas, nobody knows what that is. You need to display the county in the region, the Washington DC region. So I'm going to say one more time, because even when I see this place in Montgomery County events, I think that one of your three goals is marketing, marketing the county. Not MCDC, those are two different things. I know I sound rush or harsh, but it's just... I'm just... There's no other way I can say this. And then I love the deal of the bus tour that you guys are having. It will be great if you can please forward to us where the stops that you guys are making in development. So that's not anything that you can communicate with Eric and some member. I'm sure there are things that we know that you probably don't know. It's just that you know the day's collaboration. But I loved the idea. I think it's great, I'm gonna pass the mic to Councilmember Baucon who seats us the lead person for the county in MCEDC. Thank you, thank you for being here today. Just a couple things. I do think the presentations have, in terms of our visuals have have evolved. So I just want to put that there. I also want to say that when we look at the data, the business engagement, we had a long discussion through the years about meaningful business engagement. And I really appreciate MCDC's in looking at a business engagement. It's got to be meaningful and appreciate that change. In terms of the budget, agree it doesn't make sense to talk about the budget today when we're going to see it on Friday. Just want to put a marker out there that this is going to be a tough budget. But we cannot do what we need to do unless we invest in economic development. And sometimes when we get really into the weeds about what's important and what we can and can afford, we can't afford to not invest in economic development. So I'm just putting it out there. I look forward to hearing about the job creation fund in the next segment of today. I think that's important. And in the packet, there were a discussion about gaps in economic programming. And I thought that was a really good discussion in the packet. But I am concerned about mission creep for MCEDC. We need MCEDC to stay focused on our top industries and our key industries. However, I do think I do want to pull out the light manufacturing and this might be something for planning to look at. And that is having an inventory of our light manufacturing sites, how much availability we have for light manufacturing, and really a discussion. And this is glad that the Chair of the PHP Committee is here. We do, we should look at the balance of our light manufacturing zoning in Montgomery County, and because when we look at commercialization of our boutique and the manufacturing aspect of getting product to market, I think is important. So just wanted to pull that up. And of course, talent pipeline, which we talked about in the first piece and appreciate the summit that you all are doing with USG and your partnership with the education. So that's it. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. I'm going to ask Council staff to coordinate with planning to send us a list of the light industry zones that we have in the county. That would be great. Council member, for Laurens' Health. Thank you. I just wanted to note the budget that MCDC made use of and the I don't want to say significant cuts that impacted your work plan. Have we looked at what other neighboring jurisdictions are spending what their budgets are? We actually are. So there are gas packs of what you did in terms of as it relates to the population. So we are actually just starting that work. It's something that we were going to incorporate into our next budget conversation. So we will be able to say what neighboring jurisdictions spend in terms of economic development. Yes. You already know what the question is. Really? There's more. There's more. There's more. OK. All right. So did you want to add that our competing jurisdiction spend more? Okay, that's what I thought. So we're asking multiple millions more dollars. Yes. So that knows that are ahead where we should be investing. Our aspirational partners are spending much more. And that's good to know because we're asking you to do monumental things to become number one in the region. But if we're not funding you to the levels to ensure that you are able to do the work to market to attract and to retain the businesses that are going to attract the population that we need to be a thriving county. then we're just spinning in circles. So just wanted to dig into the packet, looking at some of the scenarios that were mentioned, looking at scenario one and two, what initiatives would be eliminated? You'd far know you with some page two. I just declared that was that is touching for the FY 25 budget. I was just providing that context from the last year's budget sessions. So we don't pay slightly in terms of what those scenarios might be today. But I'll defer to that. So in terms of the impact, we had to, we eliminated a number of positions that would have been tied to developing our strategic plan, for example. So we didn't have that capacity to be able to do that. We had to eliminate positions tied to marketing communications. We had graphic design support that we no longer have. So it has been very impactful. We did prioritize our business development efforts, obviously to maintain and be able to satisfy our mandate, but marketing communications was severely cut. And so with those two things go hand in hand. So while we prioritize our BG team, so that we would have minimal disruption, There's been considerable impact on the marketing and communication side. Okay. Thank you. With regards to the lease expiration campaign, do you have any additional data points? How many businesses were planning to renew? how NCDC assisted those businesses in restoring their lease, what methods you use to engage. Do you have any more information on that? Yes, Councilmember. So we've reached out to over 300 businesses, whose lease is going to expire in the next three years. And we do have some success stories where businesses have renewed their lease as a part of our outreach. Obviously, we're not the only factor, but certainly talking to them about, hey, here are some of the options, here are some of the incentives have certainly helped us in the conversation. And we can get that list to you. But one thing I will say is the job creation fund has been very impactful for us. So not only in talking to businesses that are located in the county right now, but also businesses that are outside of the county. We have multiple businesses that we're talking to right now. I'm asking because you're in your packet. It says 1300 businesses were engaged with. But there's no data on how many were retained, how many leases were renewed. So it's great that you're talking to these businesses, but detailed data on what the benefit to Montgomery County was. That's not great. We'll get that to you. Thank you. And then with regards to, well, I guess if you are going to get some additional information, if you can also share what the actual benefit to Montgomery county was as a result of those engagements. Okay. And of the businesses you have engaged with being in growth mode, what key sectors are we seeing the most investments in with regards to mergers and acquisitions, venture capital, private equity, foreign direct investment? How are you focusing that outreach given the limited workforce that MCDC has the limited budget for marketing? So we're focused on our target industries as we always have been. So life sciences techno. No, I mean how many businesses in each of those sectors are you targeting across those key sectors because it's very broad the packet that you've given us. It's just a lot of information but nothing about the targeted investments or conversations that are happening in these specific industries. So if we anything that would indicate a growth mode or a constriction mode for a company would trigger us to engage with companies in those target industries. So if we see a company has raised $10 million in venture capital, we engage with that company. If we see that... Yeah, so was it 5, 10? If you don't have the information now, because I'm looking at page 4, it's not there. So that's what I'm asking for. If we're having a discussion about data and indicators, it's helpful to actually have data to understand who you're speaking with in which key sectors you're actually speaking with and then how that's benefiting. What are we retaining? What are we attracting as a result of those conversations in those key sectors? Yeah, we should be able to break that. Thank you. That would be very helpful. And then how are you affecting the measuring the effectiveness of the new Montgomery County Maryland where built for business messaging compared to the B next campaign? I'll let our marketing director talk about that council member. And please be brief because of we're running out of time. I just want to say that. Finally, to Hashmay, Director of Marketing and CDC. Thank you very much. I'm chair and council member. So in terms of we are built for business, we actually did at that point some research in terms of competitor research of what other adios were focusing on and messaging and tagline. And what we wanted to do is offer a much more targeted overall message that isn't just generic, but also that is more focused on B2B audience. So our entire strategy for fiscal 25 has been much more specific to the business to business community and then in particularly to our industries. So in fact, to answer and to add on to what Lori said, we have actually delivered deployed some marketing campaigns for specific life sciences companies in Boston and San Francisco. And we looked at particular segmentation of companies that have received SBIR and STTR grants, companies that had received early stage venture capital funding. So we can include that in the next data in the next. So how many? Yes. You know, we heard about the Bnex campaign. This is a new messaging campaign. So if we're spending money on marketing, what's the result? What has transpired between the last campaign in this campaign and who's coming up with these tag lines to ensure that they are effectively attracting retaining the sort of businesses that we want. So I don't see that in the packet again. It's great that you're telling me what you're doing, but what are the results for what you're doing? You have the Bnex campaign, and I'm not sure what is the return on investment from Montgomery County. It's not indicated. I think in terms of return of investment, we also have to consider that economic development is obviously long-term in fact. And so while we can sit here and you know, certainly in the next packet, I can offer some data in terms of lead generation, in terms of how many businesses we've reached with through our marketing campaigns versus the last campaign would be helpful. We can do a comparative analysis. Okay. That said, it is a long-term process, meaning just because we are doing a campaign. Yeah, but the process is done because that campaign is over. So we should have the data based on when that campaign started, when it finished, what was the return and what you're projecting for this campaign? Yes. We can absolutely add that without a problem. Thank you so much. We have great data in your annual report too. So just wanted to highlight that. Councilmember Glass. Thank you Madam Chair. I appreciate this conversation because last time we talked about the budget was during the budget and the vision for MCEDC and potential new ideas, including the executive's budget reduction, which we as a body ended up adopting. I stated at this committee and at full council, I did not think we should have a budget reduction without having a comprehensive conversation about MCEDC. Too much was happening in real time, and I think it was a disservice. And what we've now learned is that five positions were eliminated regarding marketing, outreach, and communication. That's the problem. And so I very much appreciate the chair having this discussion now a few days before the next budget is is released. So technically, yes, we've had it before the budget, but it speaks to the ongoing need for this discussion. And it is a frustrating one. You're hearing the frustration here, this fine. You have a tough job. You know this, the board knows that I've spoken with many colleagues of yours. And not only were you sending out a course to find new leadership for this body, but now with the churning of the federal workforce changes, many of us were at NIH just on Saturday talking about the reductions to our life sciences industry or federal workforce, which is directly tied and the main reason why we are the third largest biohub in the country. They are inextricably tied, which makes this job search even harder. So please keep us informed on how that goes because I think we need somebody who is nimble, who has a vision, but is nimble because nothing is guaranteed anymore, unfortunately, under the Trump administration. So with that, let me just note that I am glad we're pivoting away from being next. I didn't think it meant much. And so as we move forward, I'm glad to hear the rationale for the next marketing campaign, but we might very well need different messages for different audiences. And so just be mindful of that. But this is an ongoing conversation. I know we'll have another one after the budget. Mr. Tomkins, thank you for being here and for your leadership over the last number of years. But this is a difficult situation that we are in. I hope the budget that is presented to us is helpful towards meeting our economic development needs. If the budget that is presented is not helpful towards that, we as a body have to make sure it is helpful towards that. Thank you. And also helpful to attract a great candidate. Yes, thank you. So for the for MCDC. Last word. No. Oh, great. Thank you. All right. Appreciate it. All right. Thank you so much for the presentation and the level of detail. Next, we are going to have FY25, by the follow-up for the Economic Development Fund. I'm going to ask Mr. Ken, Carmen Espada, and Ms. Jury Costello, James Smith, to please come forward. And I'm going to ask Cancel staff, Mr. Ali, that let's stop by each one of the funds and I'm gonna open it up for questions. Some of them are gonna be very quickly. Others are not. So let's be... Should not be rushing with this. No, that one, I, you know, the next session is at 30 song hoping that everybody here is okay to leave by 11.45 is that okay? I'm hoping that everybody here's okay to leave by 1145 is that okay 11. All right, good. So thank you. Mr. Ali kick it off. Thank you. So starting on page two and just above that we have a quick background EDF which contains multiple programs as you are all aware. and FY 25, and-FY 25, the council approved a 4.1, 4.17 billion, a million dollar budget for the fund. Yeah, and it's allocated, as you can see on page two. As for the performance to date, so this has been a very active fund for an FY25 as the Kennedy Executive team will explain. But just to walk you through Table 2, you can see what the approved budget was. You can see that 2.87 million of that has been dispersed to date. That's across four different programs. The EDFGLP, which is that grant and loan program accounts for the bulk of it, but move has been very active active today. There have been seven SBIR matches as well and then the purple line grants have been going out the door on a monthly basis. There's also been some encumbered funding for the move program the amount of $845,000. Those are agreements that will be paid and similarly another 28 another 286,000 covered for the remainder of the monthly payments for the purple line grants. In addition to that, there are eligible applications for the move program that for which there is not sufficient funding. But technically, if there was, those could also those are also awards that could be made. And And so the total appropriation if you account for dispersed and encumbered remains that is at around 160,000 with an additional 358 potentially pending. And then we get to the move program, which is the first one that we've called out starting on page four. You can see that in total between the dispersion and comfort, there's $1.5 million of awards to be handed out for the move program. And this is a significantly faster pace than in previous fiscal years. I think during the budget we showed that it had not exceeded 750,000 over the past five years or so. And so the activity is particularly high this year. Some of that has to do, some of the updates to the move are starting to trickle in. So you can see a few of the incumbent awards achieve that sort of new maximum of 150,000. And then there were also a few awards for expansion in general, even if it didn't reach the new limit. And so some of those awards are starting to trickle but that process with the executive regulation stopped being approved until November. The most of the move awards were of the original form that prior to the council's update of the program. And you can see some of the data on the average of the award and signs and things like that. But for that, I'll just stop there and turn over discussion. I think this is very exciting. I am very proud of this committee really worked together to have an active of the move program. But I do want to recognize the leadership of councilmember Glass who really led on this. And I wonder if you have questions or comments. Again, we're gonna stop by each one of them. And this is a time, but this is exciting news. Do you have anything? Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and appreciate the leadership of this committee to identify the needs of our existing tenants and future tenants to update a program that was on the county rolls, but was not codified and we know that businesses wanted certainty. So we provided that certainty by putting it into law and by expanding the scope. And so Mr. Ali or maybe I'll turn it to executive staff actually. So the move program has been oversubscribed regarding regarding the funding. So talk a little bit more about the extra disbursements that are needed and can you elaborate a little bit more about the businesses to the specific points that I know members of the committee want to know what businesses have we been able to retain or move to Montgomery County through this program. And Councilmember Friedson. I the race say, so I want to start by recognizing this is the EDF is a fun managed by the Department of Finance. And there are bits of it that are managed in different ways. The move program itself is managed by the business center and Deresay, the Kila is here to can answer questions about the types of businesses that are coming in and speak more specifically about that program. Thank you. Deresay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're racing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That question. My name is Doris Avigula. I am a program manager for economic programs. So the companies are. It is a combination of a lot of companies, but for the most part, there are medical practices, there are biotechnology companies, there are fund management and a whole lot of companies that show you the arise through a bunch of industries. That's great. And I'm going to get ahead of the broader conversation, but as you engage with businesses about the wider range of programs that we have that are going to be detailed in this particular session of our hearing. How do they determine which program is best for them or how do you speak to the different programs that an option is available? Simply what's part to begin with, we have business liaisons that are out, you know, basically interacting with businesses. So based on that, we get inquiries through the business and our emails and we would talk to the businesses directly and we don't talk only about movies but we offer the whole range of economic development we have, and depending on their specific situation that is what we determine movies, the one that is applicable to you or if it is jobs and we're referred to my colleague Nadia and we go from there. I see Ms. Kuss. Yeah, go ahead and if I can, can I ask my class? So this is the team effort. MCDC plays a major role in marketing all of the programs under the EDF. So whether it's move, whether it's the the the jobs grants or any of the other programs that finance offers under this uh they they are are front one of our front facing markets, as they're doing their outreach, they learn what the company needs, and they explain and refer companies to us for the programs. And I know we have a lot more to talk about, but let me just ask this last question, which I think does help preview the rest of the conversation. In your experience in working with businesses and sharing with them the panoply of options available, are they simply selecting the one that has the highest dollar amount available to them? Is that basically the decision making? I don't know if MCED, who, Ms. Costello. And also I'll add a footnote. This might add to the complexity of the situation, the fact that there are lots of economic development cooks in the kitchen, and businesses might not know who to talk to, and the fact that MCEDC is its own spin-off quasi-governmental organization that is not directly tied to county government, but I'll going to do. I'm not sure if it's a thing that I'm going to do. I'm not sure if it's a thing that I'm going to do. I'm not sure if it's a thing that is a thing that is a thing that is a thing that is a thing that is a thing that is a thing that is a thing that is a thing that is a thing that things but we started more than a year ago to say no wrong door and we view MCEDC as a promoter, our office as Ms. Fanny Gonzales and Mr. Glass-Know from when we were overseas marketing. And locally, we promote on the business center under funding and incentives and in all of our promotional material and our partners in MCDC do the same thing. We promote that. that corner of who that won't use that. And there to that collection of incentives for companies. And to answer your specific question, typically they will apply for any incentive available to them. And what helps keep us competitive is having a broad range of incentives and many tools in the toolbox. So it is not uncommon for someone to expand and seek now that the move funds under the expansion grant will be talking a little bit later about the technology, innovation and founders funds, some of those same companies have applied for those grants. And Nadia and Dennis will speak in a minute about a couple companies who overlap and also are applying for the job creation fund. And collectively that may seem to be a lot of options. Competently it adds up not necessarily to the huge number for most companies that some of our competitors offer in different ways. So the short answer is they don't go for the highest, they go for everything they can. We'll talk a little bit more about having said that when asked if they could lessen their request and still if that our funding would make a difference for them specifically at the Technology Innovation Fund. Our county entrepreneur said yes and they wanted strategic use of the funds. We'll talk about that later. Thank you very much, and I'll end with no wrong door. Is that the term? I think that's great. And I want to give a shout out to Gene Smith when lots of people have reached out to me about the program I've shuttled it through his door. So thank you for facilitating. Can some member sales? Thank you. Given the, I guess, overextension of the original appropriation for the move grant, it seems that there are more businesses who want to move here or take advantage of that. Do we know how many jobs would result from that additional appropriation? Yes we did. As of the data we shared with data we have 860 selling jobs, initial jobs that those applicants reported and over the coming three years they promised to add additional 1500 jobs. just from that $300,000 appropriation that we weren't able to meet. The overage. I'm talking about the overall in the FY25 as early 28, 20, 20, 20. Yes, but I'm talking about the 358,000, 248 that you weren't able to appropriate because you ran out of money. Do you have? Yes. Okay. You want to follow up? Yes. Okay. Thank you, Ms. Council members, Welcome Thank you. While Councillor member glass was speaking I wrote down no wrong door. So I appreciate that and this is following up from our conversation about the the incubators last week. This I mentioned this issue of just we have so many different siloed approaches that we need to just remember to work together, which I think the team does. And in particular, when we talk about the incentives that we have available, that everybody is aware of them and knows of them, so I appreciate that. So I do have a question about on page three. We do have some appropriation remaining. And I understand that the move grant is oversubscribed. But there's about there's 160,000 left is the intention to spend it all down. Yes. The EDF accounting works. You please enter these yourself. I'm just my apologies. Dennis Hepman department finance. The EDF accounting works differently from typical funds and it was intentionally designed to give us that flexibility if larger deals transpire. And right now there is this ever present in kind of congruency of supply and demand not aligning up. So some programs like Move will have considerable demand. Others will be slower. And we're by the fact that each of these funds are fundable and roll up together. It enables us that flexibility. So that 160,000 or so. That's typically our ending balance when you roll everything together. But given all the great work that's coursing through the EDF right now, we anticipate to end 25 right around zero if not close to a negative balance. So we are working to structure that with OMB in the context of the FY26 recommended budget. We will of course fix that, but it is a difficult fund because it is dynamically, all these are aggregated together. Okay, so does that mean that some of these move grants might go forward? Or are you thinking that this remaining balance is earmarked for a different type of fund? We're gonna do everything we tend to configure it in a way where the volume is commensurate with demand and we can keep the funds flowing to the extent that we can. That doesn't necessarily mean that in FY26, we may need a supplemental appropriation if that demand exceeds supply. Okay, great, thank you. Thanks, Mayor Bail. I'd like sorry about that. That the administration doesn't want any of these programs to grind to a halt. So we are working to move them all forward. If there is a greater need in one, we'll compensate another area and we'll be back to see you in the FY 27 budget. I'm says, do you have the answer for council members? So seven. Seven. Over the coming three years, 84. And total overall script footage that they're planning to ask advice close between 9000 scriptwriters. Wow. OK. I just had a quick follow up question. Are we anticipating an appropriation from the executive to cover these? Grants. I'm going to turn it to the finance. As Dennis, maybe you can explain that. And then if not, how are we prioritizing? We can't discuss that just yet. It will be in the packet when that's and the recommended budget is transmitted. But the counting executive fully supports this program and we'll do everything he can to ensure that these are filled. The last thing we want to do is stop and pause and not be able to offer any of the grants that are offered under the EDF. Yeah, that's a lot of square footage. That's at risk. Thank you. Thank you so much. Now for the questions, we can go to the next one. Thank you. So the next award is on starts on page five. We're talking about the grant and loan program under the EDF. There's a quick description of the process that the Department of Finance has to engage in with these businesses and to make these awards. It is a discretionary program, somewhat open-ended in terms of the requirements, but typically they'll enter into agreement to provide a certain amount of jobs. In FY25, the largest award total 1.3 million for 5600 shares laying, which I believe was discussed as part of the FY25 budget. I think there was awareness that that was going to happen. And that's going to help retain a GAC lease associated with 2,000 jobs. Cadexo also received a $70,000 award and federal real estate investment trust received a $250,000 award for an additional 420 jobs. I don't have data or council staff does not have data on pending agreements that may be out there for the EDFGO piece that that may be of interest given the discussion of the fund balance. Yeah, and that's another distinction for the EDF is it rolls based on appropriation and and conferences, not actual balances and known in conferences. So we essentially have teed up for FY26 1.7 million in deals that will go out the door. We know will go out the door. And then remaining for FY 25, we have about right around 1.6 and roughly 358,000 remaining for this year across multiple companies that you'll see when they're finalized, but there's still signatures that have to happen on those. And they're going to happen one? By the end of FY 25, so by June. Okay, perfect. Council member Brickson. Yeah, thank you all. I was going to say it before I'll say it now. We need to be investing in economic developments. This is a really important and timely discussion. Appreciate the committee for your work and continue leadership on focusing in and honing in on this. That's an MCEDC budget question. It's also an EDF budget question. And I think both are important and it's a timely conversation, given we'll get the budget on Friday as recommended by the County Executive. And the council will have to grapple with that. The 1.7 million, I just want to hone in on that. Is that pipeline? Are those potential deals that may come to fruition? Like you've you're in discussion or MCDC is in discussion and we're not sure because we're competing against other jurisdictions and we're not sure if the answer is going to be yes. Is that ones that are previously allocated and these are multi-year agreements and that's the aggregate of the multi-year agreements. So we start FY26 with 1.7 million. What does that number mean? That's a great question. And it's an important thing to clarify is that there's a lot of signatures that have to happen on these. There's a lot of elements that we need from the company. We run fiscal impact statements. We need them to show us the jobs and ensure that the data that they're providing we get in a timely way. So that amount is a cent, we know that's going out the door next year. That's not like a pipeline that's kind of... Okay, I just want to ask the answer. I asked the question and get the answer that's more specific to that. That means there's 1.7 million in FY26 that are already encumbered through previously made deals that have already occurred, that the only outstanding question is whether or not they follow through on the requirements of the agreement. Precisely. Out of the five or so steps, they're three, four. We need the fifth and then the check is cut. Okay, so just to be clear, I just think it's important because it wasn't clear in the original presentation. 1.7 million is not new economic development initiatives. 1.7 million is to fulfill the commitments and agreements that we've already made, assuming that they come forward and demonstrate that they have fulfilled their end of the bargain. Correct. Correct. Okay. I just think it's really important for us to understand that that is part of the conversation. Obviously, that is the absolute baseline. We have to fulfill our commitments and our obligations. We have to have the funding and the budget in order to do that. We also need to be investing in economic development. 1.7 million in that case is just fulfilling our obligations. It's not investing in new economic development. So I just think it's important that that be highlighted in that. Thanks. Thank you so much for that. Councilmember Freetzin, we are going to move on to the next one. Do you have a one question? Okay, go ahead. Regarding the provision, the callback provision, since the 1.3 was granted to support the retention of GSA, I know that they have since their lease is expired, they plan to not renew the lease. Have they fulfilled the expected duration of their lease? I can follow through on the exact specifics and get those back to you. I didn't have that ready to go today, my apologies. OK, because I just want to make sure that we are following through on any callback provisions, any repayment provisions. I don't know if there are any outstanding provisions anyone who has lapsed on their retention requirements that we're aware of. And if we are working diligently to evaluate and go after these funds, I didn't see anything in the packet regarding that. We have not yet confiscated policy analyst with the Department of Finance. For calendar year 2024, we have pursued three clawbacks and you'll receive more detail on those in the annual report, which we're working to finalize and send over. And then for this year, we are going through our reporting and we'll be evaluating and making sure that all of our projects that are in the pipeline are up to date in terms of all the deliverables that our companies have in terms of their reporting. Once we evaluate that, we'll be able to process another set of all-backs, which we hope we don't have to do. But to answer your question, yes, we are tracking that. And we have all the data to share for the prior calendar year is just how we organize our annual report. So you'll see some of that coming. Do we have any outstanding clawback provisions that we're waiting on? We are not waiting right now for anything to come in at this moment. Prior to 2024. FY 24. Correct. Okay. Thank you. You're just... The council member says we are more than happy to come in and chat with you about specific companies that you may have questions about. Happy to have those conversations offline. Thank you very much, council staff. Thank you. So now we're on age six, talking about the SBIR STTR local matching grant program. I've got a 25, $140140,000 had been dispersed for six businesses and one business received a pay zero and a phase one award. That number is right in between the amount dispersed and FY 23 and FY 24. It's a relatively small amount allocated for the fund overall. The committee may just want to understand if there's any more anticipated demand and maybe what factors sort of help explain these trends in demand for this if any. Anyone from the kind executive team. Thank you again budget wise I think we should be okay. So we have $200,000. We've spent $140 already. We have six applications that went the roof. We have three more applications that we're working on and I do expect more applications that I'm working with. So the focus is here for the most part is of phase zero, which is only $5,000. So I think we should be good. So the phase zero the phase zero is to help companies that we've never received an SBIR before when their first SBIR anecdotally and response to your question. We are hearing from companies that with all the changes at the federal workforce, their grants have been their potential awards have been put on hold. So we're waiting for that. That may in all transparency may be on our control, but it may impact the potential pipeline for Mr. the college program going forward. I also wanted to real quickly he was he was doing some more analysis on council member sales or earlier question about that $300,000 if it were not funded. He gave you the $28,000 square foot and the number of jobs tied to that. He just also verified that of that dollar amount represents 10 companies six of whom are would be new leases in the county, first time ever, and then four of whom are expansion releases. And I think you'll hear with the other programs that we're about to discuss that they are being used both by companies in the county and also it's as an attraction tool for the new leases and new companies coming new to the county. Thank you for providing that. Thank you so much. I don't see anybody for right now one more. Okay, let's go. Yeah, so I just wanted to get more information about the disbursement of the micro loans. If you have any. I haven't been there yet. That's the next one. Oh, yeah. So I think,, yes, so maybe Castle Staff can get us off. Yeah, Council Member Sales is hitting on the only question that Council staff raised about this was just that this money is appropriated to the fund and then allocated out to contractors that provide the loans directly. So just wanted to confirm that that money was dispersed to Council Member sales point just because it didn't show up in the role of the council staff provided earlier but it sounds like it has having a concern with formative finance staff arrived at the conversation. Any updates from Connie said it's interesting. It has been dispersed. It was slightly lesser in the amount. I think it was budgeted for 150 where at all. I don't know 100 right now, but we anticipate to fully fund that. Is there a reason why we haven't fully dispersed all of the awards? Just volume, you know, it can slow. Capacity at the county executive, like what's what do you mean? Volume. How many businesses is this money going to? We're cutting checks to how many businesses? Yeah, I don't have that number, but I can get it for you. Okay, because some of these businesses, these are make-or-break funds that they need to stay in the county to, you know, get equipment higher someone. So, um, if we can get an update on when those phones will be dispersed, that would be really helpful. And an update on the geographical locations of where this money's going in the county. And any other demographic information you have to share. Thank you. Okay. Now other questions on this one, let's move on to the next one. Thank you. There's a small section on the Purple Line Small Business Impact grants, it's gonna follow up, but there was a joint work session of the great on that. Okay, moving on, just to the jobs initiative. The jobs initiative is administered through the EDF. It was a $20 million supplemental appropriation in the FY24 budget using one-time funding from undesigated general fund reserves and created three distinct funds, the job creation fund which is a buy-write program awarding businesses for hiring individuals that are earning over $100,000 in the county. And the other two funds are application-based, where businesses apply for funding for its projects that help them commercialize their work. The technology and innovation fund focuses on businesses and strategic industries, and cutting-and-edge of technology, and the Founders Fund had basically, that helps target that funding towards underrepresented communities and businesses with a more general scope. The job creation fund is like I mentioned this by right, and so the app, there have been applications for it. You can hear from the Department of Finance for an update on the most recent number of applications, but just by the nature of it. But they have to take in the applications and then they will disperse money as there's evidence that individuals have been hired. And they may get applications prior to the plan to hire certain individuals, right? They know that they will, they know they'll be moving here, they haven't done that yet and so the money goes out incrementally as those milestones are achieved. And so for that, one of the main reasons is that the $10 million in that fund will not be dispersed and FY 25. They don't see it being disperse in FY 26 or FY 27 either just given the pace of following up and ensuring that the activity is funded as intended. For the other two funds and we have a slide deck and Ms. Costello can explain the activity there, but they be fund closed at the end of last year, they received applications and are currently reviewing all of those. They receive a lot of documentation about the project. They have other background information to vet the candidates. They work with a consultant called FedTech that has helped provide some of their expertise in evaluating this and really coordinating that whole effort. And I've had some exposure to that as well. And you can see the total number of applications that were eligible and received under each of the funds. The results of that is still ongoing and so we haven't presented what the status is in terms of how much money will ultimately go off the door. And just one note on the Founders Fund, which I'm sure Miss Costello will explain the large number of ineligible applications compared to eligible application for the Founders Fund. It's something that they flagged. They're continuing to work with businesses that were ineligible to help them understand why they may have been ineligible. But one of the reasons it was just maybe not necessarily meeting the criteria of the program just because, but maybe try to go after it because there's money available but not necessarily meeting some of the criteria for the fund-based. We've done this custom, I'll explain further. And with that, I guess I can pull up the slides. Going to this one or to the job creation. Do you want to start by job creation first? Would you want to hear the presentation on technology and the vision? I'm going to lead up to you, whichever you think works best. 15 minutes. Okay. While we're waiting. Okay. Despite the fact that we're ready, I just want to usually I just. Mr. Jean Smith, who you all know well, or nearly would be sitting here. I just want to take a second to publicly thank him for his leadership with the business center and many of the programs that we have talked about on Friday and here today. So thank you for letting me do this as I next we'll see him on your side of the table. So I know we don't have a lot of time. This is a summary of data for a program that is very actively ongoing. This is specifically the $10 million funded through the jobs grant on the for the technology innovation and founders grants. So that, sir, we're at opposite ends of the table here. Okay. So as as you know, we that resolution initiated by Council Member Freetson and with support of the executive and the administration was passed in May of last year with separating that fund into seven whoops, seven, that funders should say founders, seven million for technology innovation and the founders grant is three million dollars. But the main thing to focus on here is that we were tasked to give this money for commercialization grants for projects that will advance from market to commercialization and create new new sales, more research, and eventually new jobs. Next, please. This, I don't know if you have a printout of it, I'm happy to provide it afterwards, but this is a timeline of how we move forward with the program. The county executive's office picked up this after working with MCEDC on the job creation fund and working through the possibilities with our partners at MCEDC on how to best manage the program. And as you already shared, the view is that MCDC's primary task is promotion, job recruitment and retention. The County Executive Office has a lot of outreach and responsibility. Neither one of our organizations who were tasked to manage $10 million had the capacity on its own to judge commercialization for an unknown as of September, number of companies and projects and what they're doing. So we made the decision to seek, we jointly made the decision to seek a third party commercialization expert and to do it quickly and namely we leveraged MCEDC and their capabilities. We interviewed several firms and the firm Fed Tech was chosen. Ms. Councilmember Freetzin had the opportunity to meet with them after that choice was made and learn a little bit more about their background and their commercialization expertise. They picked up the contract with Sinden in October, and they immediately started working with our office on turning that resolution into meaningful criteria for an application, an application portal into a notice of funding opportunities eligibility requirements some may hear may think it's obvious that if you want funding in Montgomery County you should be headquartered here or do you do most of your R&D here you should be in good standing with the state Maryland. When you put out a notice that you will offer in $100,000 or $200,000. And awards, a lot of people will apply, whether or not they hit those targets. We spend a lot of time going back and I should say also with our colleagues at the Department of Finance who have and take very seriously their fiduciary duty with the disbursement of these grants. So there was interaction between Fed Tech with companies, with our office, with the Department of Finance and with MCDC on the criteria requirements. The no-fo and applicant, and let me back up and say, we originally thought in September, we would announce two rounds of grants. And come grants and come here and tell you again we had no idea whether ten people were going to apply or 148 who actually applied. We wanted to be able to come here we had a sense that there was demand and that this would be well received but we weren't sure so we originally contemplated two rounds of grant application analysis and funding. And after discussion and dealing in the details we realize it was better to take a minute, do everything as close as we could to the best practices, which takes a little bit of time when you're working with county, county regulations and innovator requirements. and we decided to issue one round of funding. Councilmember Freightson, MCDC in our office, all were called. My company, we want to apply but we've raised more than $5 million which was the capital requirements. My company, we want to apply but we have no money, we need the money for city. So we did have a discussion with council and with our office that said, let's put out a request, a call for applications. If we have funding left over, we will look at expanding the aperture of the criteria. But let's see what the demand is and what types of companies come in. And that's what we did. So we announced, started promoting the program in November and December, we opened the application portal. It actually closed on January 31st of this year. And even before it closed, FedTech, our third party, started reviewing the applications for eligibility. Now these are applications aren't just one pages that pages. They're asked to submit a commercialization project, a budget that aligns with the research, show the potential job impact, show what they're going to do, provide documentation that they have at least one full-time employee so that Nadia and I or anybody don't come up with an idea and apply for 200,000. Those requirements take a lot of time to do due diligence. They've been actively working on that. After companies were viewed deemed as eligible, Fed Tech with 13 members of their team participating started scoring the applications based on their commercialization expertise. And then late February they presented an initial list of companies recommended for approval to a selection review committee comprised of board members from MCEDC, a diverse group of board members with technical expertise and business management and and biotech, life sciences, and then a very diverse group of board members with technical expertise and business management and biotech, life sciences, and then a very diverse group of investor, biotech, and advanced technology, folks at FedTek, and then Mr. Blal also joined to observe and watch and participate in the process. At the time that we presented, we could have taken a very easy way out. More than 104 applicants applied for $7 million of grants each up to 200,000. We could have taken the first 35 that were, we knew were eligible and recommended as strong candidates. However, we decided to go back to them and say, did you really need $200,000 to move your commercialization project forward? And to the credit of entrepreneurs in our county who recognize the best use of funds is important for them and county taxpayers, They double the amount of money and companies that we may be available. That may be available to companies. So they responded to an email that we sent them about two weeks ago. With very specific, I really need the 200,000 or 150,000 will move this forward and help me grow jobs. And our initial pass at that information showed that instead of funding only 35, we expect that we'll be able to fund closer to 70 companies. What that means is more due diligence going back to the next level. Be careful what you ask for. But we, but it's been very thorough and very valuable. The other thing is for the number of an eligible, and I guess we should go ahead to a couple of sides. Let me pause on that. And real quickly, since we have this, what type of project is this? We estimated, probably under estimated, that we have spent 15, 16 hours on this project today, since September. That's more than one person a year, if you think about, but, but instead of having an illustrious person from our county, from MCEDC, we have been able to bring in expertise by leveraging everybody I've already mentioned. BEDTEC does do available hours, so they've added up their hours. We've estimated ours. You can see, by the way, the marketing that BEDTECH alone did that talks about 6,000 social media impressions, site views on the landing page. That does not include, and we'll later have MCEDC's social media. I can tell you, for my little personal when I announced this funding program. Not only did it get a ton of hits, I got a lot of because I used to work in Virginia. I got a lot of I wish we had this program here from Virginia. So skipping to the next slide and back to what we were talking about before. Here's the overview of the companies. 144, the number of employees that they report, they have, this is reported because we have an time to view all the payroll. Look at the increase in full time employees. They say if awarded funds. These projects, the companies will have up to 18 months to complete the projects. Do I expect that they'll immediately hire everybody? No, some of these are longer term projections. Again, you're getting this information real-time as we're still going through the process. But they did have to report a fair proprietary technology issued patents, patents that they expect to file. You'll see the ineligible numbers that we'll all talked about before. And I'll talk about that a little bit more in the next slide. What I wanted to let you know is last week, knowing that we have this money about to give, but wanting to be certain that every company deemed ineligible was actually ineligible. In a federal program and some of the other programs, if you're ineligible, that's it. We went back and contacted every single ineligible candidate. And there are a couple more that will be eligible, which means they will need to be scored, and they will be ranked and thrown in the pool before we announce them. Next, please. So some of the lessons learned while still in this program and this relates to our conversation Friday and earlier conversations today. We are in the center of the number three biotech but look at the other innovators in the county and the fields that they are in. Council member Bauchem mentioned light manufacturing. That's under advanced manufacturing. You see cyber, clean tech, ag tech here. I'm happy and proud that all parts of the county, including Germantown and Silver Spray and Ampatoamic and Bethesda and Gatorsburg all are recommended. If you look at the reasons why the companies were not eligible, IRA referenced the amount of money that the company started with. This program was not offered to retail or professional services only companies. We would be giving it to every very good and strong and important employer in our county who is in the legal profession, the IT services profession, medical practice. So we said no, but we still have particularly in IT companies applied for the tech innovation grants. On the founders fund, I spoke with a half dozen founders last week. I have promised and will be promising to the remainder of in eligible candidates who we get back to this week, a meeting later this year with me. Let me say two things also about this. Once we award the, I guess you could go to the next slide. and make a notification of an award to a candidate. What happens? They will get a letter saying, congratulations, you've been selected to receive a grant. Once we make a notification of an award to a candidate, what happens? They will get a letter saying congratulations you've been selected to receive a grant of X amount for Y project. Or they'll receive a decline letter. If they receive an award notice, they then will be directed to our Department of Finance to sign a grant agreement. They will be asked to complete one hour of coaching with Fed Tech. That is part of the money that we've already committed for this FY25. Before they get the disbursement, they then will get half of the disbursement and they will be required to report on the use of those funds before the layered disbursement. That's a lot of work. Fed Tech covers part of that part of that work, but is by my colleague sitting to my right who do not have extra staff to manage that, but we'll be overseeing the reporting and the grants and the disbursements. If a company is declined, we are hoping that in FY, in the budget you.S.C. Friday, to have funds to support Fed tech, continuing to manage basic reporting, and to offer two hours of coaching to a declined applicant, including the ineligible, including the ineligible who may not have a proprietary technology. and we'll be working with them to make sure they have the right business consultants. But that is in the dollars that we propose. That's help for those who are awarded to make best use of funds. That's help for those who are not awarded to help move their business forward. In addition, I will ask that a business liaison member from our business center meet with every one of the founders members. And we will ask that a business liaison member from our business center meet with every one of the founders members. And we will have that connection so that they know everything that the county has to offer, whether or not they are a technology commercialization project. I'm just going to interrupt you very quickly and look at other time guys. This is a briefing. I'm just going to put it out there. We need be out of here in five minutes. But everything that you are saying needs to be, when you're speaking and remembering the conversation that we had for the incubators last week. And I hope that third party conversation that we have on the incubators matches with this because those founders applicants can easily merge into this other effort that we're doing. So I hope that's reflected on the budget we're getting on Friday. If not, we're going to have to fix it when it comes to the county council because things need to be in coordination. That's all. Do you have something else about finish everything? Yeah. We're going to open it up to I'm'm gonna open it up to Councilmember Frickson for this one and then we're gonna go It's please keep it brief guys. Okay. All right. Just really quickly I very much appreciate the briefing and all of the work the idea between behind these three funds was sending a strong message if you are willing to invest in Montgomery County Montgomery County wants to invest in you. We need to to work together to grow the economy, to stem the tide of some of the data that we saw earlier that was increasingly sobering and the demand, the job numbers, the interest that these funds have received is really encouraging and I'm particularly thrilled with the geographic and the industry-based diversity. One of the goals was to be intentional here, and we have intentionality with the diversity of the funds. But the key was we also wanted geographic diversity. We also wanted industry-based diversity, and we're seeing that and reflected in the data. And I think that's just really important to note. I will express again, my frustration, this took too long to get off the ground. It's frustrating that it took until September just to figure out who was on first and to work out the responsibilities between MCDC and the executive branch. That has to be better. We have to do better moving forward. And as we talk about investing in economic development as we talk about moving forward with these programs and others as we have that budget conversation that we're going to have, the relationship between the executive branch and economic development corporation, both of whom play critical roles in economic development has to be much more seamless. And if we're going to use the talking point that there's no wrong door, we have to demonstrate that there's no wrong door. And that means working out our processes in a much more seamless, much more efficient way. Having said that, since that has been determined and decided, even though it was many months later than I would have preferred and hoped it took six months longer than I think it should have, Fed Tech has been a great partner. I was encouraged when I met with them to see their expertise and the proof seems to be in the pudding that this seems to be a process that's moving in a good direction. So it took too long. It was too delayed. It needs to get better moving forward. But I think this in particular is heading in a really positive direction. On the coaching, I love the idea of coaching the theeligables, also in keeping connected with those who receive funding. There shouldn't be a one in done relationship, it has to be an ongoing relationship, and I see this as an opportunity to build that partnership between the public sector and the private sector that we desperately need. I would also encourage that the coaching connect with our local chambers. looking at a former chamber executive right here, the Amber program and the black collective and some of our other key partners who can be part of that coaching who do this as part of their core competency and frankly are probably more equipped to do some of that coaching. Then the executive branch or even MCEDC is capable of doing so really leveraging those partnerships I did want to follow up and it doesn't have to be now because I know we're short on time, but I would like similar to the line of questioning before with the move program and some of the other programs. And I know some of this work is still happening, but exactly the number of requests, the 104 that came in, the 104 then of the total amount that would have been eligible if they were able to max out based on what we could have allowed before you sent that email and our do-good-er businesses were willing to accept less in order to get their foot in the door, But it would be helpful to know exactly how many jobs are being created. And what investment is going to be received by the number of companies that 70 ish number that you think you're going to ultimately land on. And as quickly as we can get that information, be helpful. And what would it be if we had unlimited funds just based on the eligibility criteria and what would the jobs be for that unlimited funds just based on the eligibility criteria and what would the jobs be for that, what would the investments be for that, what would that look like? If we could get that detailed breakdown, I think it would be helpful because it would be instructive for us as we head into the budget and figure out how much funding that we need and I just love the idea of we wish we had this program here and getting that feedback. I will note I heard a lot from a lot of folks who weren't eligible for this but want to be eligible for something else. And I will just reiterate it speaks to the value of this program but also the broader need for us to be investing in economic development to supporting our local businesses to partnering between the public sector and the private sector in order to stem the tide of this sobering data that we've seen and in order to grow a local economy. So thank you and I'll you'll back. Councillor Meade, I'm about. Thank you. So I know it's early to assess the program but appreciate the data that we received here today. And I do want to thank Chair Fenigunzalus for these pre-budget sessions. They've been very important. I think this is the last one considering that we're seeing the actual budget on Friday. But they were a good opportunity to ask questions, knowing that these were not intended to have all the data. But you now have an idea of the data that we're looking for. So I appreciate both MCDC and the county executive branch. Should just to have a feel for what that when we get to the budget will need a lot more data. So I wanted to mention that. From the ineligible candidates, I think it's important to that it's not the last time that we hear from them. However, in terms of resources available, there are two types of ineligible candidates. There are people that just had no business applying in the first place. And then there are other candidates who missed it by this match or they're on their way. So I think that when we look at the consulting and what we do with some of these, that the resources are allocated to the ineligible candidates who we, of course we to encourage all businesses in the county but there are some that probably are ineligible just because they're not even companies so just wanted to bring that up. Thank you so much for that council member sales. Yes, I'm just wanted to get clarification on the eligible companies. When do they receive the money? Do they receive it up front? Or do they receive it a year after a year of employment? Good question. So they will receive it as soon as they complete a grant agreement. They will receive information on how they complete a grant agreement, get signed up with the county vendor system, a requirement for an hour of coaching and then they will get a disbursement of half of the total amount requested. And so that they can get started and then upon submission of the reports up to 18 months from the new agreement. But if they finish their project in a year, they'll get the money sooner. So, no, thank you. I am honestly very proud of the executive team. Also MCDC for working together. I thought you guys moved really fast. I mean, we didn't even have money for this, but for this fiscal year. It was taken from another fiscal year. And as Council member Fritz mentioned, the third body that you hire, what's it called? Medtech. Awesome work. Looking at the circumstances. So I think it proves that we're, we do mean business in Montgomery County when we work together and I look forward to what's next for all of us into that budget on Friday. With that, we are adjourned.