I need a paper about public economic development. The instructions are in the attached files.

Hello. My name is Kimball pain and I'm the city manager of Lynchburg, Virginia and I'm joining you today from stairway or an alleyway adjacent to the city's community market in downtown Leesburg, where we have been working hard over a number of years for redevelopment of the downtown area, which is an important aspect of the community development and economic development that we do in the city. I've been asked to talk to you today about strategic planning and development from the perspective of a city leader. I want to start kind of what the biggest picture that I can of why economic development is important to really any community, not only to a city but to a, to a county, or even a town as well. But I think you have to understand that, that economic development needs to be put into a broader perspective of what the community's broader goals are for that community. Our mission as employees of the City of Lynchburg is to deliver services to our community and to make our community a better place to actually build community and economic development. It is important part of how we go about doing that because they provide some of the support that we, that we need in order to have a successful community where people can live, can work and can play. And so need to think about as you're talking about, what role economic development plays in your community, what your community goals are. If you have, if you have goals for our community of great little ability, for a lot of public amenities, for cultural amenities. Most communities have a goal to have a great school system. They want to have parks, they want to have successful and well-maintained infrastructure such as roads, water, sewer, buildings, things like that. And they want to have the ability to do all that in a way that's reasonably expensive to sit or reasonably cost-effective to the citizens who live in that community. And that's just another way of saying everybody pays taxes for the services that they receive as community citizens. And how can we balance that out so that the burden is shared. Create a great community? So we need to think about what our overall goals are for economic development is our economic development goal to produce jobs as their economic development goal to and to create tax base? Or is there economic development goal just to be to create this broader community economic vitality. And everybody needs a place to work. For the most part, everybody needs to get a source of income for their, for their family or full for whatever it is they're trying to accomplish. And so economic development provides that job base, but it also provides a base of support and revenues to do the other things that that city public services that are provided for the common good that maybe we don't all directly, directly pay for. When I speak to high school classes, I often ask them if they understand they know what it costs to support a local student in our school system. And the local cost is about $6 thousand a year. When you look at the revenue produced from a typical household, that typical household may produce taxes on its property tax, sales tax meals to acts of only a couple of thousand dollars a year. And so where does the rest of that support come for things like a school system, but also for public safety, for roads, water, sewer. And much of that comes from the business community, from the economic development that that makes that community successful. In addition to providing the jobs. In Virginia, we don't receive a direct benefit from jobs created by economic development. The main tax that jobs pay an income tax on that income tax goes to the state and not to local government in Virginia. So just economic development prospect that only that is generating thousands of jobs may not be something that's consistent with what you're trying to do because we're not going to get a direct revenue off of off of those jobs in terms of their income taxes. I've often laughing, Lee said that the ideal economic development in Virginia is a, is a physical plant of about a $100 million with only 10 employees. Because and localities in Virginia receive the main benefit, the main measurable benefit from economic development in terms of the property taxes that that building, that is paid on that building or the value of the land. We also receive taxes off the machinery and tools and maybe on some of the business processes that go on. For smaller businesses. We will receive taxes, do business license taxes, and of course, many of our businesses will generate sales tax, meals tax and other taxes to support the community. As we talk about soap. So economic development is important for all, for all of those reasons, to bring in those revenues, to provide jobs and to and to support, again, a dynamic and a successful community. In Lynchburg, we're fortunate that we have a number of sectors in our community that had been successful, that support the community from an economic development standpoint. We have a very, we have a Regional Medical Center. And so we have a lot of activities associated with that Regional Medical Center. And so medicine and medical activities, health activities are an important sector in our economic development in this, in this community, we have strong financial sector. Here in this community, we have a strong engineering sector, both in nuclear engineering and in, in wireless technology. And we also have a very successful in a very strong higher education sector. Schools like Liberty University, Lynchburg college, Randolph College. Sweet Briar. All of those provide jobs, provide activities, provide cultural amenities and opportunities for our community. And again, make our community a great place to live. And then we also have a strong just small business environment. And in any community, the small businesses are the businesses that support that community and keep it going. These are maybe referred to as mom and pop operations. But there are people who are very deeply invested in the community. They have lived here, maybe there a second or third-generation family, and we want a business owners and we want to support them as well. We have organizations like the Chamber of Commerce who help us to do that. And other organizations we ourselves in the city have an economic development office that is very integral and trying to support those businesses so that they can be successful in our community. And that success is often defined by their ability certainly to meet the bottom line to make money. So we're sensitive to the fact that although we have to have some regulations to control development in the community, we don't want to be have those regulations have a negative impact on the bottom line of these businesses. So we're looking for ways to, again, help them to be successful in the community. It's all a matter of balance. We can't, we have to balance the, our desire for economic development such as a new industry or a new business. With our other goal of protecting the quality of life and our community. And again, making this a better place for all of us. The days of smokestack industries are pretty well over. But if we were talking about a smokestack industry coming into here, we would have people who would be concerned about pollution, about noise, about smell maybe. And we have to be careful inciting those sort of industries that they don't have a negative impact on the broader community or a particular portion of our community that, that could be impacted by that. So talking about our goals for overall economic development are very important. We have a number of partners who work with us to do this. We have a partnership with the state. Economic development obvious now the state will always talk about jobs they have, that they had gotten from an economic development standpoint because that's the way they measure success. So the state will talk to us about opportunities that we can serve in our community. We also realized have to rods, we operate within a region. Business that locates in a county adjacent to the city also brings benefit to the city because they'll come to the city for meals, for cultural activities, to shop. And again, it strengthens the entire vitality of a region. Most business owners, most employer, employers are not very sensitive to municipal boundaries and they don't understand that, you know, the difference between a city or a county or how that works. They're looking for good quality of life. They're looking for good infrastructure to support their business. They're looking for a reasonable tax environment of reasonable regulatory environment. And they also were looking for a place of their employees will want to live from a community live ability standpoint from shopping opportunities, from cultural opportunities, from warship opportunities, from volunteer opportunities. And all of that has to work together. And at my level, at the level of a city manager and the level of a of a city council or county board of supervisors. We have a responsibility to look at that entire picture and try to see how all that fits together. One of the things that we, that we will, you will often hear us talk about. When we talk about economic development activities, is what the community ought to do to support that, that business or that industry coming into the community and we end up talking about incentives. The state will offer incentives and sometimes localities will offer incentives. Usually what we look at when we're talking about incentives is what sort of return on our investment, our public investment will we get? We also try to look at public investments that will support more than just that business. For example, if we, if we widen the road, it might support that business, but it also will support other things around it. If we put in a waterline or sewer line, or if we support broadband infrastructure development. Those things have a broader impact abroad or positive community impact than, than just maybe specifically for that industry. But we will also look at what it cost us to do that and what the industry brings back to us in terms of taxes and to return to the community. And we try to look at a five to seven-year payback period on that to see if that's going to make sense to try to support that industry. And it's usually tied to their, tied to their capital investment. They're machines, machinery and tools that they put in. And at the state level, it's also tied to the number of jobs that they produce. So we try to make sure that doll that that fits so that we're not subsidizing a business. We usually use incentives as I call it for as a deal closer to baby be the last thing that makes us the appropriate place for that business to come. We're not going to subsidize. We don't have the ability to subsidize a business that won't make money here in our city. They've gotta make money. That's the bottom line. So subsidizing that would not make any sense either to the business or to us, but we want to get them here and an appropriate setting if they fit in our community, either as part of one of the sectors, it's already here, or maybe as complimentary to those sectors because sometimes we get a little push back for it from a new industry, possibly by the businesses that are already here who were concerned about workforce issues, maybe losing employees, maybe the effect on wages. Those are concerns we have to we have to deal with. Fortunately, most of the business growth that we see here and that many communities say probably about 80 percent of it comes from businesses that are already here. So we have a strong desire to support the businesses that are here, to help them grow, to help them be successful, to help them with workforce issues. And so we have a business outreach program that tries to keep in touch with them and understand what their needs are, what their plans are, and then how we can support that. And we'll actually have some businesses who move from the city to the county as they grow back to the, back to another counting back to the city. And we support that from a, from a broader economic development perspective as part of this broader region. So just to, just to wrap up out, I think it's important as a leader of a community that you do understand the context of economic development and the broader community sense that you have a willingness to provide an environment for business to be successful. As the businesses also come in and support your environment, your broader community environment for everybody who lives in your community to have a successful life. And again, to make your community a great place to, to live, work and play. Thank you.