The Chesapeake City Council met on Tuesday, February 13, 2024, beginning with a work session at 5:30 PM on small business assistance programs, followed by the regular meeting at 6:30 PM. The council unanimously approved all consent agenda items except one, and voted 9-0 on all regular agenda items. A total of four citizens spoke on agenda items and four on non-agenda topics. The meeting adjourned after new business and council announcements.
Want to welcome everyone to our five thirty work session, February thirteenth. Well, I think we only have one item. Mr. Manager. Yes, sir. So council has expressed an interest in improving our small business assistance services. Some of it was a lifeline to keep gett uh businesses going. We learned a lot through that process. It's part of your strategic plan is to improve small business assistance services. And so we have uh teamed uh members from economic development and development and permits tonight to talk a little bit about um some of the resources council's allocated um towards small business assistance and and what we've uh been able to accomplish and what's still on the horizon. So I'll turn it over to Steven. Thank you, Mr. Manager. Uh Mr. Mayor, members of council, thank you for the opportunity to brief you about what's going on with our small business development program. Um before I turn things over to Christine, I just want to give you a little bit of a brief history about how our department has treated the small business community over the years. Um we at one point in time had a very, very vibrant and aggressive small business outreach campaign. Um it was culminated in 2014 when our department won an award from the small business administration for the outreach services that we provided, not only Chesapeake, but really the entire Hampton Rose community. Um sometime after that, uh we did an analysis of all of the services that we provide from an economic development standpoint, and it was determined that we were investing a significant amount of time and energy and financial resources into the small business program, but we weren't really having a lot to show from it. Um I think one of the reasons for that is because our program was so good, we had a lot of people from outside of Chesapeake participating in our program. Um so at that point in time, we kind of shifted our approach to small business, and we decided that we were kind of going to be a resource provider and not really be directly connected to some of the small businesses. We would just steer them in the right direction, then help them find the resources that they needed. A few years ago, though, um, particularly with COVID, we understood and we learned a lot of information about our small business community. We discovered that there was a lot of information that our businesses did not have. There was a level of knowledge that a lot of small businesses didn't have, and we knew that it was going to be important for us to help those businesses uh weather the storm that COVID brought. Um so to that end, um we asked for, and fortunately the city manager uh created a position within our department to directly address the small business community and members of council, you all approve that um back in 20 FY2023. Uh so in FY2023, we hired Ms. Kistine Plarr to be our small business development manager, uh, and she has done a phenomenal job of reaching out to our small businesses, providing them with the resources and information that they need to succeed. I'm going to turn things over to her. She's going to tell you a little bit about what she's been doing for the past year and tell you about some of the things on the horizon for our program. Thank you, Stephen. Hi, good afternoon. And again, I am Kistine Plarr. I am the small business development manager for the Department of Economic Development. And so I'll start again with 2023, um, FY23. Our department again building on the momentum of small business. I did not want to necessarily recreate the wheel when it came to connecting businesses to our regional resource partners because they do an excellent job of again promoting small businesses at any stage, whether they are in the idea stage all the way up to they have an established business with employees and they are trying to scale for growth. So, with that, what I wanted this program and this initiative to have was to build on the momentum of what the region is doing and make sure that Chesapeake has a seat at that table and that we continue to grow from there. So, starting with that, the first I would say pillar that I wanted to focus on was making sure that our small business community had a direct access to becoming SWAM certified. So again, SWAM small women and minority-owned certification, and mostly because the first question that I am usually asked at any business meeting or any phone call that I get is how can I do business with the city? And the first step is becoming SWAM certified. So with the SWAM certification and as well as working with several of our regional and state partners, for example, the small business and supplier diversity office, we have been able to put together some programming that our small businesses have been taking advantage of over the past year. The first, uh and it's not in any direct order, but again, the SWAM certification information workshops. We have had approximately four in the last year, counting a little bit for the calendar year going into the fiscal year, but we have held four informational workshops so that businesses know the process of becoming certified and that they can start to bid on any of the contracts that the city has as well as other cities and the state. In addition to some of the other programming that we've done in the past year, include the small business symposium and more one-on-one attention. And part of those are one-on-one business counseling that is done in conjunction with the SBSD, again, the small business and supplier diversity office out of Richmond. And we have continued our BizChat program, which started during COVID as a quick 15-minute meeting that a business can have with one of our business development managers and quickly have access to resources and answers to their questions. From there, we have also wanted to build out and grow on the partnerships that we have, and again, our local, regional, and state partnerships. Part of those again include the Small Business Development Center, which is through the Hampton Roads Chamber, and the SBSD. I would say those two are our premier partners where I am on the phone with them at least once a week, and we are continuously growing and trying to come up with additional programming that our small business community can take advantage of.