The Clovis Economic Development Committee held a special meeting on February 11, 2026, at 3:45 PM. Committee members reviewed and approved the minutes from the previous meeting. The committee received an extensive update from Tina on economic development projects, including the green energy project (Project Bite) in the Industrial Park, the business incubator and Switch Our Accelerator, the Clovis Sound Studio, and the recently approved license transfer for Sunray Park and Casino. The committee also voted to approve a retail leader application for Shoe Department Encore, authorizing a tax reimbursement to support the store's expansion.
Call this meeting to order. Amy, will you do a roll call, please? Alan Kinland. Yes. Brett Johnson. Present. Raymond Mondragon. Jason Gonzalez. Here. Tyler Lucas. Present. Debbie Spriggs. Here. Paul Cordova. Bryce Jimenez. Do we have a quorum? Um if you had if you had a chance to read the minutes, I will take a motion to approve. Motion to approve the minutes. All in favor say aye. I was happy to explain. Update on CED projects. Tina. Members of the board. So I'm going to give a quick update first on CED. This is our a mid meeting. It's a special meeting, so normally our updates are every three months, but I'm happy to provide what's occurred since our last meeting. The Industrial Park, we still have our one green energy company we're working with. There's been no recent updates, so we don't have a timeline for that yet. But I did have a call with Project Bite and our state economic development reps were on that call as well. And they think this is the year they're going to be able to move forward. So we've got another call scheduled in April, and we're hoping to have a hard timeline after that meeting. For retail, I don't have a lot of retail update. I know we have retail strategies working on things, so maybe the next meeting there will be a retail update there. On the business incubator, we held an advisory board meeting on December 16th and have been meeting with mentors and trainers as we finalize our program, and we'll be kicking that off very soon. But until the regular programming starts, we've had a project we've been working on called Switch Our Accelerator in conjunction with Clovis Main Street and Sutton's Bakery. And so we are on our final participant. We had it's actually been five companies, our five different uh food entrepreneurs coming in to run their business out of the Sutton's Bakery. And so the third one started this week. It's Chai Town Pizza King. He makes original deep dish style pizza on his very first day. He sold out, I think by noon. And so it's been incredible. This has been a really popular program. We've watched these businesses grow. We know that there's already a lease in place for the building when this is over, which is one of the things we want to do is fill vacancies on Main Street. And then Lisa Spear and I will be attending an event for the New Mexico Main Street in Albuquerque to set on a panel and talk about these community partnerships and how working together is helping Main Street projects. So CED is also still planning to fund high school pitch competition for Clovis High School, but they have a new teacher, so I don't know if it's actually going to kick off this year that class. If it does, we've got the money set aside for them for uh prizes. If not, we will wait until next year until they're ready. Clovis Sound Studio, we're getting very close.