Good afternoon, and welcome to today's Cobb County work session this August 25th, two thousand and twenty-six.

Today, the Board of Commissioners will receive two presentations.

The first is to receive an economic development update regarding our strategic plan.

And the second is to receive feedback on our employee survey.

Good afternoon, Chairwoman Cupid, Commissioners, and County Manager.

So today we want to prevent what we hope we want to present, what we hope is our final uh presentation and update to the economic development strategic plan that we've been working on since late last year in partnership with KB Advisory Group.

And I would like to first acknowledge some of our economic development partners that are in the room today.

We have um Hatchbridge as well as Select Cobb and a couple others in Town Center CID coming in the room right now.

So I want to thank them for their partnership and also their um engagement throughout this process of comprising this strategic plan.

So bring up Gabby and uh Jeff Koske and the team from KB Advisory Group.

Thank you.

Um, this is um a great opportunity for us to share the work that we've done.

We know we've been in contact with you quite a bit through this process, and we actually feel really good about where this plan has landed.

One of the reasons we feel so good about it is because we feel like we've incorporated a lot of feedback from y'all and from your and from the partners around the county.

Um, you know, as you know, we were here um a couple months ago with a first draft of what we had put together, and and you really pushed us to say, let's dig in a little bit deeper.

And so we had many, many more meetings, including more more talk with our steering committee, uh, more talk with some of y'all, and and more talk with um the partners, the economic development departments, the partners in the county.

And so because of that, we think we've produced a plan that incorporates a lot of you, like your fingerprints are all over this, and your partners' fingerprints are all over this.

And so we appreciate the opportunity to come back to you again to kind of give you an idea of what the plan is, what's in the plan and what it says, and really an opportunity to really ask questions before it becomes you know part of an agenda for consideration, agenda item for consideration.

So again, I at the end of the day, just want to really thank you for your partnership and your your leadership as we you know worked putting this plan together over the past many months.

And so with that, I'm gonna hand it off to Gabby, one of our co-project managers, and she's gonna kind of give you an idea of the structure, the framework of what's in the plan, and take an opportunity to really answer any questions that you have about um how it turned out.

So thank you again, and and here's Gabby.

Good afternoon, pleasure to be with you all again.

So, as Jeff said, um, we have spent a lot of time since we last spoke with you all, um, listening to you know, all the feedback that you individually gave to us during the previous work session, but also as Jeff said mentioned, with all of our partners and the team.

And so for this session, what we're gonna do is just review the timeline once more very quickly, and then I want to go over on a high level showcase of all the different ways that we did incorporate your feedback within the plan.

Um, the cop you got a big vanilla envelope from me, um, and that includes the EDSP draft as where it stands right now with everything that we're about to go over, and then we'll leave you know ample time for you all to ask us any lingering questions that you may have.

So, first, right, so we started this process um in August of last year, so coming on about a little over a year now.

But since the work session that we had with you all back in May, we have added a forest steering committee meeting just to go through particular action items and the goals and to brainstorm on those a little bit more and add the specificity that you all were requesting of us.

And then we've also, you know, you all received a you know, full-ong draft with all the different pieces, but having you know the opportunity to talk with you all if you had so desired to ask us even more questions one-on-one and give us your additional feedback and considerations for things that we need to add into the plan to help make it yours and as useful as possible.

And so we are on track to have a potential um hopeful adoption with you all if you all are happy um with its contents in September.

But going on to the pieces that we have updated.

So, first and foremost was making sure that we made it very clear and detailed about all of the feedback that we heard, right?

So the main thing is that we had both a resident and a business survey.

Um, and so we have both the kind of a high-level key takeaways from each of those surveys as well as maps about showing where the locations were of respondents, so that we can kind of see themes from that end, but then also not leaving out the open houses that we had at the end of last year.

Those were kind of our first way of gathering public input as part of this process.

We had five across Cobb County, so you can see the results of the various boards that we asked people to interact with, and kind of the summary pieces that we took from those.

But a main part of this was working with all of the partners that uh Sabrina and her team work with, some on a day-to-day basis, some on a quarterly basis, some on an ad hoc basis.

Um, you know, a lot of them you see on here, but that also includes all of the cities.

And so we made sure to further emphasize their involvement and their role in help shaping this plan because even though it is steered out, you know, specifically what Sabrina and her team will be doing, there is a lot that she and her team cannot do alone, and it will be very, very important for her to continue her work with you know, select cop, the chamber and development authority, for example, and as well what we added into the public input section was making sure that you know, from our steering committee meetings, the takeaways and highlights that we had from those conversations, thones were spelled out into the plan as well.

Same thing with you know recurring themes that we heard from our focus groups, in which we had three, one with just the cities and with the CIDs, um, others with um, you know, various partners.

Um, and then some where we got to speak with some of your business associations.

So then we had a large number of stakeholder one-on-ones.

And those included partners, both internal to the county as well as external.

And not only that, you asked us to kind of help think about what is the best way to continue to coordinate with existing partners or how you would maybe want to pursue you know new partnerships that come along the road, like what is this framework that can be developed, what is an array of options that you on the board could talk about together.

And so we have added that whether it be you know a spectrum of potential agreements that exist and models that you all can discuss and decide which one works best, but also for every single task that we have in our implementation matrix.

We have identified a partner entity that will be assisting Sabrina in that effort.

So all the people that we have spoken with, they are represented in the implementation patriot implementation matrix of this plan.

Something else we want we were asked to dig deeper on is understanding access and opportunity, um, especially as we dig into our data sections data section.

So we you know looked at more from a spatial point of view, you know, looking at you know how unemployment test scores, uh, maybe single parent households, and like how we have to think about where targeted economic development efforts may be most needed and not just tied to redevelopment.

And so we have added that as part of that section of the plan and part of the representative goal.

And one question again was about workforce and making sure that that has been incorporated.

So for all of our target industries, right?

We have added in you know specific occupations that typically fall under all of those, looking at is projected growth within the state of Georgia, right?

Because thinking about how you can be you know layering effort with what is going on at a higher level, um, and thinking about as well the type of education that they that is needed to um fill those positions, but as well as their incomes so that you have a better understanding of when we recruit this job into Cobb County or expand its presence here, who exactly could be filling into those opportunities and making sure that what the county has and is offering as a support can help fill any gaps that are needed.

Right, and I know we talked about this a lot last time, but again, you know, emphasizing you know, readable redevelopment as a big focus of this.

We have our three redevelopment areas, right?

Um the area around um town center mall, um, Austel Road and Canton Road.

Those are gonna become we recommend being the focused ones for this plan because this is only a five-year plan, and you can only do so much in five years, but serving these as the initial ones to look at, and then once we have kind of figured out the framework and the process that works best for maneuvering through redevelopment within the county, then from then we can that can be expanded then to other areas as needed over time.

And we have you know very specific strategies and action steps that go for um each of these different aspects of redevelopment.

But of course, it's also important to outline you know, but challenges to implementation or obstacles that may come up.

So we have kind of addressed some of those into the plan, but of course, we've also added you know more specific and fine-tuned goals that you'll be pursuing.