I'd like to call the March 30th City Council workshop to order.

Item number two on the agenda is presentation discussion and consideration of increasing the proposed fiscal year 2026-2027 Edmund Electric budget by an additional 291,387 for the Edmund Economic Development Authority 2026-2027 contract.

Kathy?

Hello, Mayor and Council.

Just going to introduce our two guests today, and we will be talking about Edmund Economic Development Authority budget first.

And then we will have Mr.

Crawford from Crawford and Associates talk about budget and financial reporting simplification.

So just do a real quick.

Okay.

So basically, I'll just do a little bit of a background on the EEDA.

Currently, in your 2627 budget that you've already seen, it includes $823,498 to cover fiscal year 2627 contract.

And that's a 5% increase from last year, which was 784-284.

Heather will be Heather McDowell, our executive director of EEDA will present an updated funding request, which is increase uh requesting an increase of 291,387.

So I will just turn it over to uh Heather at this time.

Thank you, Kathy.

Good afternoon, Heather McDowell, Edmund Economic Development Authority.

Uh thank you, Mayor, thank you, Council, for the opportunity to be here today to be a part of the budget workshop.

I do want to take the time before we dive into the budget.

Um I think I would be remiss if I didn't come up here and talk about some of the progress that we've already started making in the first seven months since I've come on board.

Um, I think that you've seen our organization go through uh quite a bit of transition in the past year.

And we have taken a very intentional approach over the last seven months on strengthening internal processes, building a team that's focused on execution that's focused on results.

And since September, we've made some meaningful progress in a couple of key areas.

First and foremost, we um applied and were awarded a marketing grant through the Oklahoma Department of Commerce.

This was a competitive grant process.

This allowed us to go through a competitive bidding process in which we awarded flight marketing a marketing contract to help us rebuild our website as well as new branding guidelines.

And our new website will be launched and active as of July 1 of this year.

Um sites are more than just a website, they're a critical business tool.

They're the first places that site selectors and developers and businesses go, and it it helps us clearly articulate Edmund's assets and opportunities as well as directly impacts our ability to compete.

We also purchased MPLAN, which was some of you are familiar, you've heard it several times now.

It's our economic development impact tool.

Um Jennifer Springer, we have continued to keep her on on a contracted basis.

As you'll remember, Jennifer worked at the Oklahoma Department of Commerce for 14 years, started as an economist.

She runs those data analysis for us.

Um and we've completed those analysis for five projects uh since the purchase of that in the last seven months.

One of those was critical, and if you'll remember with the legacy at Covell, which thank you, thank you so much.

You all approved that incentive um last week, and we know that that's a critical catalytic project and really excited.

I think it it gives us strong momentum moving forward.

We've also partnered with Visit Edmund and run some economic impacts for them, and we'll be working with them to run economic modeling for the U.S.

Senior Open.

We've also awarded our EEDA board awarded a $60,000 incentive to Block One partners so that they could recruit a tenant with Liloba.

Um we've already paid out 40,000 of set incentive.

Um it was based on performance metrics.

They've already completed their first milestone.

The second milestone is the additional 20,000 would be funded upon completion of their cells uh milestone that they set before themselves.

We also hosted an out-of-state company that is looking to locate to Edmund that would be bringing 50 high-wage jobs uh into our community, and we are still working with that prospect.

In fact, we're uh gonna have a call later this week with the state to see what incentives we can match with them.

So really excited about that.

We're re-establishing our relationships with site consultants and site selectors in a meaningful um active way.

We're going to be gearing up for ICSC, which we'll be attending in May of this year.

And then that visibility we feel is really critical to ensuring Edmund and I know Aging and Lena from the city are going to be there as well.

We're really excited about that opportunity.

And then in January, we convened a strategic planning session with key community stakeholders.

And we brought them together.

It was facilitated through Francis Tuttle, and Francis Tuttle led us through a framework called SOR, strengths, opportunity, aspirations, and results.

And from that, those key findings that Francis Tuttle found, we worked with our board to develop what we're calling four strategic pillars.

And these strategic pillars are going to be the framework for future work of EEDA.

Pillar number one, let's get into it here.

Pillar number one, we're going to be supporting existing businesses and driving business retention expansion visits.

And Mayor, I know your tie, everything you like to tie is to key and metrics, and I want to give a caveat that these are baseline metrics press.

You have a completely new staff at EEDA.