On March 5, 2026, the Community and Culture Committee held a meeting featuring two presentations: an overview of the city's economic development efforts and a review of underutilized city-owned properties with development potential. The committee discussed key statistics, programs, and future opportunities for reinvestment and collaboration.
Call to order the community and culture committee meeting for Thursday, March the 5th, 2026, so to stand for the Pledge of Leafs. One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Welcome everyone to the committee meeting today. Today we have two items on our agenda. The first item origin is an economic development overview. This item we're presented by Richard Griffin and Mary Ford now. Welcome. Good afternoon. Richard Griffin and Mary Ford Neo. As you all know, I oversee four departments of the city, and I have a strong manager who oversees the day-to-day operations in each one of those, and Mary does an incredible job running economic development on a day-to-day basis, and she brought a couple of our other colleagues with us, and I'll let her introduce them. Sure. With us today, we have uh Kennedy Wilson, who's our business development specialist, and we have Andy Feldman, who is our uh economic development specialist bilingual. So we're gonna we thought that pictures were better than just a lot of words. So we're gonna try to walk you through a story about economic development, but we're happy to stop at any time, answer questions, and uh and take notes if there are things that you ask us for that we don't have, and we can get them to you if we have them, okay? Um so economic development, and we're gonna try to move quickly through these. I just want to make sure that we all are working from the same page that economic development is generally considered to be a deliberate set of programs and policies that a community puts in place to improve the economic well-being of the community. And why do we do it? We do it because we want jobs uh for our citizens, people that live in our community. We want the tax base that comes along with it. Uh we want the um the opportunity that comes along with corporate growth, also comes stewardship for many, many other things, including the nonprofit sector, the arts and uh and things like that. And then finally, uh private sector investment in the community stimulates additional follow-on investment. Um we do it through a number of different techniques, and there are a lot of theories of economic development. We subscribe to the economic uh the International Economic Development Council, IEDC. They have a prescribed set of um economic development um best practices that we try to implement every day in our work, and we focus on business attraction, business retention and expansion, neighborhood development, and workforce development. And so those are kind of the pillars that we that we uh everything that we do falls into one of those categories. Um I want to share that when you look at studies that have been done across the world about what people value most. After family and health and relationships, they value economic stability and jobs. And you don't have to go very far from Frederick to the you know, to the Midwest and to other parts of the country to see communities that are not in the same condition that Frederick is in. And you have to have a concerted constant effort to make sure that you're cultivating a community that attracts private investment, builds jobs, and builds opportunity for its citizens. And I am really proud that Frederick is that kind of community. Uh, and I am very proud of the work that's been done by our team over the years, and there's still a lot more to do, but uh we're headed, we believe in the the trends are in the right direction, and we're heading in the right direction for the types of things that we're focused on. Um Frederick within our market is a desirable commodity. People want to be in Frederick. They like the authenticity of our community, they like the job opportunities that are here, they like our historic downtown, they like the arts, they like the culture, and as a result, we're growing, both residentially and job-wise. And you can look at these statistics here on the slide that show kind of where we are, but I want to kind of walk you through a slightly different narrative. The City of Frederick, can you see you got a question? No, go ahead. I'll I'll ask you for the spot. The City of Frederick, we occupy only about 3.5% of the county's landmass. We're about 24 square miles. But we contribute almost 30 percent of the population, 25 percent of this county's tax base, 42 percent of the businesses, 48 percent of all the jobs in the county are physically located in the city, and about 30 percent of the entire labor force of our market. So we are mighty, our our little three and a half percent of the county's land mass, but we contribute sizably to the economic prosperity of the county, and our residents, because of that have great opportunity. We're really proud of the fact that our ratio of jobs in the city to the number of residents to the number of workers is about 1.6, 1.7 jobs for every um resident that lives in the city. And that means that the folks that live here have an opportunity to work here. Now, that doesn't mean they all do, but it means they have an opportunity to, and we are very focused on that. Yes, sir. Real quick, who's who's our largest employer in the city of Frederick? We're gonna cover it, but our largest employer is It's a combination that's Fort Dietrich with all the government contractors there. They're by far the largest. AstraZeneca is where?