Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the informal meeting of the Joplin City Council on this Monday, August the 4th, 2025.

We're gonna have two items on the agenda for the informal.

We're gonna begin with the review of the Joplin Area Chamber of Commerce contract.

Good evening, Mr.

Edwards.

Yeah, thank you, Mayor.

Good evening, Council.

Uh this item is on the agenda uh to follow up on a council request.

I believe it was a meeting or two ago.

There was a question asked about uh how does the uh reimbursement or how is the chamber paid uh for economic development services?

So in your material, you should have the uh chamber uh contract.

Um if you want to go over that.

I should have already mentioned uh you also see a lot of our chamber uh folks here, so they might be able to help answer some of your questions.

Um I won't read uh this to you, it's fairly straightforward.

Uh the uh city uh obviously contracts with the chamber for economic development services.

Uh the reimbursement for that uh occurs monthly.

Uh we reimburse for actual expenditures, so if there's uh budgeted expenditure, say vacancy or something like that, uh that's not included in the reimbursement for those uh actual uh expenditures.

Um the rest of the the uh contract uh really kind of sets forth uh some performance measures and some defined activities that the chamber performs.

I'll say that uh you know, each month uh myself and uh city staff, uh believe also the mayor, mayor pro tem we'll meet with the chamber uh to go over uh economic development activities.

All those are coordination meetings.

They kind of uh share with us the different things that they're working on, the leads that they might have, um, you know, any big changes in our local economy here.

We kind of work on those things together and uh kind of stay abreast of those performance measures.

So with that, I'll stop and see what questions you might have.

Council, Mrs.

Carlin.

Sir, when reading over the contracts, it says that the JACC shall provide a written report to the mayor and city council on a monthly basis.

So do you see that?

Because I've never been given a monthly report.

Ms.

Carlin, yes.

Uh we'll we do have a uh monthly report.

I I wouldn't say it's a uh formal uh report.

Uh looks a lot a lot like the quarterly report that the council uh receives from the chamber.

It's kind of just a running list of those items that are uh presented to you each quarter.

It says here it should outline the task accomplished and include statistics for each performance measure outlined.

Yes, ma'am.

We do you see that, Mayor?

I do, and I've read through that contract.

And uh again, the only thing I would add is we do have a monthly meeting with the chamber, the economic development team, MoCann comes over, gives us all the leads that they're working on and things that are happening.

Um again, that uh for me has been relatively informal to this point.

They keep us posted and updated on all that.

We do have a loose agenda that we follow during those things, but um I don't know if that information has been disseminated down uh from that meeting.

It would be nice to know.

Agreed.

Any other questions for Mr.

Jackson?

Nick, one of the questions I've had asked among amongst the members of the community is um directly how the reimbursement for the chamber contract works.

So it's my understanding that we do fund certain operations, certain salaries for the economic development services they bring to the community.

But with one of those positions being vacant at the chamber right now, are we still funding that portion even though that's empty, or I mean are we paying are we paying for a person who's not there doing the service?

Uh Mr.

Jackson, my my response is no.

We reimburse based on actual expenditures.

So uh the chamber has appointed an interim uh who's helping with some of those economic development activities.

We will reimburse for that, but it's not like we're uh reimbursing for the position that's not paid or is vacant.

Something else I wanted to ask about.

I know you and I have talked about this, Nick.

Um have we looking at the uh I I think the chamber does a great job in terms of you know uh the networking side of the community, business to business, business to community members, um, organizational um programming.

Um I've been a volunteer there for a number of years, and I think there's a lot of things to do really well.

But on the economic development side, have we ever looked at soliciting um kind of an RFQ to see about a long-term contract, long-term partnership?

And it's not to say that it wouldn't be the Joplin chamber.