The City Council held a work session on October 7, 2025, to receive updates on economic development activities, including quarterly accomplishments, business engagement efforts, grants, infrastructure projects, and partnership negotiations. Staff and council members discussed progress, challenges, and next steps across multiple initiatives. No formal votes were taken, but direction was provided for future actions.
All right. Um here with my volume. Your boss. I'd say you know the staff side. Um conversation with something else's side. I'm gonna give it over to Syria to take us through what we were able to accomplish last quarter, and then I'll jump in and talk about uh the quarter ahead and even just a little sneak peek into the first year into next year. With that, I'll let you get right into this here. All right, Q3, July through September. We all give model Milwaukee best. Um and economic development connections that we wanted to highlight from this successful event were the many local businesses that were both sponsors and active participants. Um not only were they leading Jazzer size in the middle of the square, but they were also donating electricity to their storefronts, um, as well as the fact that if traffic was moving all the way from historic city hall all the way down to the South Downtown Plaza for the entire day. Um and we will also be looking to get feedback um from businesses in a Q4 survey, which we'll touch on in our future activities, um, where we ask about how events have impacted businesses and how they would like to get involved in events going forward. So speaking of this survey, um, thank you, Councillor Stavan Jordan. Um I took lots of what you had given us via email um and infused some of our other city weeds into it. Um so we have a draft survey that is ready to go out. Um, and so it'll talk about our business friendliness um to get a metric. That's one of the metrics that is on our council work plan. Um we don't have a baseline for, so it will help us get that baseline as well as be able to measure improvements to business friendliness. Um, as well as on this um work plan, we have a business license code update. Um so it'll ask questions along the lines of what would you like to see this meeting go towards? Um, should it be measured based on um employee count or post receipts? Um, so on and so forth. Um, and then those needs and opportunities are where I'm really leaning on what your input was um to kind of measure the health of our business community. Um and then of course the first part, which is the journal info, just to help us understand um those patterns and trends for specific cohorts of businesses. Um yeah, and so I'm thinking, and I'll get your input on this maybe January launch um after the busy uh holiday season, um, but multi-con index. And how will you? Oh, maybe that's on your next one. No, I don't think it is there. So how will you get it out to people and how will you yeah? Yeah, um, we have a pretty good email list for the business license info already. Um so probably gonna start there, see how that goes, and then maybe do another round of in-person. I'm noticing some big gaps in geographic areas and things like that. I think one thing that chamber has said a lot is they would like to see funds from our uh business registration go towards chamber membership. Will that be a component of the business license question? Or that will be a part of the conversation. I know that's something we had told the chamber when we had that discussion with them that's when we revisit that conversation. The mayor and I had a conversation with Jones about that. So good. And they I mean, I think there's a question for us, right? About is the chamber, I mean, there's the chamber, there's the business of Milwaukee, there's Dan. Um we favor one over another, or do we? I mean, you know, do we have money out of it to get and this is connected to our broader update of the business license code that we are working on? Um right now our business registration or business license code is written very much from a revenue perspective, and we're undertaking a process to look at that and update that and bring that to you. So I think these conversations and feedback can be a full bit of that conversation. Yeah, the hope is that we'll get feedback from the businesses that'll be what kind of value do they want to see the registration dollars use for and so then we'll give you that input or that feedback so that you all can make a decision on what that might be, whether it's funding our business uh associations um one or the other, or if that's not even a something we do in those dollars. So we'll find out more. That's the and uh um that's of the or from the chamber. What would that actually go to? I think that's probably I mean, is it part of the advocacy? Is it part of their little bit of both?