Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
This summary is based on the raw transcript; no agenda or minutes were provided. The Saco City Council met at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, October 19, 2026. Deputy Administrator Prescott attended in place of Administrator Pelletier. The meeting featured a presentation on the Venture Forward small business program, routine approvals, two action items, and three informational new business items. The council adjourned at 7:40 p.m.
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Sarko City Council meeting for Monday, October 19th, 2026 at six thirty PM. We'd like to make recognition of our counselor's members' presence this evening. And with us tonight, we do have Deputy Administrator Prescott. Administrator Pelletier is off. Thank you, everyone. Okay, moving on to item number four under general. We do have one presentation this evening. And with us tonight, we do have Chris Tarina, who is going to be a venture forward presentation. Welcome, Chris. Thank you, Mayor. Thanks, Tracy. Thank you for having uh me here tonight. Really grateful for the opportunity to present uh Venture Forward for some background. I am the managing director of entrepreneurship and venture creation at the Rue Institute in Portland. Um I'm also a member of the economic development advisory board for my hometown of Yarmouth. So what I'm about to present tonight comes from two different lenses. Uh, prior to my role at the Rue Institute and the EDAB, I was also uh uh founder myself with a very successful startup. Um so uh this venture forward program is near and dear to my heart from a personal perspective and also from some of the firsthand accounts of our previous cohort that I'm gonna present today. So for those of you that aren't familiar with the Rue Institute, the 30,000 foot view is we are uh a campus of Northeastern's 14 campus network. So we represent uh a graduate campus of the university system. Uh we opened our doors six years ago with a bold mission of spurring helping spur economic development and job creation here in the state of Maine. Um with the uh generous donation from the RUS as well as the Alphonse Foundation, we open our doors in 2020. Um to accomplish this mission, we really do it through four intentional uh pillars of our organization, one of which is we're a research institute, we're also an academics uh institution, and we also work with a myriad of organizations throughout the state, both large and small, as large as LL Bean, IDEXUNum, and all the way down to our municipal partnerships with towns such as Yarmouth, Kenny Bunk, Rockland, and hopefully after today, the city of Sacco. The fourth pillar, which I represented entrepreneurship, and for just context, um, we are an entrepreneurship team that supports uh startups from different parts of the country and really the world that are thinking about uh resource ecosystems to help drive and scale uh their venture. And so we have programs that focus on early stage tech, healthcare, climate sustainability, uh, as well as dual use technologies. Uh one of the pillars of within our team is also entrepreneurship education. And in the past, we were kind of defined through entrepreneurship education through programs such as uh hackathon or an innovation challenge. When I took the helm about two years ago uh at the Rue Institute, I kind of rethought um really took a half step back and really kind of challenged my team to rethink actually how do we support not just the traditional, you know, Tracy and Chris from Missouri want to, you know, kind of build their business in Maine and hopefully they hire William and Jeff and Jody to, you know, uh work in their organization, but really how do we support small to medium-sized businesses here in the state? Because as we all know, uh small businesses is really the backbone of our economy here in Maine. If we're not doing something to support um really those place-based, community-based small businesses, then we at the Rue Institute really have to question what we're actually in the business of doing. Uh so I challenge my team to kind of think about ways that we can deploy all of the resources within our ecosystem to support those organizations that are, I don't want to say in the shadows, but really kind of building on their own, you know, kind of nose down in their home office, in some secondary co-working space to really bring them out to show that the Rue Institute can be and is uh kind of in an epicenter of building and resource. Um so at the Rue Institute, as it pertains to entrepreneurship, we have a really strong ecosystem that really brings to bear access to mentorship, curriculum, talent pipeline, which I'll get to in a moment, and then also just an ecosystem of thought leaders, business leaders, municipal leaders that really want to see small businesses not just you know grow but really thrive. Um so we went back just again for a little bit of color at a EDAB meeting about a year and a half ago when I or two years ago when I first got the role as managing director, I raised my hand in the meeting and I asked all of my colleagues, I said, of all the resources that the town of Yarmouth where I live has at its disposal. And surprisingly, the answer was nothing. Um I went back to my team and I said we really need to kind of step into the moment and answer the prevailing question that I don't think just Yarmouth has, but I would imagine that most uh communities and small towns and cities have in the state. Uh so venture forward was born from that moment. And for context, it is uh a really community place-based program that helps support small businesses grow one community at a time.