The Economic Workforce Development Committee met on May 26, 2026, to receive briefings on the update to the city's economic development strategic framework, recommendations for federal Opportunity Zones 2.0, and procurement policy options related to ICE detention support. No public comment was offered.
6 2026 in the meeting and the meeting of the economic workforce development committee is now called to order. Madam Clerk, please call the roll. Councilmember Castillo. Councilmember Galvan. Councilmember Mesa Gonzalez. Councilmember Spears. Chair Via Gran? Here. Chair, we have a quorum. Great. The first item on the agenda is approval of the minutes. Are there any corrections to the minutes? Can I get a motion in a second? I've got a motion in a second. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed say no. Motion carries. Madam Clerk, are there any citizens signed up to speak on the item for public comment? All right. Okay. Um we will move on to item two. This is a big day of briefing, so I hope you all have all the questions y'all need. Uh item two is an update on the economic development strategic framework. Is there a staff presentation? Alright, okay. The floor is yours. Good afternoon, Chair, Council members. Um Brenda Hicksorenson, Director of Economic Development. I'm actually going to turn it over to the TIP strategies team who you may recall last fall. We issued a solicitation after we briefed this committee in October and November, went through that solicitation process process TIP strategies was identified as that vendor, and we just wanted to use today as an opportunity as that check-in for where we're at after the discovery and as we're moving forward, and uh just go through the rest of the timeline and want more to come. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to John Karas with TIP Strategies. Good afternoon, Chair and Council members. Great to see you all today. Thanks for the introduction, Brenda. I'm John Karis with TIP Strategies, and I'm joined here by Tom Stelman, our CEO and Alexis Angelo, our project manager. And we just wanted to give you a very brief, ideally no more than 10 minute quick overview of where we are in the update to the 2022 strategic framework. So I'll go over just a background on the project goal, where we are in the process, the some of the economic context, and then a lot of the stakeholder engagement that we've been hard at work at, and then a very brief overview of some of the preliminary findings that uh will then ultimately feed into the update. So as a reminder, the goal is not to start from scratch, but really to build off of the 2022 framework where we had three big goals innovation and industry, placemaking and development, and talent and workforce. So we're updating that framework, as well as the the five target industries uh that included things like uh mobility, IT, security, biosciences, manufacturing across many different sectors, corporate and professional services. So we're updating that, uh looking for fine-tuning and refinements, and then we're also looking at updating the small business ecosystem assessment and the international outreach through the Metro Priority Plan. We're uh that the two uh different sides there, the on the right side, the process. Uh so we've got four distinct phases. We're still kind of in the the early phases of the process. Uh we're started work on a lot of the data analysis. I'll give you just a teaser of that, and we've done a lot of the stakeholder input. We're still gathering input, not just from uh council members and community members, but I'll I'll give you an update on that, and then we'll be heading into the opportunities for growth and then the implementation phase later as we get into the end of the summer. But I wanted to start with uh the larger economy. So, what has changed since 2022? Well, we're in quite a different economic landscape.