Welcome to today's meeting of the Rules and Economic Development Committee.

Let the record reflect that we have a quorum consisting of Vice Chair Faulkner, Councilmember Kerzy, Councilmember Alvarez, and myself, Councilmember Emerald will not be joining us this morning.

Also with us is uh committee staff, including Priscilla Degard from the Office of the City Attorney, Jeff Coir from the Office of the Independent Budget Analyst, Francisco Estrada from the Mayor's Office, and Nika Bukulova, committee consultant.

Thank you all for begin being here this morning.

We're going to begin with non-agenda public comment.

And we have none.

And we have no comment on regulatory streamlining open government and economic development.

So moving on to committee comment.

I sure hope so.

I do too.

Okay.

Our first order of business is approval of the minutes from our meeting on May 15th and 2013.

They are deemed approved unless there are additions or corrections.

Any additions or corrections?

We do not have a consent agenda, so moving on to the first item on our agenda.

Item one is informational workshop on the City of San Diego's small business programs.

We have a presentation from the Economic Development Division regarding the City of San Diego's small business programs.

As you all know, small businesses make up over 90% of the business in San Diego.

They are the little engines that drive our economy.

One of this committee's priorities is being proactive in coming up ways up with ways to attract, retain, and grow our small businesses.

And we need to do everything we can to make sure these fledging fledgling businesses have all the tools necessary so that they can grow and flourish.

We as a city realize that there is more we can do for our small businesses from our restaurants to our high-tech startups to our retail shops.

And in order to do right by our small businesses, we really have to listen to them.

We need to know which programs are available for small businesses, how they work, and how we can improve them.

With that in mind, we have asked our city staff to come and provide a status report regarding our small business programs.

And I look forward to your presentation.

And I hope that we can do this on a regular basis moving forward.

Not every month, but you know.

I'd like to get uh some metrics in place so we can see how we're progressing with our programs.

In terms of logistics, we've broken up today's items, uh, today's item into two parts.

The first will be the presentation from our city staff, who I will introduce shortly, followed by this second part, um, which will be a presentation from Dr.

Ruben Garcia.

He's chair of the city's small business advisory board and also the district director of the United States Small Business Administration Administration.

I welcome Tom Tomlinson, the Interim Development Services Director, Amy Gowan, Assistant Deputy Director of the Economic Development Division, and Meredith Dibden Brown, Community Development Coordinator.

These are great titles for the Economic Development Division.

They are joined here today by Lisa Gordon, small business ambassador for the City of San Diego, and Lila Iskada Iskandar, and she can correct that if I didn't make that.

Small business liaison in the development services department.

Russ Gibbons is also here from uh the Bear team.

Um I also understand our sitting front row and center is Rory Moore, the CEO of ComNexist.

Thank you all for being here today and uh look forward to the presentation.

I know it's a long one.

Yes, thank you.

Tom Tallinson, Deputy Director of Economic Development Project Management for today.

Beginning Monday, I will be the interim DSD director uh as Kelly is departing, Mr.

Broughton, and then uh they will conduct a full recruitment for his replacement.

Thanks for clarification.

Sure, sure.

Um Monday.

Um thank you for having us.

As you can see, we brought the troops because we want to answer all questions and be as comprehensive as we can today.

Uh I want to take the opportunity to say hello, introduce myself, and also hopefully answer a question that Councilmember Leitner had at a budget hearing about how does economic development fit into DSD.

Um DSD, as you know, is a very large department, and it was recently reorganized, uh say six, nine months ago.

And as a part of that reorganization, there were four divisions that were created.

One of those four divisions was economic development and project management.

And I am the deputy director over that division, and underneath me are two assistant deputy directors, Mike Westlake and Amy Gowan.

Amy oversees the economic development portion of the shop, and Mike oversees the facilities financing and project management portion of the shop.

Overall, I have or I oversee approximately 90 employees plus interns, and we have approximately one, two, three, four.

Six sections or groups.

Those groups are the Economic Rose Services Group, which is the bear team, the Office of Small Business, Meredith Group, uh small bad small business ambassador, uh Lisa, who is our Army of One, uh, HUD programs, which is currently uh a vacant position, uh and we're looking to fill that position.

We have our DPMs or our project management group, and then we have our facilities financing group.