12/17/2007 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Minutes of the Council Meeting December 17, 2007 Page 8 Council President Buckholtz asked if there was any discussion. Mr. Marquardt advised that he is disappointed with the information provided in Council packets. Although we received the application, the responses are apparently in a brochure which must exceed 35 pages. We did not get that which would probably have explained a lot about this project. We should have that information in front of us when making decisions. Mr. Marquardt still has concerns over spending $860,000.00 with a goal of achieving 10 jobs along the way. We should have at least 100 jobs for that amount of money in order to get a return on investments on the Village's money. Mr. Buckholtz stated that he met with Mr. Brett a couple of times over the last month. We have gotten all or a bulk of the information in several different chunks. Your point can be well taken in terms of at the start of the program if there was one concise document from the County, he is not sure if we got it. Mr. Marquardt stated that we have not seen the document we submitted with the application. It has not been provided in all of this information. Mr. Buckholtz stated he was happy to see in the last submission provided at Council's request, that the amount of people that have done the amount of work on this so far is pretty phenomenal. This may not provide metrix or the quantification that you are looking for, but people have some high hopes pinned on this innovation zone. Mr. Buckholtz will leave it for the Mayor and Finance Director to chime in, but he does want to address this issue of the number of jobs. He had an opportunity to talk to some of the people at the County. The requirements that they put on this are exceedingly low. They wanted to make it opportune for whatever communities that wanted to come in on it to show some scale of improvement of participation. No one in this room would disagree that not only the money, but the effort that is going into this, no one is doing it with the intention of creating 10 jobs, even though that is the minimum requirement that the County is asking for: Mr. Buckholtz spoke to Diane Calta about his thoughts that it is not out of the question that we could put some language in the legislation which states that we are shooting for 100 jobs. After talking with Phil and Ted, Mr. Buckholtz does not think they would be going at this with the gusto, either at the County level or our partners in the Mayfield Alliance or our partners on Beta would be approaching this to try to shoot for anything less than 100 jobs. He does not think anyone can put a number on it rather than the way the grant is drafted from the County is to identify an innovation zone which we are doing in the first phase and then to build it out as aggressively as possible. Mr. Buckholtz does not know any way better to articulate that, but he will open it to other people, if they want to amend what he has said, or add to it. Mr. Brett pointed out that we are voting on Phase 1 of the project. Any reference to $880,000.00 is not germane to the issue at this time. The dollax amounts are $10,000.00 and $20,000.00 for Phase 1. If the Village is fortunate enough to make it into Phase 2, that would bring on a two- year period where we would receive $150,000.00 for contributing $150,000.00. If the Village is successful in getting to Phase 3, we would put up $700,000.00 and would receive back $350,000.00 or basically get $1.00 from the County for every $2.00 that the Village spends. Those are three separate phases. What we are talking about now is a$10,000.00/$20,000.00 split.