# Council Economic & Community Development Committee - February 8, 2011 > Auto-transcribed civic record · February 8, 2011 - **Permalink**: https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/1873 - **Source video**: https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/1873?view_id=14&redirect=true - **Date**: 2011-02-08 - **Last revised**: July 17, 2026 - **Length**: 7,620 words > ⚠️ **Auto-generated content.** Audio from the official Granicus video was auto-transcribed with OpenAI's open-source Whisper large-v3-turbo model, run locally by The Lexington Times. Structured facts were extracted with GPT-4o; the narrative summary was written by Anthropic Claude. Verbatim wording may contain errors. See [methodology](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/about/methodology) or [report a correction](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). --- ## Meeting Overview The Economic & Community Development Committee met on February 8, 2011, at 1:00 p.m., with Kevin Stinnett presiding. The committee addressed three agenda items during the meeting, all of which were presented on an informational basis. The meeting included one motion and vote, and the committee heard three public comments. The agenda focused on economic development topics, including a presentation on fostering richer entrepreneurship in Lexington, an update on Fresh Start Initiatives, and a review of items referred to the committee. ## Attendance The following individuals were present at the meeting on February 8, 2011: * Kevin Stinnett * Julian Beard * Gorton * Ellinger * Crosbie * Myers * Lane No absences or late arrivals were recorded. ## Votes and Decisions The meeting included one motion that was brought to a vote. **Motion to Adjourn** A motion to adjourn the meeting was called to a vote by voice vote. The motion passed. [timestamp: 00:45:08] ## Public Comment Three speakers shared perspectives on regional economic development and entrepreneurship during the public comment period. **Saul Kaplan** [timestamp: 0:04:11] addressed the entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem in Lexington. He shared insights from Rhode Island's innovation strategy, emphasizing three key factors for fostering entrepreneurship: quality of place, business climate, and innovation as a regional differentiator. Kaplan stressed the importance of cross-silo collaboration and community-driven solutions in building a sustainable innovation environment. **Selena Schmidt** [timestamp: 0:29:08] discussed regional collaboration and visioning in Western Pennsylvania. She described the Power of 32 initiative, a large-scale regional visioning project spanning 32 counties across four states. Schmidt highlighted the initiative's emphasis on community engagement and cross-sector collaboration, noting that the project prioritized starting with a shared vision before moving into detailed planning. **Andy Sparks** [timestamp: 0:39:46] focused on engaging Generation Y and student-led entrepreneurship in Columbus. He discussed local efforts to retain young talent through informal tech gatherings and student-led entrepreneurship clubs. Sparks emphasized the energy and impact that Generation Y brings to innovation efforts and underscored the significant role that student organizations play in driving entrepreneurial activity. ## Fostering Richer Entrepreneurship in Lexington [timestamp: 00:01:31] Saul Kaplan of the Business Innovation Factory presented on strategies for building an innovation economy, drawing on his experience developing Rhode Island's entrepreneurial ecosystem. Kaplan emphasized three key pillars for strengthening Lexington's entrepreneurial environment: * **Quality of place** — the physical and cultural environment that attracts and retains entrepreneurs and talent * **Business climate** — the regulatory, financial, and operational conditions that support business growth * **Innovation as a community-wide differentiator** — positioning innovation as a defining characteristic that sets the community apart A central theme of the presentation was the need for **cross-silo collaboration**, breaking down barriers between different sectors, institutions, and stakeholder groups to create a more integrated and supportive ecosystem. Kaplan advocated for **community-driven experimentation**, encouraging Lexington to test new approaches and learn from pilot initiatives rather than relying solely on traditional economic development strategies. The presentation was informational in nature, providing insights and frameworks for consideration rather than proposing specific decisions or actions for immediate implementation. ## Fresh Start Initiatives Mayor Gray's Fresh Start Initiatives were presented to the committee for informational purposes only [timestamp: 00:45:08]. No discussion or action was taken during the meeting regarding these initiatives. The committee acknowledged that the Fresh Start Initiatives could be considered during future CAL (Committee on the Adoption of Laws) meetings, though no timeline or specific next steps were established at this time. ## Items Referred to Committee The committee reviewed the list of items that had been referred to it for consideration. [timestamp: 00:44:36] No changes to the referred items list were proposed during this discussion. The committee confirmed the existing list, which remains open for future consideration as additional matters may be brought before it. This agenda item was informational in nature, serving to acknowledge and document the items currently under the committee's purview. --- ## Decisions - **Motion** — passed: Motion to adjourn the meeting --- ## Full transcript Councilmember Julian Beard, who is away, and we give our condolences to him and his family as they go through a difficult time. I am Vice Chair Kevin Stinnett, and we'll begin the meeting here in about two minutes. If everyone could take a seat, we'll keep it on pass with our agenda today, if everyone can have a seat. Welcome, everyone. I know. I understand. Thank you. Okay, I'll go ahead and call the meeting in order. Thank you all for your attendance today. First on our agenda, Fostering Richer Entrepreneurship in Lexington. We have a few special guests with us, and I'll turn it over to Eric Patrick-Mar. You want to introduce our special guests. And as primary, usually during a council presentation, we limit it to 15 minutes. So we'll give each guest an opportunity also to speak afterwards as well. So, Eric, take it away. Thank you, Council Member Stennett. I want to thank you guys for your time, and I'm sorry we're two or three minutes late. Council Member Kay, thank you for being there. Congratulations on your victory, Council Member Farmer and everybody else. Thank you guys. You're right to the point. We have brought in Saul Kaplan from Providence, Rhode Island. He has a nonprofit up there called the Business Innovation Factory. His background was before that in 2005 when he started out. He was Rhode Island's economic development director. Created their governor's strategic plan to build an innovation economy. Before that, he was with Accenture and Eli Lilly in the private sector. And what Biff is doing, and actually Mayor Gray sent me up to Biff in Providence last September. Got to know them. My relationship has ensued and a lot of conversations have followed on since then. And so Saul wanted to come down to visit Kentucky to help Lexington and Louisville both explore and discover what we can do to even improve our entrepreneurial innovation ecosystem, to use those words. And he came down free of charge. Randall Stevens paid for his travel. We've had two full days of nonstop meetings. I had Mayor Gray dinner last night. Went to Louisville this morning, Mayor Fisher. They're GLI. They're entrepreneurs. A lot of different people across both cities. Along with Saul, we also have Selena Schmidt from Pittsburgh. There, she runs this group called The Power of 32. It's 32 counties in four states up there, regionalism, economic, community development issues. She's also come down for this conversation. Andy Sparks from Ohio State. He's Ohio State's Entrepreneur Club president and also is doing some entrepreneurial things in Columbus. From West Virginia, we also have Dwayne and Dina. Where are they? Back in the back. so in addition to Saul's stuff if you'd like to let them talk just for a few minutes and questions and answers but really Saul and what Biff is doing around the country to foster entrepreneurship and create that ecosystem for America's future economy and how that can be built here in Kentucky it's a great thing I think so are you ready Saul? last night we had a reception Bob Quick came to the reception which was awesome thank you Bob and I'm glad the chamber's here thank you guys so much and dinner with Kevin and Jim Gray last night. Very good. Welcome. Well, thank you, Eric. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, members of the council. It's truly an honor to be here with you this afternoon, to have the opportunity to share both some observations from the last day or so that I've had the opportunity to visit with some really exciting people in your community, people with a passion for entrepreneurship and innovation. I'm pretty sure that I've seen the future of Lexington and Kentucky over the last couple of days. I met with some 80 entrepreneurs yesterday here in Lexington, an incredibly passionate crowd that have great pride for the local community, and I'm quite certain can form the nucleus of a very exciting growth conversation going forward. I just came from University of Kentucky where I was asked to teach a class, an entrepreneurship class, and there were some 40 sophomores in the class, and Eric asked them how many were from Kentucky. And everybody, I don't think I saw a single hand that wasn't from here. So I'm pretty sure I did speak with the future of Kentucky, and the future is bright. They were really engaged in the conversation, really engaged in the community and thinking about how together we can make the community a much stronger place. I'm here today really just to share a personal experience having worked in the economic development space, not to imply that I know what's best or right for your local community. I can share an experience with you and a set of observations that I hope might be helpful as you continue to strengthen your local community. I grew up in the private sector, had never really worked in government through most of my career. I spent a lot of it as a senior partner with a large consulting firm. I had spent a lot of time thinking very deeply about innovation, but through the lens of large corporations. I had the good fortune of being able to retire, and my wife was not that interested in having a strategy consultant at home advising on household operations. So what was to be a year-long hiatus trying to figure out what I was going to do next got shortened to three months. And I made the mistake of raising my hand to the then newly elected governor of the state of Rhode Island, who asked me to work in the Economic Development Agency and ultimately join his cabinet and lead the effort for the state of Rhode Island. So what I'm going to share with you is what I call my accidental bureaucrat story. It was an incredible six years that I spent. We had a classic economic situation. I was very surprised to learn when I took over the opportunity. I would have assumed we're in the Northeast. We have a very high cost structure associated with being in New England. And so I would have assumed that our wage levels were higher than the national average. Just intuitively, I would have thought that and was incredibly surprised to learn that it wasn't true, that we had a local economy that had transitioned from an industrial economy into a lower-wage service economy, and our wages were actually lower than the national average. Only about 40 percent of the jobs in our state came from sectors like health care and finance and IT and digital media. We have a big defense cluster there that have the potential to pay higher than national average wages. And if you look at comparable states that are faring better, you would see that number at about 60 percent of the total workforce. So our job was to try to move from 40 percent of the workforce to 60 percent of the workforce coming from sectors that have growth potential and the ability to pay higher wages. There were several observations that I made coming into government for the first time. First of all, our psychology was wrong. We didn't believe in ourselves and in our economy, and I knew it was really important for our state's leaders to change that psychology, because as you know, economics is all about what happens on the margin. Whether a company hires one additional employee or invests one more dollar in your community is in large part about their confidence and enthusiasm for the local community. And we knew we needed to work on changing the psychology. Psychology really does matter. Second observation was how fragmented we were as a community. There were an incredible number of very well-intentioned programs throughout the state. But there were far too many under-resourced, under-led, all stepping on each other's toes. none of whom knew what the other elements of the fragmented community were doing. We needed more collaboration muscle and more ability to break down some of the silos within our community to unleash the entrepreneurial and innovation spirit that we had. Last observation was about how we were selling ourselves, how we were talking about the community. I'm not sure we knew what it is we were selling. Too many of the economic development conversations were about price, were about what incentives could the community deliver in order for you to move there or for you to stay there. And in business, you know very early on that when price is the first thing you talk about, it usually means that you don't know what you're selling or how to sell it in a value-added way. So we needed to change that. So the economic development strategy that we put in place was built around those observations. There were three elements to the strategy. One was about quality of place. I'll lay all three of them out, talk very briefly about each one. One was about the quality of place. The second one was about our business climate and the conditions for starting and growing businesses within the state. And the third was about innovation, each one. Quality of place, really important. I know how important that is to you just from driving from the airport here. You have an incredible quality of place that people cherish, and we do as well on the ocean up in Rhode Island. It was really important that whatever economic development strategy and programs we put in place, it was not at the expense of quality of place, that we were doing it in a way that enhanced the quality of place because we recognized that that was our strongest. asset, and we needed to sustain and build on that. So it was a lens through which all other economic development strategies went through. I suspect that that has resonance here in your local community. The business climate conversations were the ones you would expect. Land, we have a very small state. It was really important how we did land use planning and the way we made sure there were some parts of the community that were available for economic development and growth and other parts of the community that were untouchable and related to our quality of place. I suspect that, too, has some resonance here in the local community. The workforce was an area of great interest to me, a big disconnect between the capacity to work in a 21st century economy and the ability of our workforce development and education system to create the kind of workforce that would enable that, a really, really important challenge that we spent a lot of time working on. Of course, tax climate is important and the regulatory environment is important. The piece that I want to focus on is the third piece. It was a very innovation piece, an entrepreneurship piece. It was very clear to me that even if we had a positive business climate, even if we had a positive business climate, that was necessary but not sufficient. There are a lot of attractive business climates around the country and around the world. And everything you do that can improve your business climate, some other location can improve their business climate. You can't compete alone on business climate. You have to have some kind of differentiator, some kind of thing in your community DNA that makes you different, that gets people up in the morning and excited about being part of the community. And for us, it was the recognition that it was about innovation and entrepreneurship. I have a fundamental view that our economic future is going to be centered around innovation and entrepreneurship, not just for a privileged few, but for everybody in the community. It's really important that we get below those buzzwords, below that rhetoric, to make those concepts directly relevant to everybody in the community, that we create an inclusive conversation that everybody can participate in, in order to unleash the entrepreneurial and innovation talents of the community. We did a lot of work to put in place very specific and targeted programs to improve the innovation capacity of the community. First, we wanted to increase the R&D or research intensity within the community. We're blessed like you are with significant and prestigious colleges and universities in the region and in the community. It is really important to create connections to that and to make sure that ideas and the research that's coming out of those institutions have a way to translate into real economic development and real company formation and growth. The second piece is about entrepreneurial activity. We needed to refocus our energy on what does it mean to create an environment where we can start more entities, both for-profit entities, social enterprise, and nonprofit entities. How could we become known as a community that was recognized for the capacity to start more entities? And that's not just for classic entrepreneurial companies like high-tech companies. Every single one in your community has the potential to be an entrepreneur. We have to broaden the definition of what we mean by entrepreneurial activity, and we have to create the capacity, the platform, and the tools in order to enable that. And the third and last piece of the strategy was beyond just entrepreneurial and startups, how do we turn our community into what I call an innovation hotspot, into a real-world laboratory where all the organizations, not just the new companies, but existing companies have the capacity to innovate and get stronger. Because if you have a community that on balance has more organizations that are innovating and becoming more competitive, more competitive in the region, in the nation, and around the world, you will have a stronger economy, you will have more companies that are growing, and those companies are the companies that are creating new jobs and better and higher wage job opportunities. So creating an environment where all organizations can innovate is really important. So this is not just about small startup tech companies. This is about an environment where all the entities, all the companies in your community, have the opportunity and access to the tools and resources they need to get stronger faster so that they can be more competitive and they can create the kinds of jobs that you're looking for. The entity that I created was an outgrowth of that strategy called the Business Innovation Factory. It was an opportunity to create a real-world laboratory that would help organizations of all size that wanted to innovate determine how they could innovate, how they could create new solutions, and it's very focused on delivering solutions in the areas that are most important to all of us. Little things like health care and education and energy and entrepreneurship are all systems challenges that we can tie the innovation and entrepreneurial community to and make significant progress to strengthen our economy. So my reason for sharing that story with you is, you know, rather than making specific suggestions on what you should or shouldn't do, because I have not been here long enough and don't know your local community well enough to do that, but I think there are some things that you can take away from the experience that I've shared that I hope will translate into the economic development strategies and practices that you put in place here within the local community. And with that, in my formal comments, thank you for the opportunity to present them here with you today and look forward to any further discussion or questions that the council might have. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Council members, if anyone has any questions or comments, just chime in on the granicus, and we'll recognize you. Council Member Farmer, you're up first. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, not being a member of your committee. I appreciate being here today and your chairmanship. Solid welcome to Lexington. Thank you. Glad to be here. It sounds like we have a lot of the kindling ready to go here from your description. Yeah, I absolutely believe that. I don't think this is about inventing anything new. I think this is about how do you activate and harness the energy that you already have within your community. I could sense it over the last day. There's a lot of passion within the community. I've often said that the role of government should be the catalyst to advance those conversations, to help enable those conversations that are going on in your community, and to seed those conversations with resources as you can to advance them. But I absolutely agree. The kindling is definitely here. You had a good turnout last night then? Yes, there were some, I think 80 people, that came to the event that Eric pulled together last night. And there was a diverse group. It wasn't just a single siloed group. There was diversity amongst the group. There was diversity in the conversation. And it leads me to the conclusion that there are important conversations that are going on here within Lexington. There's a passion for making entrepreneurship and innovation more central to the economic future, and I would be very optimistic about that and be looking for ways to encourage and support that conversation. Is that our best follow-up, is trying to help those connections take place a little better, a little more fruitfully, a little more often? Yeah, I think it's one, the language you use about the vision for your economic future and making entrepreneurship and innovation more central to that. I think it's about encouraging the ground-up conversations that are already happening. And the only thing I would add to that is the importance of creating a conversation that cuts across the silos, the horizontal conversation. There are many conversations that go on within silos. There are far fewer conversations that go on where the innovators from each of those silos get in a room together to share and explore ideas. I personally believe that the gold, the economic gold, is in that gray area between those silos. And what I think we all need to get better at is how do we catalyze those cross-sector, cross-silo conversations so that we can mine that gold, so that we can find the best economic opportunities within them. We appreciate you being here. We want to make sure to make a plan to get you back before you go. Thank you. I'd welcome you. Thank you for your question. Thank you, Council Member Farmer. Vice Mayor Gordon. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Welcome. It's really good to have you in our community. I was one of the folks who powwalled with you over the speakerphone while you were stuck in the airport yesterday. and I wanted you, I found it really fascinating. Of course, as you know, the group that was assembled yesterday afternoon was looking at aging-related issues. And at the end of our meeting, it spurred, we were just kind of ready to keep going. It spurred some intense conversation, first of all, about who's old. And being one of the older baby boomers, you know, I don't think of myself as old. And yet, you know, other people look at who's old and make a determination of who's old. So I wondered if you could share with the committee just briefly some of the things you've done with the aging, because I thought it was fascinating and very helpful in terms of looking at this big, I think of it as a big blob of baby boomers moving into retirement and how to leverage those folks and their talents and their gifts for the community. Yes, thank you for the question, Vice Mayor. First of all, you're not old. Thank you. I didn't think so. No, thank you for asking that and for tolerating the conversation. For those of you who don't know, my trip in to Lexington yesterday was by way of Indianapolis after the plane hovered over the airport and then got diverted to Indianapolis. So the first meeting I was to have was with a really important group thinking about elder care and aging in place. The reason this conversation is so important, and thank you for asking it, is because I believe that entrepreneurship and innovation has to be tied to real social issues and challenges. The conversation we have is too esoteric when we just use those words, and we don't talk about how we can apply that to solving a real problem. So yesterday, the challenge, and this is a real challenge and opportunity for all of our communities, How do we support an aging population where the historic solutions have always been about institutional solutions in nursing homes? When, number one, with the aging demographic, there are far too many of us to build enough institutions, even if we wanted to be there. And I know as one, I don't want to go there anyway. I want to age in place with dignity in my own home. But yet the system of care, the system that we built up, wasn't designed to do that. So I can think of no more important challenge to take all of our entrepreneurial and innovation talent and to focus it in order to create new solutions that are designed around the experience of the elder population itself. What we do at the Business Innovation Factory is we – that's exactly how we frame these challenges. Our labs are all about large, complex social challenges like this one. And then we bring the community together to explore a better way to deliver value and services, in this case, to the elder population. We have a comparable lab in education designed around the student. We have a comparable lab in economic development centered around the entrepreneur. bring the voice of the community directly into the conversation, and that way you can start to break down the boundaries of institutional kind of internecine conversations that don't move very quickly. The way to move that conversation more quickly is to put the voice of the citizen in the middle of the conversation and then design solutions around that. So our Elder Experience Lab is doing exactly that, and it was a privilege yesterday to talk with you and the group about some of the work we're doing there. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other councilor have any questions or comments? I do have one question. How often have you worked with government entities in developing entrepreneurship programs, and what do you see as government's role in entrepreneurship? Yeah, great question. Well, of course, when I was working directly in state government, it was a very large part of what I did. And it was very clear to me that we're a country that had entrepreneurship at its heart when it was founded. We were all about entrepreneurship and were for a very long time. And then we became more institutionalized and we became kind of an institutional America. People found their value and worth by tying themselves to some kind of institution. And that's not all bad. That created an incredible middle class in our country and an incredible economic prosperity. We live in a time now where we need to get back to our entrepreneurial roots. Number one, I think we have to redefine and broaden the definition of entrepreneur. I meant what I said earlier. Everybody in your community can be an entrepreneur. This iconic entrepreneur that we have in our mind, you know, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, what that iconic caricature does, it scares all of us off from thinking we could ever be an entrepreneur, that we could ever start an entity. We think all entrepreneurial activities are about technology. They're not. And so we need to broaden that definition and create platforms to do that. Government's role, in my view, is a catalyst to that conversation, right, by reinforcing the centrality of entrepreneurship to our economic future, by working with the local community to catalyze the conversation, platforms where more entrepreneurs can go from an idea to something they can try in the real world, right, and partnering with other entities in the community and helping them tie their efforts together into a cohesive network or whole so that we don't have a fragmented approach to do this. I think government has a very important catalytic role to play in this conversation. Very good. Thank you. Anyone else? Eric, are there a couple other guests you'd like to introduce and have them say a couple words? Yes, and before we do that, one of the things that Saul, he didn't really touch on too much, they're doing up there is called the Entrepreneur Experience Lab, and it's a partnership with Babson College up in Massachusetts, which is usually ranked maybe number one university in the country for entrepreneurship. And this lab they're doing as partnership is something that I am very interested in. Maybe at some point in time, if we could have Kentucky be a node on that network, they're doing it around the country. The model for that is fantastic, as a matter of fact, and they create the space, the ecosystem for entrepreneurs to experiment. Just like when you're in chemistry class in school, you experiment with chemicals, and it's safe to do that. So if you put the wrong vinegar and oil together, there's a mix, you learn it and you don't mess up your mother's kitchen. It's like this laboratory space for Kentucky's people to experiment with new ideas and things. So long-term goal as an outcome would be, in my dream, and maybe somehow have Kentucky and BIF some type of real partnership down the road. So I'm just going to say that publicly while we're on TV for Saul. Next, Selena Schmidt is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. I know that Chamber and Lexington and Louisville both actually went up there last summer. So she's come down for Saul because of what she's doing and what Saul is doing around her region, 32 counties as a matter of fact. She's going to speak a little bit about what she's doing, fantastic stuff. And then Andy from Columbus after that. Very good. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much for giving me a few moments to talk with you today. I actually have sort of a unique background. I started some small businesses in Pittsburgh and New York, came back home, worked with some nonprofits in the area on civic engagement and how you build cross-silo programming, and actually most recently spent three years as Chief of Staff for the President of the Pittsburgh City Council. So I very much know your environment and how important your time is today. So thank you very, very much for the opportunity to speak with you. I loved my time in government, and one of the reasons that I loved it so much was the opportunity to convene people around important issues of the day, start looking for different kinds of solutions, but also to be able to bring together groups of people that ordinarily don't come to the table and start fostering that conversation. I also love those impossible challenges that you see. How do you take these micro issues that we just simply can't solve because we're too small and somehow manage to make things happen, create real value for the community that I passionately love? How do we take these huge macro issues that are impacting the people's everyday lives and do something when even in a city the size of Pittsburgh with 325,000 people, we just don't have the resources to be able to do what we need? So when the opportunity to work on something a little bit bigger, bringing together a few different sorts of ideas came around to work with the Power of 32, First thing I thought was, well, heck, 32 counties across four state lines, that's impossible. And then I thought about all the work that we do in council, and I said, well, I do impossible things every day, so that just makes sense that I would do this work. But it became really important because where we sit in our region, our geography, our sort of cultural understanding in our economy really does cross those four state lines. You have a map in front of you and get a chance to see that. But the way that we operate is competitively against each other in little cities and municipalities, against counties, and definitively across those state lines. If you look at the little dark spot that's in the center, that's the city of Pittsburgh. And yet we have cities that are in Ohio and West Virginia that are closer to downtown than the economic regions in Pennsylvania that we work with all the time. That inconvenient right angle of the state line really costs a lot of competition, and we end up fighting against ourselves. And that doesn't just happen economically or with governments, although we certainly, in our region alone, we have more than 2,000 government agencies, if you can count authorities. But it also happens across silos. One of the things that Saul speaks about is how do we manage that? We've got nonprofits that work just for West Virginia. We've got nonprofits that work just for Ohio. We've got nonprofits that work just for the city of Pittsburgh or the surrounds. We've got businesses that take a look at those lines, those ways that divide their business practice. And I'll go here rather than there, rather than looking what could be maximized by the full breadth of opportunity and the resources. So a few leaders in our community from the business, the nonprofit, and the public sector had seen other examples around the world and around the country where things had been done a little differently. They didn't start with planning because planning has a specific outcome. They started with a vision. My favorite example is Torino because it most replicates what we see in western Pennsylvania. The communities around Torino, Italy were completely devastated by the loss of their fiat plan. I mean that was everything. That was their entire economy. In many ways, many of the places in the Midwest feel that same thing. We had a central industry cluster that left, that devolved, that got outpaced by someplace else on the globe. Well, Torino had some options. They could fight amongst themselves, and they did for a while. But a mayor said, what if we did something differently? Brought together 100 leaders from all of those sectors, from all the surrounding towns and municipalities, and brought together a bigger vision of who they were. Now, the combination of that is pretty simple. I mean, we can take a look at the Winter Olympics and say, yes, that's terrific. I don't think we're getting the Winter Olympics in Pittsburgh any time soon. although with all the snow out here, y'all might be eligible if this keeps up. But what it did show is that people could take their individual municipality, their individual identity, and build something larger if they leveraged their possibilities. That's the exact concept behind the power of 32. If we'd done it just in Western Pennsylvania, we would have had those old high school rivalries, and we might have been difficult. We wouldn't have really encapsulated our economic potential. But by broadening it to the full natural and economic region, we have different possibilities. Our board of 71 people is made up of leaders from the business community, the nonprofit community, from the public sector, and from that fourth sector that's also eloquently put, which is that community sector. It needed to be vision put together by all four. Our project's a little bit different because we didn't start with a specific agenda just around economic development, but actually going out to those communities, talking with thousands of people. we had 156 community meetings in four months, one in every single county at minimum across 17,000 square miles. More than 123 volunteer facilitators were trained to run those so that people within their communities were running meetings for their communities. We have thousands and thousands of sticky notes of information and ideas from people throughout the community. And we're now synthesizing those and finding six primary themes that people are concerned about. But what's special about those themes, while they seem like big, broad topics that everybody has concerns about, economy, education, people in communities, is the nuance and the difference about what's important to the people of my region. What matters for the future, what they want is not going to be what worked for Austin, what worked for Indianapolis, what works for Portland, what works for Lexington. It's a unique set of experiences, of histories, and desires for how the people in my region want to live. Starting from that basis, it puts an entirely new nuance on public policy. Now, of course, it's aspirational. This is the largest visioning project ever undertaken across the globe. It's complicated to do in two years. And to start with no premise and just ask people what they wanted, it's been amazing. It's not just, well, it's a tough time, so we want jobs. Folks in my region are saying that they want jobs across a diversity of economic sectors. They're very sophisticated. They don't want one industry to come in and take care of those. And that's even as we're sitting on the brink of a huge economic boon in our region with Marcellus Shale and natural gas exploration. That's not enough for the people in our region. They want a diversified economy. They want jobs that are available across the spectrum. They want their young, educated college students to be able to find work, but they also want to find work for what is in some cases the majority of our workforce, folks in their 50s, early 50s. And how do we make those transitions? Again, that's nuanced public policy. And having sat in your seats, I understand that. It's a different thing to say we want jobs in our community and say, well, the retail jobs are all right, or this sector's jobs are okay. If people are asking for something different, that is a different way that we approach it. What I really want to focus on is what we're on now. We've got this report. We're synthesizing things. We're setting up our task force to create these solutions. We want them to be aspirational but achievable. We want to make sure that we've got the people in the room that are making the right decisions. That means the public sector, but that also means our nonprofit sector. It means our private sector being able to say how can we catalyze this and work as corporate citizens in our community. And it also means running back to where we started with that community sense of purpose. I know that if the community is not behind you, it makes it very difficult to be a leader. Even for the issues that you think are most important. We've got massive infrastructure challenges. Most cities, municipalities do. How do you vote for things to make sure that you can take care of sewer lines, which aren't very sexy, when folks are worried about whether or not they've got a playground in their neighborhood? That's hard. But how much easier is it for you in the public sector to know that thousands of people across the region have actually asked. In one of our six themes, one of the concepts that came up was transportation and infrastructure. Regular folks saying, yeah, it really matters to me about what we're doing with sewer lines. It really matters to me, water quality, and it really matters to me about bridges. I didn't expect that to be one of our top six issues, but it is. What I would suggest to you, as you look ahead, it's easy to plan. It's difficult to vision. It's difficult to bring everybody in the room and say, let's just see what we really can do. Let's talk up. Let's know where we've been, but let's put all of the players in the room at the same time and see what we can generate. Two years is a long time, but it's an awfully short time, too. In the next eight months, you'll be seeing our plans and policies come through. I would welcome you to contribute as part of our larger sense of community and our larger sense of home. Any ideas, thoughts, best practices that you can kick our way. We're open to them. We're excited for them. And then also know what I've had to learn, too, because I drive to that potential all the time, is we've started a snowball on the top of the hill, and it's small. What we want to do is just make sure that we kick it down the hill so that we can really get that momentum going. And anything that we can do, anything that we learn, both things that worked and things that didn't, that we can give back to you here in Lexington, it is our pleasure to be able to bring that to you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Any councilors have any comments or questions? All right. Thank you. Council Member Farmer, did you chime in there? Did you? She talked so fast, I got all of it. Very good. She did a good job. T.J. I've been to you at like 1 o'clock last night. She got in. She came just to be here for everything. And then I know we want to get moving. Andy Sparks. I'm sorry. Oh, go ahead. Okay. Andy Sparks is here from Ohio State. He's a senior at Ohio State University in Columbus. He's also Entrepreneur Club President. They call it something different. What do you call it? Business Builders Club. And then he's also doing some things in the community with the startup already, 13 folks, and then he's doing some more things too. So I want him to talk a little bit about what Columbus is going through, what Columbus is doing, just to give us more perspective on what's happening around the country. Very good. Welcome. Even though you are a Buckeye fan, I assume. There's a lot of them here. Please don't hold it against me. No, we won't. I appreciate you guys giving me the time to talk here today. Had I known I'd be speaking in front of a city council, I wouldn't have worn jeans. Maybe something a little bit more appropriate, so I apologize. I wanted to talk on a couple different points. Eric mentioned the point of what Columbus is going through right now, in addition to I also kind of want to touch on how to maybe capture the energy of Generation Y. So on the first point, Columbus, there's a lot of talk in that city of how do we stop the flight of youth from that city. There's a lot of brilliant students coming out of the great universities, just like you guys have here, that like to go move to Austin, Denver, Boston. You could probably name them all. I'm sure that you're all aware of them as well. Students love to move to those cities. How do you keep them in your city? So Columbus has come up with a really unique collaboration between a lot of different interests, between the technology entrepreneur interests, between the city of Columbus, between professors, between the universities to kind of get together in a very informal way. And just like a lot of these same conversations are happening about how do we catalyze economic growth? How do we keep young people here in the city? All the same questions. But they're happening in a lot of different places. One of the really great places in Columbus is called Tech Strategy. There's an individual that has really taken it upon himself in Columbus to organize the technology community in Columbus. And so once a quarter there's a meeting called Tech Strategy. All the Columbus CEOs and CIOs of technology companies get together in a room and drink beer and talk. They get in front of each other. They talk about this literally what happens. I'm fortunate enough to have been invited as the leader in the Business Builders Club at Ohio State. I go there every quarter, and there's actually several members of the city council come in and talk about and ask how they can get involved. From what I've seen, they get a lot of really great feedback. So you're not the only city having these conversations, and I think that's really exciting to see that going on somewhere else. And on the second topic, and I know that you guys are probably short on time here, and I want to be conscious of that, the second topic of Generation Y. I hear a lot of people say that Generation Y is this lazy generation, and maybe some of us are, but there's another end of the spectrum that is exactly the opposite. We've got a 23-year-old buddy that just started a vodka distillery. I have a it's all about alcohol when you're young I guess I have another good friend that's publishing a book she's 24 I have a buddy that just moved to Brazil who's 24 he's starting a holding company for a plastic injection molding company there's a lot of young people that are really excited a lot of energy Mark Zuckerberg 26 years old 50 billion dollar company like you said entrepreneurship is not just about technology, but there's a lot of energy from Generation Y, and we want to get involved. And so recently, today I met Wes Brooks, who's the new president of the Entrepreneurship Club at the University of Kentucky. And I think that he'd be someone that would be really excellent to get involved in the conversation on what he can do. I think in government, a lot of times, you don't necessarily want to start a new program, so how can you get someone to do it for you? And I think Wes Brooks and all the students at the University of Kentucky Here's someone that can start doing these things for the city. The Business Builders Club at Ohio State, the entrepreneurship organization, we have a fundraised budget that we students alone fundraise over $40,000 a year. And we put, I think, close to $14,000 of that into students' businesses every single year. And a number of those have actually come out and gone on to be productive, employing businesses. And that's just in the past 10 years. So there's a lot that students can do, and any way that you can encourage that, I highly recommend. And thank you so much for your time. Andy, thank you for coming. Council members, any comments or questions? Very good. Thank you so much. That's about it from our end. Just a little more context. We had Mayor Fisher, who actually just found out about Saul coming Saturday morning, totally rearranged his schedule. So we met with him at 7 a.m. this morning until about 9.30 with John L. Brown III and about 20 or I think 25 different Louisville entrepreneurs and across all different spectrums, their chamber, their private business sector, their social innovation sector and everything. So the Louisville folks are extremely excited about it. It was great. Last night, Deborah Hensley came to our event last night. Social innovator was there. We had, before that, Robin Pease at U.K. had the aging and community, which I know is a big part of Lexington's thing. And so I just want to thank Saul on this massively watched TV program. Thank you for coming to Lexington. And I'm glad that Bob actually has a good friend who's a Providence's Chamber of Commerce director, and so they have a connection with Saul there too. So that's good that they're connecting, and I think that's about it. And Chad Eames is the state government right there, any kind of development cabinet. He came last night. I'm glad. Thank you, Chad. So I guess that's it. Very good, Eric. Thank you so much. And on behalf of all the council, thank you all our guests. We appreciate you taking time to come and talk with us. Okay, committee members, next on our agenda we have, just for information only, some fresh start initiatives from Mayor Gray. Obviously, as he's come to council one by one, we can place them in the committee or discuss them during the CAL meeting. So those are just for information only, just to make sure everyone's aware of those issues. And then last on our agenda today is any items referred to committee. Are there any changes we need to make to that list? Anybody have any changes? All right. Do I hear a motion to adjourn? Second. All right. All in favor say aye. Aye. We're adjourned. Thank you all.