Juneau, Alaska (KINY) – The Juneau Economic Development Council made its pitch for $400,000 in city funding during the Assembly Finance Meeting on Wednesday.
The request was approved by unanimous consent.
JEDC Executive Director Brian Holst laid out five key areas the council is working on. He says the number one topic is revitalization.
“We have particular interest in the Auk Kwan district,” Holst said. “There’s an economic argument for strong downtowns. And you’ll see that in our partnerships with the Downtown Business Association in particular, we work very closely with them, but also with we have partnerships with others. Some work related to our great Capital City is close coordination with the Alaska Committee, they meet monthly in the offices of JEDC. We met this morning. We just completed a satisfaction survey of legislators … We will follow up and we’ll have results in June. An exciting initiative is that we have begun a new group called the Southeast Regional Elder Care Coalition, and that is addressing some of our workforce needs for our population.”
According to Holst, a second area of focus is to strengthen key regional industries.
“We need to remember that to grow an economy we need to bring in money from outside,” Holst said. “It’s helpful to have money circulating in our economy, but if we want to grow the economy, money needs to come from tourism, tourists need to come with their dollars in their pocket and spend those in Juneau. We need to have fish. We send that fish out, bring money in, and mining, et cetera. A couple of key areas that we’re really excited about is our 12 years of work with the Visitor Product Cluster Working Group. We’re excited about a partnership with the Forest Service.”
Holst added that another area of focus is to develop talent, saying, “Economies are about people. I constantly want to say that and remind people that the purpose of economic development is to support the people in our community. And having the right talent is critically important. We address that in several ways. One of them is through our statewide robotics activity, STEM activities, and K through 12. It was successful during COVID.”
JEDC has also identified additional work in the area of promoting entrepreneurship.
“Currently we have a loan portfolio,” Holst added. “We’ve been involved in ‘angel investing.’ We’re going to host an angel conference here next year, in the CBJ, formally through the mayor’s office to the National League of Cities.”
A fifth area of work is to deliver economic development services, with Holst saying, “We’ve had a busy two years, and we managed $100 million last year. We’re managing $90 million this year. So over $200 million in the past two years … I’m pleased that we’ve recovered $2.4 million, that you’ve already gotten back in your coffers. The businesses have been responsible about trying to get that money back, and we’ve worked hard to recover it.”