 Good evening. This is What's Going On. I'm John Lee. Our topic this evening is economic development. Our guest is the chief innovation officer for the city of Davis, Rob White. Rob, I want to thank you for being on our show. Thank you, John. Oh, for sure. You know, economic development is a dirty word in Davis. There are people that will stop anything if you tell them that it leads to economic development because that means it leads to growth. That has been the debate within the city of Davis pretty much since mid-70s. I think the debate kind of clarified in 1966 when University Mall was put in and that was the first structure that was commercial that was outside of the city of Davis. I'm sorry, outside of the downtown. And that's the way they called it. It was outside of the city of Davis. I mean, nobody went all the way out to University Mall at that point. But that was when I was a freshman. That was 1966. So when Marketplace was built, the developer, Karen Fox, actually paid the downtown business association $8 million for the right to build Marketplace. That's how much the downtown has defined what we call economic development in Davis. But at this point, we have, what, 8, 10 neighborhood shopping centers. We have a downtown that's known for being artsy. We have about half of the number of jobs per house compared to the rest of the state of California. We have about half the sales tax revenue per capita compared to the state of California. And about half the people in this city of Davis live in houses that have a government check, either Social Security or retirement, or more likely the state or the University of California. All those people get government checks. Where do you think that money comes from? We need to talk about the private sector in Davis. I'm through with my sermon. The rest of the show is about Rob White. Rob is a very gifted person. We're very lucky to have him. And so what I'm going to do is have him talk a little about what his job is and what it means. Then I'm going to have him talk about his background. Then we're going to get into what economic development in Davis would be in the near future and down the road. So Rob, thanks for being here. Why don't you start out just by talking about the chief innovation officer of the city of Davis, what that means. And then we'll get into how you got here and then where you want to go. Sure. That's easy. So chief innovation officer is a newer title in municipal government. It's been around in the business sector for probably a better part of a decade. But municipalities and other local governments have really just begun to use this as an idea. What it is is it's obviously an executive level officer or staff who works typically directly with the mayor or the city manager in really trying to reframe the discussion around efficiencies, around technology. And in Davis specifically economic development because in Davis economic development and technology I think are mixed and married in ways that we'll get into later but I think in inextricable ways. Chief innovation officer probably is best thought of for Davis as somebody who it's my job to call out opportunities. Some people would call disruptive. But I think more importantly it's an individual whose job is to really put new ideas on the table and ask the questions of why not or why can't we instead of let's just or let's do it the way we've always done it. Sometimes that leads obviously to questions you don't want answered. But I think more importantly what we've seen at least in the time that I've been here in Davis it's led us to examining things that we otherwise probably didn't want to talk about yet. Things like development, things like growth. And we've come to I think an understanding at least somewhat in a very brief period of time that those aren't necessarily incompatible with what Davis has been or what Davis wants to be. And again we can talk more about that towards the latter part of the show. To me Chief Innovation Officer was an opportunity to really create a new image of city staff, city government, service. In the state of California right now if I'm not mistaken there's now five of us across the state. First was in San Francisco then I believe there was one in Riverside, San Leandro myself and I believe there's another one down in the San Diego area now. And you can see all of that information by the way on the govtech.com website. There's a whole thing about Chief Innovation Officers across the U.S. That idea I think was actually born out of some concepts that came from the federal government ironically. When Obama came into office he had a very strong bend towards technology. It was one of the ways he got elected. It's one of the ways he did fundraising. And there was this realization that the federal government as much as it is a giant bureaucracy was also going to have to think differently. Partly through necessity. We were in the midst of a horrible economic downturn. And partly because that's part of renewal. Thinking differently and putting two innovation ideas together and coming up with yet a third. That's really the essence of I think much of the American dream these days. If you look at one of our most celebrated areas of innovation. Silicon Valley. It's really because of the mixing of ideas. So for government the opportunity to change the way we think to look at the problem differently. That was the reason for calling out a Chief Innovation Officer for Davis. The outgrowth from that. The outcome I should say that's really beneficial is it's new. It's different. It's gained positive attention for Davis. Both at the staff and the government level but also as a community. Regionally the title whenever I hand out my business card people go what is that? Tell me more. Typically if I was working as just an economic development person or even a high level ranking member of the city manager's office people would see my card as an assistant city manager and executive of some kind and they would say oh I know what that does. I don't need to talk to you. It's given us a pathway to further discussion. So that's an important factor goes back to the idea that I often talk about and I'm paraphrasing but Peter Drucker in a lot of his work it really comes down to you're either branding or dying. I think Davis needs to brand because dying is not the idea that we want to push forward. We are a community that has vital resources. We are a community that has opportunity like many don't. Let's talk about those. Let's talk about the positives. We're good at talking about negatives. Let's talk about some of the successes and again we'll go over more of those I think as well but that's the reason for the chief innovation officer concept and what it's done also inside City Hall and I don't want to leave without saying this. It's given the staff a different look at what it is that we as staff members can be as part of the solution. One of the conversations I had with the mid managers we have a mid manager retreat we do on a quarterly basis now and so there's about 50 people in the room across the staff of the city public works and engineering as well as community development and the idea was to tell them about economic development but what I did first was I talked about how everybody in the room was important to the idea of economic development. Everybody has a hand in that because they all help create quality of life. They all help attract businesses through their own efforts. They all have control over when revenue comes into the door because if a permit hits the desk and we draw that permit out especially on things that are much more wrote in manner. We're delaying revenue. We're not collecting the check that they want to give us. So recognizing and being able to tell exactly being able to tell everybody here's the opportunity and how you are part of that process. I think that's a powerful message we staff, we the city, we the community in some ways we control our destiny. Some of it happens to us but some of it happens because of us and I think that's the true idea of this innovation officer concept. Well as you talk we'll get a better idea of what you mean by how you're acting to be the innovation officer. We poached Rob White. He was a chief innovation officer in Livermore and I don't know how much you know about Livermore but it's got this lab that's next to it that's affiliated with University of California at Berkeley and so the Lawrence Livermore Lab, UC Berkeley and Livermore, the city created an innovation group and Rob was the one that put that together and we stole him. So he already knows how to do what it is that he's going to talk about. So why don't you talk about how you grew up and what your parents did and how you got here. Sure. So childhood was a good childhood. You know a lot of people they have a story that was landmark for them and how they changed in certain ways. I don't have that story unfortunately I had a great childhood. Two parents they just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. My dad literally just turned 70 this last weekend we as kids I'm one of three. I'm the middle child. I have an older brother and a younger sister. We're spread across the decade. My brother's four years older. My sister's a little over six years younger. We grew up in the Inland Empire of Southern California. I was born in Ontario then in high school lived in upland. When I moved away and went to college I went to Chico State and became a geologist. My parents stayed in that house and they were in that house up until about three years ago when they moved to Brentwood, California the Brentwood in the East Bay not the one in LA and they've just been having a ball there since. Childhood for me was a lot of free range activity. That was a time in American history where kids played on the street. We didn't have video games. I can remember getting my first video game console but I was already 12 so it wasn't one of those things that had the same impact it does on kids today. I can remember getting our first computer or an Apple 2e that my dad salvaged from work but that again was until I was 11 so it didn't have again the same impact in my life that my kids have grown up with. But what really had an impact on my creativity was the type of play that we did then which rife with imagination. Star Wars came out in 1977 it was the first time that movie magic had been done in that way for all of us. For all of us. I was seven when it came out and I was a big collector of Star Wars figurines and stuff. Legos were huge so you get to put things together take them apart put them back together and I had a brother who was just old enough that he was somewhat of a mentor but he was young enough that he was also a playmate and so it wound up being for me at least a childhood rife with creativity, imagination opportunities to roam freely around the neighborhood we grew up in that area of LA there were large wash gullies where you could go and you could ride your bike for miles literally and so there was a lot of creativity that went into my childhood. Technically I wasn't extremely motivated in high school. I got okay grades wasn't motivated to really go to college my family on either side was not previously an education family. I'm the first in as far as we can tell six or seven generations to go to college and although my sisters followed suit and my kids are heading that direction got a kid in Chico now the reality is I wasn't based in an educational system or a family that that was their motivation hard working people but that just the education piece was missing so when I got to Chico and I went as a broadcast journalism major my ideas of what a college experience were and what I really experienced were vastly different I'd seen on TV or in the movies what a college experience was supposed to look like when I got there what it was for me was a complete expansion of my understanding of the universe the world I went from broadcast journalism which I started out with a year and a half in I took a geology class because I wanted to avoid completely science and math and get through and just do liberal arts essentially fell in love with geology absolutely head over heels changed my major I can I can still remember the call my fourth semester in I'm going to be a geologist what do you do with that you know that then led me into this just love just absolute love of science and technology and how things work at the atomic as well as the macro and the universe level and I've had a hunger for it ever since my wife makes fun of me because half of our DVR and maybe more than that just full of science shows my favorite new one is cosmos that's come back and so for me it's a driver to really understand how things work how they fit together and more importantly how can you take two things that shouldn't work together and look at them in a whole system goes to a lot of what you've talked about in the past of this whole systems theory and really I believe one of the things going back to the government end of my life one of the things they believe that government is hungry for is somebody who can think in systems it's easy to think in slices a lot of departments become parochial because of that I'm an expert at planning or I'm an expert in engineering I'm an expert at finances but what if you had somebody that could cross all those boundaries I'm going to interrupt and say I mean it's like you just threw a pitch to Bynes and said you got to take it hit a home run so applied general systems theory I'm just going to make the historic switcher the person that really did the most to change the world about general systems theory is Robert McNamara he learned ppbs program planning and budgeting systems when he was at Ford there was the people at Ford in the private sector the people that did the Mustang that created they did the Edsel too but it was it was in that transition period that they gained an understanding of the synthesis of the technology the social systems the information and the ideas that is at the heart of trying to understand what general systems theory means and McNamara figured that out enough that he imposed it in the Department of Defense and within about six months it was in education it was in health education and welfare and as soon as it got to education then everybody figured out how to explain it within government jargon so now it's used as a tool to cover your on your job so that's all I'll say about that applied the Bible system model is the alternative and I'm not going there tonight this is his show so thank you for the interruption you're just about to graduate from college so I'm just about ready to graduate from from Chico I've done it in four years I crammed what really is a four year program for geology into two and a half and I'm getting out and I'm absolutely thrilled but I'm getting out at what at that time was yet another bad job market in 1991 so one of the humbling moments you get in life is sending out resumes and getting a lot of no's and I still can remember the day I sent out well over 250 job applications across the western US I wanted to stay in California I preferably wanted to stay in northern California I loved it I'd fallen in love with it with Chico I loved the fact that you could actually drive through farm towns and get to a city that wasn't surrounded by city after city after city which as a LA person you know you can drive from downtown LA out to almost Palm Springs and never leave the metropolis so this was unique and new and I liked that and I wanted to be local in May I graduated in September I wound up getting my first job opportunity and it was with a private corporation in environmental engineering company at that time it was called PRC EMI and they changed and became part of Tetra Tech which is a big engineering firm somewhere about 1995 what was great about getting into that company to go to your point was the company was completely different in the way that they operated their theories their ideas of management the way that they operated in a flat structure where you could literally pick up the phone and access the president of the company even though there was 700 people in the corporation was a totally different mindset than anything I'd ever seen or known now I was early in my career and I was spoiled unfortunately because as I moved through the rest of my career I realized this is not the nor but it really did paint my viewpoint of how the world works what it did too is it also gave me the understanding of you can do most of what you put your mind to if you choose to you really can see a path forward if you want to and that a lot of people when they get stuck they get stuck because they don't want to see what's around the corner or they don't want to talk to somebody get advice on how to go there because it may be fearful it might be change it may threaten their job but if you do that the future really in a way takes care of itself in most cases and in fact what I think I found in my career early on was that ability to accept change that ability to accept readily that there were others around me that could help direct my path forward if I wanted to allow that to happen it really did cement who I've become today this curiosity thinker this creative seeker this disrupter as some would say you know I'm a change agent in my job even today starts all the way back then after about a decade with Tetra Tech I wound up getting a job with a company called Concurrent Technologies Corporation or CTC we've talked previously that was a corporation headquarters out of Johnstown, Pennsylvania and it was created because an old steel town had gone bust and Congressman Murtha had come in and said hey we can reform this infrastructure we can start to do government contracts and testing utilizing the equipment that's already here and more importantly we can start to chart a pathway forward of how do you take something that's now gone defunct and move it to something that's still usable and revitalize so the beginnings in my world of redevelopment of this idea of change and moving something that looks static today and possibly derelict to something that's vital but most importantly I really got a chance to tear back the curtain on how Washington DC and truly congressional effort can reform and change the way something on the ground is happening so I want to ask a controversial question which I do Murtha what's your opinion of it you have to obviously explain who he was so when I met him he was already well into his congressional career and so much of his work in that area of Pennsylvania had already been done he had strong ties to Carnegie Mellon he had extremely deep academic ties so the experience I had with him the person I got to know was somebody that really had started to at least in my mind invigorate this idea for me of academics and private sector didn't need to be separate they could actually interact in ways to find new ideas and find new opportunities department of defense scam artist who's got more money into his district than any other congressman so is he a strategic thinker is he somebody that he inspired you he really did inspire me I get that and I don't think it's irony I think it's the same person I'm going to tell you a story in a minute what you're saying is absolutely correct there are many that look at him and say how did you in the words of others siphon off that much federal money earmarks into a place that it's Johnstown Pennsylvania for God's sakes and this is just one of 20 or 30 places in his district that he did yes there were many many places that he wound up being that successful we'll use those words but again I look at the personal interaction for me what he did was he inspired me to understand policy at not just a federal but at all levels and how that impacts futures of again what was a derelict location it was a place that Johnstown had literally been flooded it was obliterated by the bust of the steel cycle that had moved much of it out of Pennsylvania at that time and the industrial revolution had literally left something in the past to reform it to rethink it reshape it to see the way of academia and private sector working together and then the twist of the irony here is he did help set up the CTC system the concurrent technologies but he did it by making them a non-profit so I often refer to them as a baby Battelle so Battelle Labs out of Ohio which now obviously is doing many things across the world this would I would say a mini version of that and what I was exposed to is as you mentioned many contracts with the DOD more importantly many contracts with the Department of Energy and for me later that wound up having a really good impact because when I started working in Livermore I had a base of three years of experience in working with energy and I'm still young at this point I'm going to a little bit about 33, 34 time out how old are you now? I'm 45 I was younger let's put it that way just perspective go ahead well and so I thought at that time in my career you know around the 32, 33 time frame that I knew a lot that I had over a decade of experience and I was feeling very good about the work that I'd done I would become a professional geologist and I was a registered environmental assessor for the state of California I'd gotten some accolades I wound up working with a group of people for about 10, 12 months on a process of a big project up in Hanford up at the nuclear reservation in Washington the people I was working with were double my age and their list of pedigrees made mine look like it was the first sentence on a 50 page resume I was well outstripped I was a flunky I was a gopher I learned amazing amounts of things these are some of the folks that actually helped to set up parts of the Department of Energy in the early years what was outstanding is to see that some of what they'd helped create they were now helping to solve some of the problems that it had created as well the project we were working on was a classification a vitrification project for nuclear waste the long word you said in there I didn't hear right vitrification and what does that mean so making something into glass that's what that means okay and so basically they would take waste and they would cause sure so they lock it inside the inside the glass you got it and the intent and some of it is now happening the intent was to inert it and then take it down and store it in Yucca Mountain for millennia 25,000 years right and so it was an interesting project and the piece that I was working on was the early stage of doing the assessment work understanding the engineering behind it and again I'm a flunky I get to not only meet amazing people at a very high level across the world but then I'm winding up preparing presentations and helping to present to at that time Secretary Richardson for the Department of Energy so at my level my age I'm getting to meet people that you never get to meet especially in the industry that I've chosen as a geologist so I'm over the moon and I'm experiencing great things again what it cements for me is this opportunity to understand and change my career I'm not a traditional geologist anymore I'm working on something that's in engineering see things in a broad spectrum this systems approach most importantly it's this opportunity to really start to think strategically at multiple levels federal, state and local and it really has given me tools, knowledge to be able to do some of what I do now even here in Davis rolling forward from that I'm getting about three years and then I wind up getting a job with the County of Sacramento I wanted to stay more local I was still living in Sacramento but flying all over the place bad for family life so I looked at a job and I wound up getting a job as the Deputy Director of Economic Development for the County of Sacramento one of my job duties was also to be the manager of a group called the Business Environmental Resource Center it was a group that was started by a number of the different regulatory agencies to help businesses understand compliance the idea there was if you regulate you better give them an ombuds person to be able to help them also understand because a lot of regulation isn't written exactly and a lot of regulation as you know isn't written in parlance that most business can understand so we became translational how do you understand this to go to this the reason I highlight that is one of the things I did while I was there was I wanted to recognize businesses that were moving towards sustainability I started the Sacramento Sustainable Business Program the intent there was unlike the green business program out of the Bay Area or other parts of the state where you had to meet criteria that were in four areas and there were long lists and it was very hard for a business to achieve anything and it became I think in some ways dissuading for people to do it counterproductive I said instead if somebody wants to change out their light bulbs and become more energy efficient let's let them and let's recognize that if they want to do water conservation let's let them and recognize them so we came up with five categories all of which had multiple different things you could do and if you achieved a certain amount of them in any one category you know like a brownie badge or a Boy Scout badge you would get the badge there are a couple businesses here in Davis that have that including Bernardo's and it encouraging to see that you know more businesses are constantly looking this direction I think in the future this program probably broadens out to become much more of a regional effort but the the Sac County folks now are struggling as far as how they're going to fund it forward so we'll see where that goes but it it met it met the needs at the time the other thing that I got out of the county was a recognition that just because you're good at a job doesn't mean you're going to get the next job after applying for several different directorial jobs in the county the county executive pulled me aside and he said to me you know Rob you're amazing you're doing great things I appreciate it all here you're never going to get another job up from where you are and at first I scratched my head and didn't understand that and I recognized after some additional counseling by the county executive that I came in at a level that really locked me as far as the vision of what people saw from me and that I needed to go someplace else in order to do something bigger more and by doing that I actually got to do two things one I got to tell a new story someplace else and in many ways take a lot of what I had learned and reapply it in new ways so it was a learning opportunity the other is is that smaller locations and that was a county and he suggested I go to a city smaller locations you have more ability to I think impact directly the needs on the ground so that got me to Livermore as you've mentioned already a couple different things in Livermore I was the CEO of the innovation hub known as IGATE we helped start that up by myself and a co-founder out of Sandia National Labs and another individual out of Lawrence Livermore National Labs and we used to joke that with the labs there it was a lot like having a university without the kids the knowledge was the same it was leaking out all over the community there were many people retiring from the lab and staying in Livermore or the Tri Valley but you didn't have the energy that the students provide good and bad yes but I missed that and I wanted that piece at the same time I was still progressing forward in my academic career I just finished while I was at the county of masters in planning and development for USC and I knew I wanted to do more so I was searching around for a new doctoral program and I wound up towards the latter half of my Livermore time getting into a doctoral program for USC which I'm just now finishing the dissertation phase for and ironically living my own experiment here my doctoral thesis is on the impact of local economic development on innovation ecosystems so I'm a practitioner researcher in many ways the concepts in Livermore were not that difficult which was you have a major institution of knowledge and learning that's throwing out innovation locally and broadly it's interacting and connected to other places as you mentioned already UC Berkeley Davis other institutions of learning and research and what could we do with that locally to help build an ecosystem that truly created more innovation so that was one of the reasons for the innovation hub it was a state of California call for for efforts and ideas and we won and what it grew into was a partnership across 40 different partners in multiple different sectors so sectors of government at all levels sectors of business sectors of finance and then most importantly research in academia we helped to broaden the labs presence not only in the East Bay but broadly into the Bay Area they were the best kept secret sitting out in Livermore for a long long time people knew who they were or what they were but they didn't know what they did or why they did it they didn't really know what the mission was and everybody assumed that it was only around weapons and when the people realized that weapons only made up about 20% of the total research budget and realized that they were literally working on things that could and do change the future that became a little eye opening what it did for me again was it reinforced this opportunity of mixing of sectors change opportunities come from where two ideas collide that otherwise don't meet the basics of innovation in my mind at least are taking something that might come from a business sector and taking something that's from the academic world and bringing those together in meaningful ways so being able to have Davis here interacting with the university being able to have Livermore there interacting with the labs and then progress forward in regional leadership was a valuable and important job this is a semantic distinction that I just I like to say there's an electronic fence between the city and the campus it's outside it's safer inside but just to make the semantic distinction between the city and community of Davis and the university California Davis people have a tendency to go Davis and you just did it where I was confused on whether you met the campus or the city so I'm just as you know just as you know that's just a semantic thing that's a bad habit that we all get into when it's just a chicken stocking so I would actually propose that I actually mean what I said in that I mean it all I mean the university and the community because in my mind the world that I sit from it is inextricably limited I'm not disputing that at all so I would say and this is where we go to part of changing vernacular because you're right semantics are important and it is important for distinction I would like to propose that a couple of different things happen in Davis over the next coming months and years one we don't have the distinction that there is in a permeable barrier not the impermeable fence that we're moving back and forth now I realize these are administratively difficult things to do the reason I believe this is possible once I started working with Lawrence Livermore which again I want to remind everybody is a weapons lab this is one of the highest levels of security you get in the national lab security part of this I'm literally you are going through pain of death to get inside the fence I got to level 2 I couldn't do level 1 I understand the difference and we used to joke on the outside in the city is that you know we're breaking down guns guards and gates so you can see that you know that's the mentality by the time I left Livermore there I'd become a permeable back and forth dialogue now you couldn't just walk on the laboratories I don't want to give that impression but we had gotten to a place where they were actually moving fences back they were opening up what they were calling at that point open campus research space they're in the process now of building non-secure research buildings where their people can do research without site entities they've established two buildings already in that space and they were working forward their weapons mission in helping to help the local universities but more broadly international and national universities and then the most important piece business partners coming and locating at those labs people like Cisco Google Intel working with their high performance computing working with their the NIF the national ignition facility which is trying to achieve clean power and ironically there's an outgrowth of that clean power they're actually solving medical issues they're identifying other outgrowths that include new ways to deliver energy that have nothing to do with fusion power the interesting thing by the time I left Livermore so about six years we had gotten to the point where that kind of give and take that happened and I think it will go farther as time goes on couple things that drove that though people that we had the right people in the right places so you know everybody talks about Collins with the right people on the bus in the right seats we had gotten the right people in the right positions to have the dialogue the second thing and this is where I think the barriers often lie trust we had developed a relationship of trust that took time that allowed the city of Livermore to speak on behalf of the labs to the Congressional about things that were important to the region the labs were speaking in positive ways about their city partners and moving economic development forward and I'll give you one proof point as to why I know this was successful for the first time anywhere in the Lawrence Livermore system and more importantly I think even the broader lab system they had designated a director of economic development which was a number two report directly to the director of the lab with the intent of doing the things we've been talking about tech transfer economic development in the sense of community partners and most importantly creating this brand that would attract new investment attract new corporations to come and locate so going clear back to our Mertha conversation what Mertha did in Pennsylvania was to create a brand which allowed him to dump money and redirect funds out of the federal budget in the earmarks but it attracted other investments and so it was one of those if you build it they will come kind of scenarios those don't always work I'm not suggesting we put up a big structure about something and hope it gets filled but the critical mass that got created there was what was important the critical mass in Livermore by the time I left Livermore we had had companies moving out of the South Bay and out of the other parts of the East Bay we had over a thousand jobs either created or moved into Livermore in about a decade that investment by those companies in equipment and efforts were equaled well into half a billion dollars I mean hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment and investment that's valuable and important because that's the economic development we're talking about here that's what we want to see we want to see these corporations that are investing in our city of Davis but are our Davis community that's campus and the city and truly I will say the Davis area I don't want to say region but the Davis area because we have companies that have moved into our sphere of being close by us that aren't technically in the city H.M. Close great example they took over the Campbell soup factory that's Davis for all intents and purposes even though it's truly Yolo County all of their workers are either living or interacting with Davis they're coming downtown for lunch this is their community even though technically just outside of it what we did in Livermore and what I learned through my time and doing these different so private sector NGO government is that if you can cut across all those barriers and you can knock down some of the walls some of the communication lines if you can create trust you can move the ball forward in very meaningful ways the other thing I think that builds the trust though and I want to make sure that I put this out there we have to start thinking differently about ourselves if I'm constantly suspicious of people's actions I won't ever be able to trust them if I instead look for proof points as to why they're telling me the truth and doing the work and they're following through then I should have no choice but to trust those activities what we do I think sometimes is we get to the point of we should be getting to trust and we continue to say but not yet a little more a little farther and that's okay but what happens is we don't get that energy of collaboration of partnership we're not working and linking in the ways that we should and I'm not saying that we should just say all bad actors are good people that's not the point but there are a lot of people that are just regular actors that may have accidentally said something that we didn't like but they're not really actively trying to work against us pull them in add them to the mix similar message to as I mentioned that I was delivering to the mid managers we're all part of this if you have a couple of voices that are talking negatively about Davis that's more damaging than a thousand positive voices the region's watching we've seen the region hear us we ourselves have told a lot of stories about ourselves that we don't necessarily want to share with everybody but we've done that we've let people know that we're not doing we're not open for business we're not interested in growth we only want to do certain elements we vote on targets okay that's fine we've made those choices but we should also talk about all the positive things happening behind that those are some things that we don't necessarily love about ourselves you know we don't love that we have to vote on a target but it's something we've chosen to do but at the same time what about the 30 things we did correct what about the 30 things that the region hasn't heard about that we should be talking about that were big wins and I can talk about those if you like we probably better I saw that you wanted to say something so well just this is when Joe Cerno was mayor so that this is 20 years ago we said every time I think about economic development in Sacramento and I get concerned you were working there then I just think about Davis and then I feel Sacramento's doing just fine well you know that's because Davis has such a bad reputation in Sacramento but I sort of think that B has a they have a mixed feeling about Davis half of the things they write about Davis are really wonderful because they're really incredible unique things but the other half are things that I think they go out of way and sometimes they misrepresent us so you know we do more pre-process than most cities do in their process sure and that creates a whole culture what some staff call the Davis banking machine so talk about some of your ideas about what to do in Davis so let me give you a couple of proof points as to why Davis is doing things that are exciting we should talk about them okay I'm bored you're gonna like this actually how many corporations in Sacramento in the last decade had a $500 million infusion investment I don't know I don't know either but I can tell you right now that's a big number $500 million is a big number right yes I don't know what the total universe of Sacramento is but I can tell you two of those happened here we had Bayer infused into ag request we had FMC infused into shilling half a billion dollars each that's a billion dollars of on the ground real investment into corporations that were here in Davis I would suspect that there might have been three of those or four of those across the region in the last 10 years another question you should owe the answer to this how many commercial public offerings happened in the last eight years one where Davis Pam Marone Pam Marone on her third company by the way Pam Marone who said you know what it's not just good enough to have pest control it's not just good enough to be green and sustainable we should actually use naturally occurring substances and microbes to control these things in ways that are beneficial to ourselves and she's gone about with biologics literally recharging ag tech and how ag tech works and we know that she's having success because what's happening other companies are now coming Bioconsortia just got a $15 million infusion and said where should we put down our roots this is a New Zealand company deciding to headquarter in Davis HM Close HM Close a French company has decided to move almost everybody out of Modesto a couple hundred people and move them into the Davis area and then on top of that they said you know we should grow as well they bought the old Campbell's soup research lab they're doing work down there they've moved into part of the facility that's just behind PG&E's corporate offices over there off Cousteau they're looking for more space they're already outgrowing what they've already moving into literally still moving into already outgrowing it Agrinos a Norwegian company that is looking around how do we come in they're taking over space that's being vacated by another company because that company's moving up we're seeing constantly good news happening now you think okay well that's a lot of news those last three things I talked about have all happened in the month of April so what do you think will happen in May I'm going to suspect more of the same what will happen in June I'm hopeful double the important thing for us to recognize here is that Davis is literally finally coming into its own it's been for the longest time about agriculture sustainability strong engineering engineering three years ago Maurice Ake DTL at the time came out and said hey we're looking around we're trying to figure out a place Adam Hansel put down the first building out there off second then he said hey I want to do manufacturing big contest looked all around the US was talking to Chicago and other places stuck it here and by the way they're not done expanding their manufacturing lines they're only working at about 60% total capacity that's hundreds of jobs in that one building one building that most people look at and say I don't know what goes on in there one of the cleanest clean rooms anywhere in the state of California probably even the western US you can literally eat off the floor I kid not you could eat off the floor they don't want you to make the floor dirty some of the some of the most amazing robotics literally millions of dollars of robotics that are going on in their high tech robotics stuff that you have seen on movies in the future happening right here in Davis who knows about this advanced manufacturing right under our noses I know that this is important and exciting and more importantly unique because I'm a board member on a group called the California Network for Manufacturing Innovation it's now the 16th IHUB in the system of the state IHUB's it's a statewide IHUB it's the only one like that they are constantly looking around for success in manufacturing especially advanced manufacturing something that's literally truly moving the world forward we have two examples of advanced manufacturing happening here in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year category Shilling and Morisaki we don't talk about them like that two sitting right down the street other exciting examples of growth gold standard diagnostics is looking around they're trying to grow this is literally medical device that could literally change the way medical testing is done not just in America but across the world where you can take a single sample and test for a variety of different things instead of a single sample for individual diseases think about the cost savings that go on when you can take single samples and do multiple tests in Africa or the Amazon or even in rural America or more importantly inner cities what kind of clinic changes would happen when we're talking about medical care that's going sky high when you can drive cost into single units where you're having multiple things collapsed these are the things that are happening here in the city of Davis what I think I really want to express as an important point here is many of these things happen because of the university but not all of them are technologies coming out of the university they're coming to work with the researchers not necessarily researchers taking technology out some of that happens we have Davis Roots locally which is a child's institute for entrepreneurialism over at UC Davis got together Andy Harganon and Anthony Costello got together with the city took a city building and have created this incubator and accelerator for new starts new companies and they've had some good success they're on their third class being inducted right now Barobo which is an educational robotics system was one of the things that came out of there over at the campus and the engineering department Lavernia has now two different startup labs one for regular startup companies that are researchers from the university now one that's all about students just opened its doors and so it's a place for student entrepreneurs to go and talk to each other get mentorship etc very forward thinking this is things that we see happening at some of our partner UCs that should have been happening here and are now happening here the tech transfer process is getting better we've got a number of people that are on that job trying to figure out how to go through and make that system work more efficiently well what's the best way to make sure that a system moves rapidly into efficiencies you have external partners helping to push the ball along one of the reasons I'm here is to work with the university to identify opportunities and then be that voice from the outside that is not part of the administration saying what about this or what about that what about UC Irvine what about UC San Diego what about UC Berkeley can we do it like them more importantly what about the universities that are on here they have a large amount of partners that come out to the university from around the world Vaganagan, Midwest etc what about some of those university partners putting up little labs here putting up research stations more importantly what if they started to offer auxiliary courses that were complimentary to things the university wasn't teaching new engineering classes etc there are a ton of new opportunities if we think differently the university has to think within a certain box that's the box that they've been given by the state of California and they have to figure out how to work that out the university the president office really tells them in many ways what they have to do in some of their administrative processes what if we as an outside partner much like I did for Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Labs talking to the DOE headquarters and talking to the congressional representatives what if I could and I am talking with other parts of the UC in trying to push that forward one of the individuals that now runs the federal labs program over at the UC office of the president is an individual that used to be at Lawrence Livermore very good friend of mine we sit on an advisory board at Chico State for the engineering school don't think that I'm not having conversations with him on how do we help and the intent isn't to be a burr in their saddle the intent is to identify ways that they may not otherwise readily see but could be smooth path forward what is again Irvine or LA or somebody else doing the reason I seem very animated about all of this is this is the space I enjoy these are the things that I feel like we really need to focus on locally these are the things that are going to bring new investment they're going to bring new business opportunities they're going to collect businesses that want to be around the efforts that are going on at the university and the research institutions met with three different companies in the last two days that are all talking about expansion plans or opportunities in Davis every one of them comes into the meeting and they start and they say well we want to do these things we know the city probably won't let us but they leave the meeting with we had no idea that somebody could be so welcoming and want so much for us to succeed how much of that is you it's the staff I want to say it's not me it's our work together the reality is I think what I've done if anything is to pave a way forward of helping everybody recognize their same opportunities to be that service oriented economic development it's biggest tool that it uses is service if we can make the path easier here that's better than any incentive that's better than anything I can do for a company letting them know they're wanted and letting them know that we're going to get them to a finality in a quick and expeditious manner and that's something Davis has a poor reputation about yes it has a poor reputation but we want to put that in the past and what we're doing internally with staff is to work very hard on saying that's what it used to be but here's what it is today we saw this in Livermore and not to bring it up but it's something that's recent in the past it's not your old girlfriend it's your success story so talk about it well when I got to Livermore economic development had the similar problem where it was not something that they talked a lot about at that time when I got there it was 2007 the economy was still doing pretty well we were turning people away at the counter because their project didn't meet the criteria that we wanted because we had a color palette for the entire city that contractors could choose from it was five different shades of brown so you could do dark brown, you could do light brown, you could do tan, you could do sand, or you could do off-white for any building so if you wanted to paint a building this were your color palettes in fact Chili's came in and wanted to paint red and we said well red's not on the palette it's the only place I've ever experienced where there's really concern, real concern, that the crossed palm trees for the In-N-Out were actually signage and with that counted towards their sign criteria and it got that way because the Bay Area and the East Bay specifically had so much growth that you could be choosy you didn't have to just take everybody that wanted to be there well in walks the bad economy, the great recession as we've called it and all of a sudden you're not quite as choosy anymore that it had done correctly but it started to take a hard look at what were the things that we could do differently, started to talk more about service we started holding brown bags with our local developers and our brokers and our businesses what do you like, what don't you like, a lot of it ironically all went back to service, people would pay the freight to be in that location if they could just get an answer, if they could just get to a place where they knew that the process took this long, not this long we inside City Hall, well you called it the spanking machine we inside City Hall are very cognizant of what's been called in the past we don't want that anymore, we entire staff are working very hard to say how do we going forward create a new paradigm where people go, you know what it may cost a little more to open up shop in Davis but you go there, you get gold service no matter who you are or what you want to do that doesn't mean we're going to accept every single business that wants to come in, there are some businesses that just aren't Davis-esque I don't think we're building a home depot anytime soon but there are a lot of people that want to do changes to downtown densification, changes in businesses, so the intent here I think would be that we wind up really showing that service component that changes the way we look at economic development this is a different kind of a response to what you're talking about but Sutter Davis has just gotten the Malcolm Baldurage award for quality there's a standard of care that every hospital has to achieve and I think that the quality of care of Sutter Davis is so exemplary and I don't believe this terminology but it tripled the quality it was outstanding, it was noticeable now a hospital is a service provider thinking about the government as being a service provider is a little bit of a mind-jarring thing because it has police power and budget power and taxing power none of which you want to have anything to do with if you can avoid it but if you're a business I mean the businesses that want the government to go away don't appreciate that banking system and the roads and the police system all of which you're dependent on so your customers can get your needs met but thinking about government as a service I just wanted to bring up how wonderful Sutter Davis Hospital is and that they deserve the recognition that they're getting nationally for the Malcolm Baldurage award we have to wrap up but I want to put two points on what you just said one, how much are we talking about that? Here is an individual hospital that has just created an amazing storyline for Davis everybody in Davis whether you go to that hospital or not should be talking about it we don't we should be the second part going to the service concept you brought ways that hospitals can always distinguish themselves are lower costs etc but the biggest driver is you want to go to a doctor that you know that you're going to get healed from or more importantly can help you avoid any sickness to begin with any disease that you can avoid so that whole prevention idea well what if government similarly started to think instead of having the problem and then having to fix it what if we prevented it up front what if we were proactive and thought to ourselves what are the blocking factors now that people constantly are telling us about or better yet if we get a group of people together and they say top item on our list is this blocking factor what if we just remove that barrier or what if we modified that process if it's an issue that you know has a police powers issue or whatever what if we modified it and looked around at best practices by other cities and said they can do it different why can't we I really truly believe that the staff at the city of Davis want to deliver the best customer service they know how in some ways if we're not it's because we're not either one getting feedback as we need to do something differently or maybe more importantly there isn't a full understanding of the training or the the processes that need to be put into place my job as that change agent is to look around at all of our processes I think I was blessed by a background of multiple different things to be able to look at the systems and understand how engineering connects to community development connects to recreation connects to roads connects to sidewalks so when a business comes in and says I don't want anything to do with government I get that at the same time they want that sidewalk to be open they want the street to be drivable they want the parking to happen in front of their their their store and they want truly customers and the way that we get customers is you create a community where the things that you need are available and that there's a quality of life that drives the residents the community and more importantly the area or the region to be prideful about what's here I want to thank you for being on our show this is what's going on thanks for watching good evening