 As you all recall, it's been about two years ago. The economic development department really began an engagement process where we were reaching out to our key community stakeholders to talk about how we could be more effective in our economic development processes. That led to some revisions in our tax payment policy. But what we always had in the back of our mind is that that was really going to be the first step in a larger discussion about economic development across the community. And it was interesting that as we went through that process, that was what we also heard from our stakeholders, that it was really good that we were having this engagement process, really good to hear from you. But boy, it would really be great if we had a much more comprehensive process lined up that we could talk about economic development. And so at the end of last year, we were able to allocate some funding to issue an RFP to select a consultant. That RFP went out, we had a very strong response. So we had 73 companies that that RFP went out to. We went in it down to about 12 that actually we reviewed and interviewed and then finally selected tip strategies to lead us in that effort. And they have already had a listening round one week that they've been in town just this month to engage with our stakeholders. We already had over 150 people across the various numbers of industries that have already provided some input on our economic development processes. So we've been very pleased with how the process has been going so far. We wanted to have an opportunity for them to give you just a brief update on where we stand today what the overall schedule is going to be for the strategic plan and then what some of those deliverables will be once we finish. This is a very aggressive timeline, as they have said multiple times. We've asked a lot from them, but we're very excited about what the opportunity presents for us later in the year. All of our consultants, our lead consultants are named John, which is an interesting thing, but we try not to say that the Johns are in the room. That's not a very positive thing to say. So I'm just going to introduce one of our consultants, John Paris, who is the seat of lead consultant with tip strategies. And John, if you can come up and kind of walk us through what you've heard so far. So thank you. And I'll be back to answer any questions about it. Good afternoon, mayor and council members. Thanks for the wonderful introduction. Robert, we've been spending a lot of time already. I'll kind of give you some background on our firm and the rest of our team members and kind of the process, what we're up to and what you can expect. And we'll be back again at least a couple more times, if I understand correctly, to meet with the council to show you what we're up to throughout the process. But we've been working closely with Brenda and Robert and their team, putting together the meetings with the right stakeholders. So a little bit of background on our firm. We are a strategic planning firm based in Austin, Texas. We also have a Seattle office. Our name stands for theory into practice because we try to take a very tactical, very practical approach to economic development. From what we understand, there's no other place in the country that has more opportunities or is experiencing more growth than this city. So all the more that speaks to us being very strategic, very focused, not just on what kinds of companies and what kinds of industries should grow here, but a very spatial and geographic approach to where the types of developments that we should focus on in different parts of the city. We do this kind of work all across the country. I'm finishing up a project right now in Southern California, also Green Bay, Wisconsin. We're doing work in the Northeast, in the state of Washington and a lot of work in the state of Texas as well. And this is all that we do. We work on helping communities think through strategic plans for economic development. We don't do management consulting and then do this work on the side. We've been doing this for over 20 years and we also spend a lot of time understanding the workforce. And as you'll see some of the initial feedback that we've received already from some of the meetings, that's really top of mind for your employers. And that's not just an issue here in Fort Worth, but nationally. So that's a background on our firm. I should mention also that the very first consulting project I worked on was about a decade ago. It happened to be here in Fort Worth on the central cluster of urban villages back with EDAW and AEcom. So it's exciting to see a lot of the positive things that have changed and a lot of the new investment that has come into the city just over the last decade and starting to see some of those seeds that were planted coming to fruition. We also have three other team members that you'll get to see on future visits. This is because of that really spatial approach and looking at specific geographies within the city, we brought in Friganese associates out of Portland, Oregon. They're one of the leading urban planning firms in the country. And they've actually done a lot of work in Texas. They've done a lot of projects for the city of Dallas. We worked with them in Irving. They're doing work in Plano right now in San Antonio as well. So they're gonna help us look at the capacity for growth based on your zoning and your land use policies and based on where we see the opportunities over the next several years. So we always like to say economic development doesn't happen until something happens somewhere. So where those investments and where those business expansions take place is important to us. Which is why we also brought in Jones Lang LaSalle, JLL, Jubal Smith out of the Dallas office, also Todd Burnett here in Fort Worth. And they've already been spending some time with us understanding from a business recruitment and site location standpoint, what does the competitive landscape look like? What are the things that companies are needing in terms of real estate space and other key factors and how does Fort Worth stack up against your competition here in Texas and across the country? And then the last partner that we brought in because we see a lot of opportunity in the tech industry and startups and entrepreneurship, but there really hasn't been a focused approach to that either other than just economic development generally. So we brought in Isaac Barkas who just left the Austin Technology Incubator. He was running that, probably the most successful incubator part of a university in the country for the last decade and now he's going out into the venture capital world. We had a good meeting with some of your startups here with him a couple of weeks ago. So what is this project about? You're familiar with the RFP that was issued. We pulled these straight out from the RFP and these are the goals that the city of Fort Worth has put out there as this is what we hope the economic development strategic plan will accomplish. And a couple of them we highlighted because the first one we see that is not every community has that as a goal to be one of the most livable places in the country. That's really bold, that's ambitious. And we agree that that's an opportunity. And the second one I think is acknowledging the reality of the competitive landscape. You're on a daily basis competing with your neighbors, whether it's Dallas or Plano or Irving or Frisco, but you're also competing with cities in other parts of Texas, all over the country and internationally. And then the other ones I think they all make sense and I think this plan will have to touch on all of them in some way or another. The process that we have proposed and I'll talk a little bit more about what deliverables will actually, you will receive at the end of this process, but just to kind of show you how all of this fits into our process, we have a three phase process which is pretty typical. Right now we're in the middle of the discovery phase which is a lot of quantitative understanding, looking at demographic and economic data, but we're also doing a lot of things. Meeting with different stakeholder groups with round table discussions. We're developing some online surveys to engage your employers and other groups to get a qualitative understanding. We're spending a lot of time looking at the organizational framework. So moving into that second phase, the organizational review. So this is, as we understand it, a plan for the community of Fort Worth. So we're working obviously with the city government, but we know that there are some key partner organizations, whether it's the Chamber, the Commission of Visitors Bureau, some of those other groups downtown Fort Worth Inc. that this plan will help inform some of their efforts and some of their resources as well. And all of which means nothing unless you actually put it into a timeframe and look at how do you actually implement all of this. So as Robert mentioned, this is our timeframe. We're still in the discovery phase, but we're moving rapidly toward identifying what are the opportunities that we need to focus on. And then so we'll be back presenting some of our findings and starting to talk about some opportunities with you, hopefully in June, and then we'll be back again sometime toward the end of the summer to share with you the draft plan once we've got all of the work behind us. So the way we think about economic development, the other thing that TIP stands for is this is kind of how we view economic development in today's world. It used to be about land, labor, and capital. The way we think about it today, it's a little bit of a different twist on that, talent, innovation, and a high quality place. Those are the things that successful communities and successful economies have. Again, our process, we're in the first part of that. And really throughout all three of the phases, the engaging the right stakeholders in the right way is front and center for us. And there's kind of three categories of information that will inform the plan ultimately. I'd say the first and arguably most important is what we learned from you and what we learned from the community, what we learned from your employers. So we've been spending a lot of time doing that already. We'll be back again next week meeting with many other groups. And then the second part of it, we have to understand what the data tells us. In some cases, it may not be telling the entire picture, but the businesses that are making long-term decisions about where they're expanding, where they're investing, they're looking at that data as well. And when you compare yourself, your city to other cities, whether it's here or in other parts of the U.S., that helps to give an understanding of where do you have unique strengths that need to be further built on, or where do you have some things that maybe you don't stack up as well as you could against some other cities. And then, of course, looking at trends within industries and what has been successful in other communities, and a lot of the other places that we've worked, we wanna bring that knowledge as well. So just a few things that we're starting to look at from just looking purely at the data. You probably saw the census figures, the estimates that came out a couple of weeks ago. This is now the center of growth nationally. Houston, the metro area slowed down a little bit, and now the metroplex, the entire region here, is gaining more people than any other metro area in the country. So that's kind of the backdrop that you're operating in. What a lot of people, I think, in this room understand, but maybe not as many people that should, outside of this city, is that if you look at not just the entire DFW area, but the city of Fort Worth, you've actually grown at a higher rate over the last decade and a half than even Austin, or Seattle, or Denver, or some of these other really high growth places. So as David, you mentioned earlier, that's a good problem to have. Obviously you have to invest in maintaining and expanding infrastructure, but there are a lot of cities that do not have this advantage to work with. Another advantage that you have, this comes from the North Central Texas Council of Governments, just looking at the land that you have available for development. And this does not include floodplains or areas that are off limits, but literally you have a lot of people talk about all the land that's available in Frisco and McKinney. Well, you have way more land than put together for development. So again, all of this speaks to that you have to channel and focus that growth and be strategic about the incentives that are used, the policies that are used, the types of industries that you're going after, and where development takes place. Is that incorporated or ETJ? I believe this is within the city limits, but that's a good question, because if you include the ETJ, it would probably be much higher even. So another thing that we're looking at is the types of industries that you have here. So this is looking at daily inbound and outbound commuters by industry. So you automatically, and you know this, you've got the largest center of healthcare jobs in the entire region. So the fact that you have about 10,000 people on a net basis coming into work in healthcare is no surprise. What is a little bit surprising maybe for us at least was when you go down to information, professional services, corporate headquarters, you're not importing people on a daily basis to work in those jobs. So we see that as maybe one of the opportunities and focus areas for this plan to try to increase the number of jobs, because a lot of those are higher paying, high wage jobs within the city. And then the last thing that I'll share with you is we're also wanting to look at how does this city and this county and this region relate to other areas across the country? So this is from the IRS. It's actually looking at migration data on an annual basis. So this is actually for the last five years, the net number of people that either moved into or out of Tarrant County. This data is only available at the county level, but you can see that you're actually on a net basis gaining people from Dallas County. Now we would wanna go into this data a little bit more to understand what are the income levels of those people. But when you look at places like Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, and Maricopa County, you're gaining people on a much higher basis than you are sending people to those areas. So at all levels of education and income, you're actually, people are moving here from a lot of those larger areas. So understanding those connections and perhaps building off of them should be something that we wanna focus on. And we talked about the benchmarking. Obviously you have a host of cities that you compete with within the region. We're also looking across the country at other cities that have similar dynamics and have had economic success, some of which like Denver or Phoenix or Kansas City where they have a kind of a downtown resurgence, but they also have some periphery development and kind of what is the dynamic between those areas and then other cities that have really seen some success that have similar dynamics. We're paying close attention to what has worked there that might be able to work here. And we're even looking internationally as well some cities in other countries that have similar industries, whether it's aerospace in Montreal or Toulouse or natural resources. We've seen some interesting things happen in other places that we think and some of these might be business, potential business partners. Obviously with DFW airport here, we mentioned some of the other partners earlier. That's an opportunity that we want to explore further. So we've talked about some of the qualitative input. This is just a high level summary of who we've started to meet with. We have a steering committee that Brenda and Robert have helped us to kind of put together, which is a really good mix of public sector and private sector leaders. We've also met with the Hillwood team and Alliance and some of the big employers there, some of your other large employers and the real estate community. We've had these different round table discussions to hear from those folks. What are your issues? What are your opportunities? How does Fort Worth stack up from a business climate and retaining an attracting talent standpoint? And we'll be here next week. We've got another meeting with the aerospace sector. That's obviously an important industry here. We're also hosting a meeting with young professionals to understand not just within industries, but across industries and the type of talented workers that your companies are recruiting. What are they needing and what do they see that's working here or could work better? And then also, I think it's worth mentioning that getting back to this idea of spatial and geographic focus, there are some specific geographies within the city that we're focusing on. So some of those have already been identified, Evans and Rosdale, the stop six area. There might be others as well that we're bringing in the Frigganese team. We call them FRAGO, our planning partner to help us with those workshops to really hone in on what are the development opportunities in those areas based on what capacity exists. And just some of the initial themes were still very much in the early stages of understanding from a qualitative perspective. But some of the challenges that have been mentioned already from a lot of the employers are, this is again, it's a national challenge, but your major employers have pointed to this as perhaps the top issue, which is access to talent. In some cases, there's a wave of retirees coming in a couple of years. In other cases, there's just the general need to attract younger, more educated workers. And they are coming here and you are producing them, whether it's TCU or West Lane or now Tarleton, the community college, but the need to attract and develop talent that came up many times, I think in every meeting. The competition between Fort Worth and other cities in this region also came up. And again, and the way that Fort Worth is viewed from the outside, I think the question of, is it the Dallas, Fort Worth region that companies are attracting people to or the city of Fort Worth? So how does this community market itself from a business and talent attraction standpoint? Those issues came up as challenges that we want to address. And then as far on the opportunity side, the things that were really promising that everybody saw a lot of opportunity was really focusing in on the development that's happening already in some of the key areas in the community, whether it's downtown, the near South side around the hospital district and South Main and other areas, Magnolia. Arguably one of the more authentic urban districts, I think somebody said this is Brooklyn 10 years ago in the entire Metroplex. And then we know there are other areas, alliance as well, and this idea of how do we benefit from what's happening, happening in alliance and the downtown? Are there some obviously transportation connections with the 35 improvements, but maybe there's some more strategic business connections that could take place? So what might that look like? Maybe there's a strategy when you've got companies like Amazon and Facebook that have certain types of jobs out at alliance that those warehouses and data centers, they're not gonna be in the downtown, but there are other types of jobs that those companies have in other markets like Seattle, Silicon Valley, maybe those types of jobs could happen in the downtown or in the urban part of the community. So those are kind of some of the initial strategies we're starting to think about. Obviously the industries, we mentioned aerospace, logistics is a strong point with alliance and BNSF. And then healthcare, with the new medical school partnership, we see that as a really big opportunity that we wanna explore. And then just broadly speaking, one of the things when Isaac, he facilitated the tech and startup group and we've been meeting with Tech Fort Worth folks, IdeaWorks, some of the others, and there's a real potential to connect a lot of the activities that are happening around supporting startups and small companies and even some of the more mid-sized 100, 200 people technology companies, there's really not a central focus on that in Fort Worth or anywhere in the region for that matter. So we see those as really important opportunities. So what will you actually receive at the end of all this? There will be a nice formatted report that has the most important part of it is what is the plan over the next five years? What are the actions? What are the specific steps that need to be taken? So that's at the bottom there, the implementation plan. But I think all of the other pieces, those will become appendices or sort of pieces that connect to the overall strategic plan. But each one of those, just a couple of them I'll mention that have value in and of themselves, the labor study, understanding the workforce, the unique strengths that you have here. Do you have a higher concentration of certain kinds of engineers or certain kinds of healthcare workers? Those are the kinds of questions that that report, that piece of the report will answer. So that would help groups like the Chamber help prove up the workforce as you're marketing to other companies to come here. Talked about the organizational analysis. So looking at who is doing what and where can, maybe there are certain activities that nobody is really claiming. So how, and then a lot of this comes down to resources whether it's staff or financial resources. So we're gonna be looking at how does the organizational structure of economic development in Fort Worth compare to other cities in Texas and around the country just to get a better understanding of what you're doing and how it can be achieved over the next five years. And ultimately we see the outcomes of this. If we're successful, we will be actually three, five years from now. This community will be seeing a greater level of investment. You'll be starting to change the, right now we understand there's maybe a 60-40 split with residential tax base versus commercial. So if there's catalyst projects that we can build off of whether it's something in the downtown area or elsewhere to bring in more commercial investment, going back to the talent competition for talent within the region and nationally. So those are the kinds of things we're looking at way down the road that you can be tracking the outcomes, whether it's raising educational attainment levels by the workforce development efforts or bringing in new workers from outside of the city. Those are some of the outcomes that we think this plan needs to keep in mind.