UPDATE: You can listen to an archived recording of this meeting here.

The Eden Area Livability Initiative (EALI) will have its next EALI Economic Development Working group meeting on Thursday, February 5 at the San Lorenzo Village Homes Association, 377 Paseo Grande, San Lorenzo. The meeting starts at 6:30pm and will end at 8:30pm.

The 49 participants in the working group, which includes residents from each community in the Eden Area as well as local property developers and entrepreneurs, met five times in 2014. The group’s goal is to improve and promote economic development in the Eden Area.

At the upcoming February meeting, a panel of commercial real estate experts will provide their insights about attracting businesses and customers to the Eden Area. They will discuss how they market commercial properties to potential buyers. They will also discuss how communities can add to the promotion of their areas.

A recap of the last 5 meetings:

Meeting 1: (March 2014) Discussed and reviewed the possible projects.
Meeting 2: (May 2014) Discussed the feasibility of the projects.
Meeting 3: (June 2014) Prioritized and voted on the projects (see below for the winners).
Meeting 4: (September 2014) Discussed how to implement the projects, presented existing County initiatives, and talked about how to tie the whole Eden Area together in one plan.
Meeting 5: (November 2014) Conducted a brainstorm session on how to position and market the Eden Area.

The specific projects that the group voted as priorities are:

• Project 1: Support business creation, retention, and entrepreneurship by providing technical assistance and financial incentives to local businesses.
• Project 2: Create a working group to develop policies that would make the county more business friendly.
• Project 3: Pursue development of vacant, underutilized, and/or blighted sites by attracting good quality businesses.

At the fourth meeting, Susan McCue, Alameda County’s new Economic Development Manager, presented the group with several county projects already underway that support the goals of Project 1, such as the County Small Business workshops and the Kiva micro-loan program. The County has committed to market these projects.

To support Project 3, McCue talked about plans to update the existing Eden Area marketing website, pursue fiber optics for the Eden Area, and focus on marketing former redevelopment properties along Mission Blvd and along East 14th Street.

A pivotal discussion at the fourth meeting started when some of the participants asked what could be done in addition to the existing projects, making the point that “business as usual” in Alameda County had not got the area very far. Planning was cited as a particular problem: even though it is essential to economic development, the Specific Plans for the Eden Area have not been updated in over 20 years. (Castro Valley Matters reported on the BOS meeting where the tentative schedule was set to renew the Eden Area Plans.) The participants discussed having each community identify the strengths and challenges in their communities, and devise an overarching strategy that ties the region together.

That led to a discussion of how to better attract new businesses, including use of small business incubators, and investigating the installation of a fiber optics network as was done in San Leandro to attract more businesses. (LIT San Leandro’s CEO Jim Morrison will discuss San Leandro’s fiber optic project on February 10 at 10 a.m., also at the San Lorenzo Village Homes Association).

At the fifth meeting, the group performed a brainstorming exercise to identify ways to better market the Eden Area. There was also a discussion about ways to make the business start-up process easier in Alameda County (Project 2), an issue to be addressed in a break-out working group that will include representation from county agencies, existing boards and commissions, the Castro Valley/Eden Area Chamber of Commerce, property developers, commercial brokers, property managers, and residents. They will meet to develop policies and procedures to review existing processes and propose changes to make the County more business friendly.