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DIRECTOR’S OFFICE
The Director’s Office oversees the seven divisions that make up our department including Economic Development, Major Projects, Housing and Community Development, Fiscal and Operations, Monitoring and Compliance, Policy and Communications, and Parking Facilities. Together, the DCED team is highly focused and responsive to the needs of constituents and implements policies that are innovative, transparent, and maximize efficiency.
MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Looking back on 2016, our department achieved several major accomplishments which include:
Incentive Review From July 2015 to June 2016, DCED actively collaborated with HR&A, an industry-leading consulting firm whose core mission is to reinvent cities into vibrant urban centers that offer jobs and sustain a high quality of life for diverse communities. The result of this collaboration was a comprehensive review of the City’s incentive policies. The primary objectives of this review were to evaluate the effectiveness of the City’s incentive offerings, assess the processes by which projects were evaluated, and identify how the department’s toolkit can be enhanced to help maximize the City’s return on investment. The final report measured the City’s competitiveness in both the region and the nation by profiling our major incentive programs against peer cities. It also made several recommendations on how the City can improve development efforts, which we began implementing immediately. For example, we created a more robust process in which we provide detailed information to City Council and the general public about our investment decisions.
In addition to making changes to our incentive tools, we expanded the role of our Monitoring and Compliance Division to facilitate a more rigorous monitoring process that includes surveillance reviews, and tracking the progress of commitments made by incentivized businesses. Finally, we formed a Data Integrity Team (DIT), inclusive of members of each division and led by a Data Integrity Manager. The DIT is tasked with streamlining data collection and ensuring accuracy. All of this was done to improve our competitiveness, minimize risk, and maximize return on City investments.
Development Opportunity Solicitations Capitalizing on development momentum is a key goal of our department. To ensure the City continues to perpetuate growth, we must facilitate a development process that is transparent and includes community involvement. This past year we did exactly that by releasing a new initiative that identifies development opportunities on City-owned land that requires, as a part of the process, the development community to engage residents prior to developer solicitation. The goal is to establish a process that is transparent to residents and holds the City accountable for building projects that reflect the interests of the community.
The inaugural event occurred in 2016 on the Monday after Thanksgiving, commonly referred to as “Cyber Monday.” The event was designed to showcase the release of community development opportunities in the City of Cincinnati. The two development opportunities released were the Shillito’s West building and the Ninth and Plum Streets redevelopment site. Both properties have been underutilized for decades. Our Cyber Monday initiative utilized social media to market these opportunities in addition to our traditional marketing strategies. This effort drew in both community and developer interest as demonstrated by the attendance of more than 80 people at the initial informational session. This informational session was designed to discuss the opportunities, create transparency of information, explain the process, and promote inclusion of minority-owned and woman-owned businesses on development teams.
In total, 14 letters of interest were submitted for the two development opportunities. We are currently working through the procurement process to screen the RFP responses. Upon completion, we will select preferred applicants who will be advanced through a more rigorous selection process with a preferred developer anticipated to be selected by August 2017.
Moving forward, this coordinated release of opportunities is a tactic the department will employ, at least annually, to activate development throughout Cincinnati’s 52 neighborhoods.
Economic Development Incentives Consortium As our department continues to identify innovative solutions to grow our local economy, we understand the need to build strong partnerships with fastgrowing cities so we can share best practices and leverage relationships to meet our growing needs. To that end, we recently partnered with the City of Kansas City, Missouri, which is currently in the process of conducting a
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comprehensive historic review of their past use of incentives, like the work we did with HR&A, as noted previously. Together, we created an Economic Development Incentives Consortium to broaden our collective understanding of the long-term impacts of these tools and accelerate identification of policy and process improvements to the benefit of our communities.
To kick off this initiative, we brought together economic development professionals from multiple cities to discuss steps each has taken to improve economic incentive policies. Participants included leaders from: • Baltimore, Maryland • Atlanta, Georgia • Portland, Oregon • St. Louis, Missouri • New Orleans, Louisiana • Tulsa, Oklahoma • Columbus, Ohio • Chicago, Illinois
This ongoing effort will enable us to share and evaluate best practices on how to use incentives to promote greater economic equality, and to benefit lower-income residents and neighborhoods. LOOKING AHEAD TO 2017
Building Diversity and Capacity As Cincinnati continues to develop, advancing diversity is a priority. By developing targeted policies and programs to promote diversity, we will ensure that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
To this end, we have created strategic initiatives that provide transparency and build capacity.
Advancing Diversity in Development The Advancing Diversity in Development program provides training and informational seminars to help individuals learn about the tools and investment resources that are available to them so that they may successfully engage with City and City-supported projects of all sizes and types. This program has been successful in the past, and, looking ahead to 2017, we will build on this workshop by hosting additional informational sessions designed to educate minority-owned and woman-owned businesses about opportunities for project participation and access to funding.
Aging in Place As the city’s population grows and ages, we need to make strategic investments now that will allow us to tend to the needs of the population of all our 52 neighborhoods in the future. DCED can help promote those “aging in place” investments in several different ways, including changing our community reinvestment area tax incentive language to help shape the types of projects being built. One example of this is our grocery incentives policy that encourages new fresh foods markets to open in neighborhoods lacking this important amenity. Investments like this will ensure that our city residents can live in their own community safely, independently, and comfortably regardless of the stage of life.
The department is actively working on these aging-in-place issues with various partners, including People Working Cooperatively, Cincinnati City Council Member P.G. Sittenfeld’s office, the City of Cincinnati Office of Data and Performance and Analytics, and others. Through our collective work, we will develop a city that provides the necessary amenities, housing, and infrastructure to retain and grow the population and allow all residents to age in place.
Foreign Direct Investment Strategy Foreign direct investment (FDI) is an important tool we identified to attract investment while thinking about innovative ways to perpetuate economic development. Given the political uncertainty in today’s world, this topic has a broad appeal from real estate developers and legal professionals to investment bankers and policymakers. With the recent immigration changes and anticipated amendments to tax and regulatory reform, it is important that we develop strategies that address the changing political framework.
In 2017, we will host a FDI symposium with leaders from REDI Cincinnati, SelectUSA, Cleveland International Fund, KPMG, World Trade Center of Kentucky, and many more. This symposium will
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focus on how we can grow our regional economy (in turn growing our local economy) through leveraging FDI to build infrastructure and real estate projects, and attracting foreign companies to improve our manufacturing and workforce sectors. The information collected from the symposium will serve as the foundation for a robust strategy that outlines the different forms of FDI and resources available to help Cincinnati court international investment.
Momentum Map Downtown Cincinnati is flush with development activity and has been for some time. Since 2013 alone, our department has helped facilitate $672 million in investment in completed projects, with hundreds of millions of dollars more on the horizon. There is so much activity that we wanted to create an interactive tool to showcase this to developers and investors looking to invest in the urban core. Therefore, our department began working with
Cincinnati Area Geographic Information System (CAGIS) to create a “Momentum Map.” This map is expected to launch in spring 2017 and includes activity in all sectors of the Central Business District, including retail, office, residential, parking, etc.
We will gradually build upon the functionality of this map based on public feedback and input from key stakeholders, including expanding the scope to be inclusive of all 52 of Cincinnati’s neighborhoods.
‘Why I Love Cincinnati!’ To increase the awareness of the many great things happening throughout Cincinnati, DCED is embarking on a video marketing campaign designed to highlight the people and places that make this a great place to live and work. The first is “Why I Love Cincy!” and will be an effort between the department and several local partners where we will ask people to submit videos explaining why they love Cincinnati. We will also feature various Cincinnati neighborhoods throughout the year in videos that showcase the unique charm that flows throughout the city.
