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I'm Jeff Rea, your host for Economic Outlook.

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As we discuss the region's most important economic developments and initiatives with a panel of experts, the South Bend, Elkhart Regional Development Authority recently awarded $40 million in ready grant funds to 19 quality place projects in the region that will be leveraged to infuse $465 million of total investment.

We'll dove deeper into how that program will impact our communities.

Coming up on Economic Outlook We're back in the studio for a new season here at Economic Outlook.

And today, we believe we have a great show for you.

The state of Indiana set aside $500 million for the READI program, which encourages regional collaboration and data driven long term planning that will attract and retain talent in Indiana.

The IEDC awarded grant money to 17 regions across the state, including a maximum grant amount of $50 million to the South Bend Elkhart region After announcement of the grant awards last month by the RDA, we thought a deeper dove into the program and how those dollars would be invested might be an appropriate conversation.

So joining me today for that conversation are John DeSalle, the chair of the South Bend Elkhart Regional Development Authority, and Taryn McFarlane, the vice president of regional initiatives at the South Bend, Elkhart Regional Partnership.

Guys, thank you for being here today appreciate you coming.

Thank you for having the show.

So you guys have had a busy month or so, so we thought we would get you on right away to talk to a little bit about the activity.

But first, as we get started, we're grateful to have you in the studio.

We have we've been out of the studio for a little while, so here are our first ones back.

So thanks for doing that.

John, just to maybe help start the conversation.

Talk to us a little bit about one.

Tell us what you tell us about your day job, what you do, and then your role in the in the Regional Development Authority.

Oh, absolutely.

Thank you again, Jeff.

So my really my career has been in engineering, in manufacturing, of race tires for more than 30 years in both in Saint Joe County and in Marshall County with Hoosier Racing Tire.

And I've recently had retired as its president at the end of 19.

Since then, you know, I joined Industry Labs and Notre Dame, a local economic development effort, trying to help local manufacturers in our three county region of Saint Joe Marshall and Elkhart County.

You know, in order to become more productive, resilient and to grow and attract talent and we work with these local manufacturers and connect them, especially with resources at the university.

And since then, you know, I've been a chairperson of the RDA from the early days of regional cities going back to 2015 and Taryn How about a quick introduction for you to tell us about the South Bend Elkhart Regional Partnership and the work you're doing there?

Sure.

So the South Bend, Elkhart Regional Partnership, long name.

I'll just call the Regional Partnership has been around for at least ten years and the work there is really to catalyze collaboration across 47 smart, connected communities.

So we work in three counties in northern Indiana and two counties in southern Michigan.

And it's really to accelerate and amplify the work that our partners are doing in economic development, higher education and industry.

And the broad goal is economic growth and prosperity for folks in the region.

Great John, to come your way.

So you've been at this for a little while.

You mentioned being part of the RDA for several years.

Give us some historical perspective.

A little bit of you know, take us back a few years.

Talk about maybe the region and where we were at, how regional collaboration was going when you first got involved.

Yeah, excellent.

Excellent question.

So it's hard to imagine it's already been seven years.

So back in early 2015, some local people, local county representatives in Marshall County approached me and said, Hey, there's this thing called the Regional Development Authority, or we're considering and there's this Regional Cities initiative.

And I knew a little bit about regional cities at the time.

It was being promoted by Governor Pence, and I didn't really know what the RDA was going to consist of and I didn't understand the responsibilities or the duties, you know, back then dramatically different level of collaboration today as it existed in 2015, 2015.

There wasn't a region, we were three separate counties, everyone doing what was best for their, you know, their municipality, their city, their county.

But we didn't collaborate as a region.

You know, quite frankly, and I would tell this all the time, I didn't really care what was going on in Elkhart.

I was running my own business and Marshall County had plenty to do.

And what was occurring around me was we weren't paying a lot of attention.

And I think that sentiment was pretty, pretty common among all of us.

So back in 2015, you know, there was this big prize, a $42 million award.

At the time.

It was going to go to two regions.

Ultimately, it went to three regions.

We were fortunate enough to be one of the three regions that won that original RCI grant money.

But, you know, the biggest thing that came from that was this collaboration, this this collaborative effort.

I remember attending just dozens of meetings with literally thousands of people overall who came together for the first time and said, as a region, what do we need in order to improve quality of life, quality of place?

How do we attract people?

How do we retain the talent we have in the area?

And the first time ever, you have people from Marshall County and Elkhart County and Saint Joe County coming together and discussing as a group what's our region need?

And it was very rewarding.

And it gave me a lot of hope that our region was going to prosper.

Tayrn, coming your way because you're a little newer to the effort here.

What was it that attracted you to the opportunity to come and work on behalf of the broader region?

So I will say with pride that I am an intentional transplant to the region.

I moved here actually in 2008.

So like John had, you know, just been in South Bend, Mishawaka area and just sort of, I'm here.

Things are happening.

But my career has always been around public private partnerships and prosperity and that kind of thing.

So when I saw the position was open at the Regional Partnership, I jumped on it.

Fortunately, they agreed to hire me and so I joined in the spring and the partnership had already secured the dollars from the state and now we were going to partner with the RDA to make that distribution and that's really my role at the partnership John coming back your way.

So let's talk state perspective a little bit.

State decides to put some seed money, if you will, to seed or to catalyze regional collaboration.

A couple of years ago with regional cities sees a formula that works pretty well, right?

With with really Evansville and Fort Wayne and South Bend Elkhart areas being the success.

So so the state decides to go back and do some more about this.

Talk a little bit about just sort of the the evolution of READI and maybe the thinking behind the state of Indiana and what they were trying to accomplish with those dollars.

Yeah, very good question.

So, you know, even at the time, the concept of regionalism was really new.

It had been done in a few areas around the nation, but not necessarily in Indiana.

And, you know, we've discussed it many times.

You know, the foresight, the leadership of the state of Indiana, IEDC, the governors to put forth a program to encourage regionalism and $42 million for regional cities is a great catalyst to get a lot of people at the table talk about, you know, worthwhile projects that the region needs in order to catalyze that.

How do we improve this region for a place to work, play and live?

So from that and I think, you know, our region has done a really good job.

You know, we've we've had a significant return on that initial $42 million investment, and it hopefully gave the state comfort.

And let's do this again.

And to their credit, they did it on a statewide effort and pretty significant.

Now, we're now we're considering a $500 million grant to be awarded to all areas of the state.

And again, we were fortunate enough to be one of the five regions.

They were able to secure the maximum grant amount of $50 million.

And I will say, yes, you know, the RDA was certainly involved in that.

The regional partnership was involved in putting the proposal together.

But again, it's the it's the local community is the three counties, all the stakeholders, all these people coming together at honest, forthright, open conversations about what is what is our region need in order to grow and, you know, to be a place people want to move to and live in.

And you've got to give credit to all these people.

So they they put forth we put forth together as a region a really compelling proposal.

The state obviously saw merit in it and awarded us an additional $50 million grant to continue the work that had started in 2016.

And we teased in some of the reasons is it will catalyze millions, multi-millions, hundreds of millions of dollars investment on top of it.

Taryn maybe get a little more into the weeds of READI a little bit and talk about so.

So sounds great free money.

You know we do a lot of stuff with this but but it but the state had some specific ideas about where and how this money should be spent.

So talk a little bit maybe kind of the the guidance or the process even of deciding if you had this money, you know, where you might spend it.

Sure.

So READI from the state's perspective was really around talent attraction and talent retention and economic development.

So that's really about the people, more people coming and living and working in Indiana and in our region.

And I always think of talent attraction as also continuing to attract the people who already live here.

Right.

It's a great place.

I want to keep living here.

I want my kids to live here and is the are the individual projects?

Should the region receive the money?

Will those individual projects be transformational quality of place projects that are going to be signature, things that are going to entice people to move to the region or stay in the region?

So that's the broad guidance that the state had given our region and then our region, I think, took a very intentional approach to that award in collaboration with the RDA.

So putting out a public call for proposals, a request for proposals allowed us to hear from every corner of all three counties that were eligible to apply and a wide range of project types and project ideas.

So the request for proposals included housing and included arts and culture, included economic development and I know I'm missing one.

I knew I would blank on the fourth one.

Arts and culture.

Oh, athletics and recreation trails.

Yeah, yes, I know.

So with the idea that a specific project in any one of those categories was going to really be meaningful in that particular region and community, the RDA did that process over the summer and resulted in a September board meeting where they themselves were reviewing and deciding on those projects.

John, come back your way and I'm going to skip away, but I'm going to actually want to move more.

Taryn talked about talent attraction, retention.

So if you put your CEO hat back on, you're running one of the larger companies in the area.

You're trying to attract talent from all over the world.

Give us your perspective as a CEO in this region for some time in that effort to try to attract talent here and even what kind of limitations there were to you getting that talent?

Yeah, it's it is a significant problem if you're if you're running a company of any size with any degree of sophistication.

You know, we all know that if you're one of the best in anything, you've got to attract and retain the best talent you can find.

And in some businesses, that means you're really looking not just regionally, but nationally and even internationally.

So, you know, I was very fortunate to run a very successful business for a long time.

We we operated in 80 markets around the world.

We had operations overseas.

And I was always trying to attract talent.

And I knew that, you know, the success of my business really meant, you know, how successful were we on attracting young, bright, motivated people to come and work and support the activities that we were doing at Hoosier Racing Tire And I've told the story a few times.

You know, I'd lived in my motorsports bubble and I was really concerned about my business and I wasn't really involved in a lot of economic activities to my own detriment, quite frankly.

And then I remember this vividly because this is my motivation.

I was trying to attract a very specific person from a competing company to come and work for us.

Somebody I really respected had great capability and ability and I thought could really take our business to the next level.

And we were fortunate that, you know, we were a successful business and we could we could meet wages, meet benefits.

But the whole time that we're having the last conversation I had, the individual indicated I would love to come work for your company.

You've got a great reputation.

I love what you guys do.

And the whole time, Jeff, I know there's this big but coming.

And eventually he said, but my family doesn't want to move to the area.

So I, I go home and, and I was always really good about separating my personal life from my business life.

But that evening I go home and I tell my wife that this happened to me.

And she said to me for the first time ever, John, and you know, you're in trouble.

When your wife called you by your first name.

John, you know, either get involved and change it or I just don't want to hear about it.

Don't complain to me about it.

And that really was the catalyst for me to say, you know, you're absolutely right.

And until we all get involved to try to change the area, you know, that situation's going to reoccur.

So it it is a very important topic.

You cannot do next level technology.

You cannot become whatever business you're in.

If you want to advance to the next level, it really is a function of the talent you're able to attract and retain.

You know, we all have access to capital.

We can make those investments, but you have to make investments in people and those people have to be willing to come and work in this area.

And Taryn I'll come back your way and we'll get better time back in, more talk READI So, so before we get into maybe a couple of specific projects, can you just talk about just sort of the nuts and bolts of this?

You mentioned sort of the themes, the the, you know, the quality place, the housing, the arts and culture, the sports and recreation kind of stuff.

But so do you have this pot of money now potentially to give out to match projects?

You go through a process.

Talk to us a little bit about the response from the community across the region just by way of maybe number of applications, the amount of money asked for that.

So some of that kind of stuff.

I would say that the people were eager and excited even before we had a process in place to award the money.

So as John mentioned, the RDA applied to the state and then the RDA had to collaborate with us, work with us on that application process.

So when we put out the request for proposals we had over 50 applications come in very thorough.

This is not an insignificant you're talking about grant money, you know, very specific set of guidelines, a lot of clarity on what's the project, what's going to be the impact, what's the scope, budget, all those things.

I'll do a little bit of weeds here, but the ready dollars, the award dollars for any one project could only be part of the dollars for the overall project.

So those projects themselves, they were asking the RDA for allocations or awards that those requests to the RDA where $143 million, but that's only 20% of what they really needed.

Right.

The overall project.

So these are huge multimillion dollar projects or small projects.

It really ranged and we had three times as much requested as was available to allocate.

So two, three, three X demand and a lot of folks who were eager and excited along the way so that meant that the RDA had a lot of careful and thoughtful decision making to do to pick, you know, sort of the ones that were going to be the closest alignment to the ready goals were most coherent and most mature and ready for that investment should that investment come their way.

And we had projects that were across those four categories, as I mentioned, and fortunately we were able to make awards across all four categories.

One, so already I made those decisions.

So John, come your way, so you got this easy task now of taking this list Taryn just mentioned of 150 plus million dollars of requests and trying to figure out how to give give away 40 million of this and make meaningful impact.

So, so, so as we're talking about projects, talked a little bit about the the thought process and how you and your colleagues possibly sort through this this complicated list of a lot of great projects.

There were a lot of great projects.

57 projects in total were submitted.

You know, the vast majority of them were really great projects.

And, you know, we went through pretty thorough analysis.

There was Jeff, there was literally thousands of pages to be reviewed.

You know, some some project proposals were very well thought out, you know, very mature.

They had submitted all their financials, painted a real vision of what they were trying to accomplish, very compelling.

You know, we said to each other multiple times, I wish we had more money to award because there were some really good projects that that at this time we hadn't funded.

There were other projects, quite frankly, that were still early.

You know, this this went really quick.

You know, the READI grants were awarded in December.

There's not a lot of time for a program to come together or a project to be submitted unless you had it already were in the process.

So some projects weren't mature enough.

They hadn't thought through all that.

We'd like those projects.

We're trying to encourage those those individuals or those groups to continue to work through the program, work through that project.

Those are things we want to support.

Hopefully there's a maybe we hear there's another round of READI type funding that may occur in 2023.

We don't know what the parameters are.

We don't even know, you know, what what the dollar amounts could be.

We're hopeful that our region will be successful again.

And winning that grant money, but we're encouraging those projects to continue, but very impressed by the high quality of projects that were submitted.

So Taryn let's come your way and actually both of you to sort of help our viewers.

So our we cover a broad viewing area here.

Many people are going to see some of these projects happen in their community, maybe highlight a few if we're talking housing, for example, because I think that was a big category, maybe one of the largest awards.

But again, I think what we hear critical to this talent attraction piece is this housing piece.

So can you talk about a couple of housing projects that that people should pay attention to over the next couple of years as they see starting to move?

Yeah, now you're right.

Housing was over half of the dollars that were awarded and one that I think sort of exemplifies this this mix of transformation and talent attraction is a project.

It's called Aerial Cycle Works, It's in Goshen and essentially there's a developer is taking a brownfield site that's been abandoned, nothing's been happening on it, and creating a set of sort of studio loft type apartments there, rental facilities with a little bit of a commercial space and a rooftop bar.

And, you know, the kind of amenities that developers are very attuned to, what folks are looking for.

And I will say one of the things we heard this is just emblematic of what we've heard across the region, is recent graduates want to stay in the region.

They've got a great job, but they're priced out of the market or the commute is going to be too far or folks are downsizing and they need that sort of smaller space to live, not the suburban home.

And so this project in downtown Goshen is sort of beginning to address that need.

And in some ways it's proof of concept because there hasn't been a lot of apartment housing stock built in that region or in that area.

And so that will then say, okay, this works.

And other developers can say, okay, you ran the numbers you got, it was leased out.

It's a high demand.

We can do it as well.

And I know there's another one in Marshall County.

There was a couple of housing projects, if you want to talk about another one.

Yes.

So in our last 4 minutes, so and I wish we were going to run out of time, but but yeah, if you could highlight just some of those key projects around that people will want to pay attention to.

So so housing is an important topic.

We all keyed in that we need good quality workforce housing at multiple price points.

But there's been some models that have worked really well in Marshall County in the in the community of Culver, there's a very significant housing development that's going up.

It's a combination of single family homes, duplexes, apartments with with amenities, you know, a community clubhouse, swimming pool.

So on something very similar had been done recently in Plymouth, had done performed very well in the city of Plymouth itself on Water Street, there's a dozen duplexes that would be built because of the READI grant proposal.

So housing throughout the three county regions has been has been key.

And so so let's touch on a few others just because you mentioned there's other categories like arts and culture, for example, was an important one.

Some great projects, it looks like in Bremen and Elkhart, Marshall County, you know, all over the place.

Any others they want to make sure we highlight besides this?

Yeah.

So arts and culture, we've got the Morris project here in Saint Joe.

Yeah, that's.

Great.

And we've got our Wellfield Botanical Gardens.

So upgrading some of their facilities and the zoo.

Yep.

The other one that I think there's trails and rec so we've got some park projects, we've got small project in Bremen renovating that space there and some trail connections.

And then we've got a mix in economic development and one that I really like is Portage Place, and that is small scale economic development.

We often think about chasing big, big companies, big factories, but when you can get an old building we utilized with small scale tenants and kind of have that neighborhood hub feel, that's really what Portage Place is representing.

So to me, the highlight across all of READI is just the scope of the projects, the size and the range.

It's exciting.

Yeah.

So John, talk a little bit about a time frame we'll give before we leave a website and where they can find more information about all the projects that we certainly didn't hit on.

All but what's the time frame?

When will we see these projects really start, get started and start to see things change in our communities?

So this is, you know, the funding source for all of this is the American Recovery Plan Act.

And so there are some very specific timelines.

So we have to make all the awards by 2023.

The money has to be committed and spent by late 2024.

So there's going to be an immediate economic impact.

We'll see projects bring up here very quickly.

And quite frankly, that would that became part of the decision making process that if the if the grant money is awarded, how soon can these projects break ground and begin.

So so turn is is folks are we kind of scratch the surface and really talk more you know, big picture but people want to know more about some of those awards where where's the best place for them to go to find that information?

So the South Bend, Elkhart Regional Partnership, we have an entire page dedicated to READI.

And literally if you just Google READI South Bend, you will find the page.

It's lists all the projects I'm in.

Over the coming months, we will release more information about each individual project, the project lead and a little bit more detail there.

So yeah, a Google search.

And John, I'm going to give you the last word.

So so you hinted it at the legislator.

We'll think about READI part two.

So how about a 30 second elevator pitch to the General Assembly as to why READI two should come this budget cycle?

Yeah.

Thank you, Jeff.

Thank you for giving me the last word.

So no pressure.

So, you know, I do think our region has been very good stewards of the money.

Regional cities was very successful, no doubt in my mind that READI will be successful.

Also, you know, we're obviously in favor of a READI two proposal, I think where we would invest that money, there's continuation of some of the projects that didn't find funding this time around.

You know, this region, I think the state could look at this region and recognize rightfully so, you know, all the good work that's been done, the good stewardship, the collaborative effort.

We have really created a region now.

Six years ago we were just 42 separate cities and yeah.

That's credited to your work.

And so thank you for that and thank you for joining me today for this conversation.

Thank you.

Again for.

Having us for that.

We'll be anxiously watching over the next couple of months as as these go forward.

So that's it for our show today.

Thank you for watching on WNIT or listening to our podcasts to watch this episode again or any of our past episodes.

You can find Economic Outlook at WNIT.org or find our podcast on most major podcast platforms like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Please join us next week as we continue to cover the region's most exciting, important topics that affect you.

I'm Jeff Rea.

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