Tasked with growing the touris heavy southern Nevada economy.

Danielle Casey, presiden and CEO of the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance, is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

Welcome to Nevada Week in Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

A self-described Air Force brat, her early memories of Las Vegas are when she came here with family as a teenager.

Now she's back and bring with her more than two decades of economic developmen experience and is the first out of market person to hold her current position.

Danielle Casey, president and CEO of the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance, thank you for joining Nevada Week in person.

Thanks for having me.

And when we say out of market that means that you had not been living and working here prior to getting this position.

But I wonder, as an Air Force brat, have you kind of always felt like an out of market person?

It's a great question.

And yes, you know, I see myself as a child of th great United States of America.

I was born in Fort Worth, Texas.

We were stationed in Barksdal Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

Montgomery, Alabama, and then and then formidable years at least younger years.

Middle school and high schoo in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Wow.

And then college.

Yes.

And then for for other reasons, outside of the Air Force followed my mom and stepdad, actually, to Salt Lake City for a year and then to Phoenix, where, I believe we have something in common.

We're both Sun Devils Arizona State University grads.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

That is a lot of moving around.

Yes.

What impac do you think that's had on you?

It's a great question.

I think it makes you very resilient.

And it's given me the ability to know that when I go into a community that I'm the newbie in, that I'm there to learn and respect the community and the culture, because if I'm there, I want to be a part of it.

You can't be a part of something if you don't respect it and understand it.

Do you have any examples of when you've done that in the past where you realized, wow, I need to show up and learn before I, I don't know, I make any assumptions.

I guess.

Absolutely.

And if anybody's been to New Mexico.

So I just spent a wonderful five years there in Greater Albuquerque.

They're very big on their chilies.

And it's green chili or red chili.

It's a whole thing.

And, you know, it was funny.

Was about a year into my time there, and you would go to a lot of these buffet breakfasts and events and programs and, and I'm going down the buffet lin and somebody in the community, I think a board member of mine saw me putting green chili on my eggs, and he goes, cool, you're one of us now.

It's a thing.

It's a thing there if you ever go.

And it's incredible.

So maybe, maybe that's a little piece.

But what if you had put red chili on?

That would have been okay too.

It was the fact that I was putting chili at all of my eggs in the morning.

Okay.

What do you do now that you're here?

Do you continue that?

Oh, you know, I mean, I'm going to I've got to figure out some new, exciting traditions.

But but yes, I mean, it's there are some flavors and thing that you pick up in experiences in amazing communities that you take with you.

And, and you certainly want t keep that embrace that forever.

So yeah, we'll we'll see.

I'm getting all kinds of new, wonderful experiences here in Southern Nevada.

And as far as your past experiences here, I mentioned it was when you wer with your family as a teenager.

Why would someone bring a teen to Las Vegas?

I know we should ask my mother about that.

Well, because they're a military family and it wasn't just us.

It was also my mom's older sister and and my mom's younger sister was in the Navy.

So we just pretty much every one of my family wa probably military in some way.

And they decided, in their infinite wisdom in the early 90s, that the best way to meet was to join u and do family reunions in Vegas.

So, actually, somebody here the other day said you got a little bit of street cred there because you mentioned that you only stayed at the Stardust until they took it down.

And that was true.

I was a big fan of the Stardust Lounge.

How many people in your family were staying all at the Stardust?

Yeah, yeah.

Now, through the years.

Yeah.

My mom and my auntie always met up there.

And then we would always go in.

So.

Yeah.

How would you entertain yourself?

Well, obviously before the legal years, I had to babysit cousin T.J., who is now an accomplished adult.

And, yeah, I remember I remember thinking that the neighbors in the hotel room were going to call, call the police, because he was so upset that his mom left him in the room.

Okay, so, I mean, an 18 month old crawling so, yeah, you did things like that.

You know, you went and checked all the stuff.

Dad would take me around town, or we'd go to Circus Circus or something like that.

So in reading about you, I am intrigued by a story out of Maricopa, Arizona, not Maricopa County.

No, a lot of people confuse that they go or did you wear pink jumpsuits, Sheriff Joe?

That was a whole.

You'l remember that back to the day.

But, yes, a little town on the south side of Phoenix.

And what did you do there?

It was one of your earliest jobs in economic development.

nobody really goes, I'm going to be an economic developer.

There's not really dedicated pathways.

It's not the same as if I want to be a nurse or an engineer or something like that.

It's very clear people kind of fall into it.

They either have maybe marketing or a sales background.

You get into that or you're in government.

So, I never chose it.

I had an anthropology degree from ASU and what am I going to do now?

I worked at the Heard Museum of Native Cultures and Art, and then I found myself when when you are young and you want to have your first home, you drive to qualify.

So what that means is you keep going as far out of town as you can where you can afford a house.

So did that and, very soon after school and found myself in the city of Maricopa, which did not change its name because by goodness, we had the name before the county and we were the horse trading stop.

Right?

I mean, John Wayne had a lot of deep history out there.

So, yeah, it's great.

So it was a very fast growing, booming community because of some of the experiences I had had.

I got hired on as an assistant to the city manager, as the 12th employee ever for the city.

It had brand new, been incorporated, brand new.

And what was amazing in those times with the housing boom, the county, the unincorporated county that the county had entitled, what would have been 150,000 residents in terms of number of homes in this are before it was even incorporated.

That's a lot, a lot, yeah.

So you had third generation farmers who had sold the land to the developers by the way, saying, we want to we want to control our own destiny.

Economic development is critical.

We are going to create a city we're going to incorporate.

And I had the awesome, an amazing opportunity.

About 60 days in, we were sitting around a card table and doublewide trailer.

I mean that is a legitimate statement in a trailer next to a field that was City Hall and someone said, you know what?

Our Chamber of Commerce needs help.

We're getting all these people that want to do business licenses because it's growing so fast.

It went from 1500 peopl to 45,000 people in eight years.

So we were adding, adding, adding 800 new homes every month in terms of permitting.

And they go, Danielle, you're the newest.

Therefore you have the most capacity.

Go forth and figure it out.

By the way, we've hired a, a high falutin economic development consultant, and she's putting together a plan for the city.

Do whatever she needs.

Okay?

I have no clue.

I don' know anything about government.

I did the first press release ever for the city on West Nile virus.

I had to go.

Posted at the local bar.

So very, very fledgling kind of things.

That woman was actually the woman that founded the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, the Regional Economic Development agency.

She brought together 22 mayors in 1989, in Greater Phoenix and changed that economy.

And they've had subsequent amazing leaders.

So what's her name?

Ioanna Morfessis.

Yes.

Beautiful Greek name.

Very, very, forc to be reckoned with, for sure.

So I had the opportunity to be trained by someone who was, an absolute, you know, just amazing, you know, person who has had a huge amount of influence in her career.

And what happened in that market.

And, and, yeah she put me to task pretty good.

And then I had a series of many other great mentors.

We had a city manager down there while we were growing rapidly, and he had been an economic developer.

He's actually the one who said, are you crazy?

Why would you want to be a city manager?

Economic development is far more fun and encouraged me to get all my certifications and training and supported that.

So I've been very fortunate.

But in any career is, as you know, I'm sure, you can have great mentors and great assets is what you do with it that can make you successful.

I also liked about that story that you learned a lot when the recession hit.

Oh yeah.

What happened to that city of Maricopa?

Oh, goodness.

You know, at the city of Maricopa and then all of greater Phoenix.

Id love to hit on the beauty of that community.

We were growing so fast.

We never had a chance to hire on the full staffing that you would typically have had.

So we were lucky.

We had a lot of one time funds and were able to still build city, all do a lot of capital improvements, and we never really had to offset a lot of employees.

That was wonderful.

But what I had watched in all of Greater Phoenix and how it reinvented itself, and I think this is this is where I take stories and lessons from my career and apply them and, and ho I think about the possibilities.

In Southern Nevada.

I watched, Doctor Crow of ASU in the early 2000 and say, it's not just our desire it's our absolute responsibility to change the outcomes in our whole state.

They made a major investment in partnership with Mayor Gordon at the time and put colleges and universities, even the college of Journalism, Walter Cronkite College, into downtown Phoenix, their investments and their vision as a university in partnership with the communities from my perspective, what I saw because of this regional perspective of how economies work, change that entire market from one that was highly construction and growth dependent in the first decade of the century.

Greater Phoenix and, from the lens I saw was call centers, data centers construction dependent heavily.

They intentionally looked at their market and made very serious decisions about how they were going to design around that.

A huge piece of that was how it how business needs and the future of industry was projected.

And then the university designed to that with the communities.

So, as you know, now, ASU is a leading engineering school, graduated more engineers I think, last year than they had in their whole program ten years ago.

None of that happens on accident.

I believe with an intentionality, we can be what we want to be, but we all have to get on the same page and aligned to what is that?

What's that North star?

What's that outcome?

What does success look like?

What will that take to happen here in Southern Nevada?

And does it need to be that extreme?

Right.

Yeah.

Maybe not.

I mean, I think that there, you know, it may be our collective goal that we love so much of what we have.

We just want to augment and add to it.

Maybe we want to be the, you know, AI capital of the world and that's 80% of our economy.

I doubt that's the answer, bu we need to design that together.

So first it's going to start with very intentional work very quickly through our - my organization, with me working with my board on, on an extremely intentional strategic plan approach.

We need to all agre on what our organization does, what it doesn't do, and what a successful outcome which you can metric, looks like in five years, ten years, twenty years.

And then we need to do that in collaboration with all of our communities and partners.

So that's a critical piece, and it's going to be the most important thing I d in the next six months is help lead them to those decisions.

And then it will become, you know, my life's work and my focus to execute against that.

I know we've talked a lot about Arizona, but you went on to work in Scottsdale, Sacramento, Albuquerque.

Yeah.

You've been all over and done quite a lot.

We did get a chance to speak on the phone before this.

And you brought up something that you realized, I think, during the interview for this position, and that was about the definition of success?

Correct.

I'm a massively glass half full person.

So one of the other key reasons I knew I wanted to take this position because in the interview and by the way, they they did a very thorough interview process.

So if anyone out there is wondering, did she just charm them?

I'm not that charming.

I met 65 people in the community, community leaders, boar members, partners over two days.

And I was put in the room for an hour at a time, with about a dozen of them, each at a time, with no idea what they were going to ask me and all of that.

And I had about two days of knowing who would actually even be there.

So, it was very intense.

And then I was able to ask questions of them.

And what was very clea is that everyone in every room wants to diversify, wants to see amazing things happen for this market, and they are willing to com to the table to work together.

But it's clear that we don't have the answer now o exactly what success looks like.

So that's wher my marching orders are and why.

I know this is the right thing to take us through this strategy work.

We so look forward to having you back on to discuss the progress.

Danielle Casey, thank you fo joining Nevada Week in person.

Thank you.