Looking for tips on how to best utilize Impact DashBoard? Read how Impact DashBoard subscribers utilize their models. Below you’ll find peer advice from a seasoned Impact DashBoard veteran: Ann Miller, CEcD, Executive Director at Buda EDC.
Here are topics that you can find below:
- Data Needed to Analyze a Project
- Who Gets the Reports?
- How Do We Present the Results?
- Comprehensive Impacts of Multiple Projects
Data Needed to Analyze a Project
So how do we get the data? So we have an incentive application that projects we work with directly have to complete. If you want to get a copy of it, it’s downloadable at our website under the resources tab [or here]. We also can get most of the data we need to run in initial incentive analysis with the Impact Dashboard through RFPs from the state and region or leads or RFPs from consultants. The main thing we need is jobs, wages and their capital investment.
Who Gets the Reports?
So initially the incentive taskforce which reviews all potential incentives and then makes the determination of what an offer would be gets the report. Then as the project moves forward, a copy of the report is given to the EDC Board and city council. Then after the performance agreement is approved and the project is made public, anyone who wants copy of the report can request the report. We’ve given them to the news media and lately we’ve started giving them to the school districts so they can know the impact on their revenues that a project will have.
How Do We Present the Results?
So we use the full report primarily. I’ve made a sample project so you can download that sample full report if you want. Then we use what I call the pretty synopsis report (one page summary report). When we make our project announcements and follow-ups, the news media seems to like the summary report, so that’s what we use primarily.
Comprehensive Impacts of Multiple Projects
Impact DashBoard helped us help us to take the politics out of the economic development. So recently we’ve had some people who have thought it might be a good idea to just get rid of the economic development entity and not that we didn’t need one. We are growing so rapidly. We’re outside of Austin.
So we actually ran this report called the EDC Impacts. So we went back over the last 10 years and looked back at all the projects we’ve worked on and took 60% of those projects and their property taxable value, which was 133 million dollars over 10 years. We generated this report that showed that over 10 years from projects we brought to the city, the city got 5.48 million dollars from that revenue. Then we showed that the school district got 22.5 million in that new revenue from the EDC. Then we calculated, what, our property tax rate for the city and the school district would have to be if those projects didn’t exist. Those numbers were shocking and it got rid of the whole idea that, “Maybe we shouldn’t go with the EDC. We don’t need them anymore.”
Buda EDC Resources:
If you have any questions or need any help modelling your projects, please reach out to your Impact DataSource team!
Paul Scheuren, (512) 524-0892, [email protected]
