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Clinton county agreement - through a contract with clinton county, LEAP provides enhanced economic development services to help optimize and align economic development opportunities across the region creating more jobs and assist business startups and business investment. A major accomplishment of this contract was applying for and landing a $1.0m federal grant for bingham township water expansion to activate property along m-21 between ST. Johns and us-127, including housing, mixed use truck stop, meijer store, and economic development site(s). Active work taking place with heritage hollow, a child care facility and partner. Working to establish a potential small-scale sports facility. Additional work takes place related to the airport for potential investment opportunities. LEAP also helped at a resource fair to support small businesses.
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Regional growth department - LEAP's regional growth department worked on a variety of industry growth projects (including business attraction and business expansion projects) with key outcomes as follows: six investment projects collectively constituting $90,372,000 investment and a total of 194 jobs committed with $31/HR average wage. Business attraction projects won and/or announced include certus medical, aunex, taein e&d. Business expansion projects won and/or announced include gestamp, matrix engineers, and ionetix. In addition to industry growth work, the department focused on community development and place-based projects, and secured two projects with approvals / announcements / groundbreakings: genesee point condos and little dreamers day care expansion, constituting a total investment of $7,200,000 with 15 full time equivalent jobs related to them, 30 added child care slots and four new / rehabbed housing units for the region. Growing project pipeline in community development:working on 12 new housing, childcare, or mixed-use projects across the region, including: 2 in lansing; 2 in delta township; 2 in williamston; 1 in each of ST. Johns, bingham TWP, bath township, eaton rapids, elsie, and leslie. Placemaking efforts included transfering longstanding public art for communities program to arts council of greater lansing, while working on wrapping up final award to eaton county for placemaking project. Poet laureate program was similarly transitioned to arts council. The dept staff also conducted a total of 52 unique retention visits and discovered four prospective expansion projects through that effort while also adding value add services and referrals to 98 percent of the visits. Mostly in relation to business attraction pipeline, the dept staff conducted 58 real estate site searches, 85% of which were industrial (manufacturing, distribution, data centers), with 10% office/flex space, and 5% retail/childcare/housing related. 20 of the searches were leads generated directly by LEAP, including all 9 non-industrial prospects, demonstrating economic diversification intent. LEAP hosted 14 unique companies with executive visits to the region. Industry cluster work continued: for medtech, successfully concluded $1m eda eaa grant for medtech / life sciences gameplan, marketing and innovation programs, with continued engagement with msu ecosystem around gameplan implementation. Re-engaging medtech committee with leadership of university of michigan health sparrow, mclaren, msu, and key companies in region. For agtech, m-21 agtech corridor real estate and project activation work continues, reframed to both fit regional context and align with clinton county contract goals, and for new cluster addition of creative technologies, focusing on development around e-sports, video game design, etc. And a respective strategy and baseline research around it.
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Site-readiness funds - secured and began to administer $6.5m grant from medc to proactively prepare 400+ acre college RD delhi TWP site for a substantial investment and job creation project down the road. Administered actively the $1.2m medc site readiness grant secured in late 2023 for additional proactive site planning for nine sites across the region, which included city of grand ledge's willis industrial park, eyde development's holt industrial vacant land development, msu research foundation's lansing john bean building redevelopment, dymaxion development's industrial building development, the gillespie company's lansing commercial redevelopment space, the capital region airport authority (craa)'s "port lansing north" site, city of eaton rapids' north and south industrial parks, and 1035 us 27 LLC's ST. Johns commercial space redevelopment.
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Ultium project - continued administration of $66.1m public infrastructure funding for ultium project. Lansing BWL subgrant portion is completed, delta TWP portion expected completion in by h2 2025, along with grant closeout. As of 2024 year-end, the grant was approximately 93 percent expensed on eligible activities. LEAP worked with ultium, general motors and project partners as discussions evolved around GM's sale of its lansing ultium facility stake to its JV partner LG energy solution, who is expected to own the facility outright by mid-2025.
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Medc-CDC grant ($500k) - deployed over $87,000 in small town enhancement grants to 5 rural small towns for place-based projects and public space activation 2 in clinton and ingham counties, one in eaton. Village of vermontville for renovating a historic bell tower, village of stockbridge for transforming the patio section next to village hall into a tranquil seating/relaxation area, city of leslie for new pavilion at the site of the former community pool, village of maple rapids for historic facade project at a 120-year-old building, city of ovid for installation of new banners along main street in the downtown area. In 2023, there was no singular data source / tool for future land use mapping across municipalities for the entire tri-county region. So, we built one with the help of a graduate student at the university of denver. In 2024, LEAP partnered with c2ae engineering to complete the gis format and provide the ability to view it from any desktop setting so that the map can be published publicly. This allows developers, potential end users, and brokers to identity future real estate options and better select sites that have supportive zoning and planning. This also supports the working taking place via mshda's statewide housing partnerships, which LEAP is part of in the region.
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Department of equitable economic planning (deep) - deep's strategy to enhance equitable development in the lansing region involves a three-pronged approach of internal policy review and evolution, community partnerships and programs to enhance business ownership and economic participation among its target groups. Some of the highlights/major accomplishments in each area include: 1) we launched our fourth cohort for elevate, a business accelerator program focused on supporting black businesses with a focus on revenue, profitability an prominence; which had eight participants. 2) launched ascend (hispanic and latinx business accelerator) which had six participants in the inaugural cohort. 3) continued partnerships with the lansing regional chamber of commerce to promote the importance of DEI for small businesses and corporations by launching the diversity star award, with cinnaire being the 2024 recipient. 4) we had two cohorts of our award winning entrepreneur program, one & all, which focuses on people below the alice threshold.
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Small business support grant (SBSG) - with support from SBSG we launched ascend (hispanic and latinx business accelerator) which had six participants in the inaugural cohort.
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Ingham county agreement - through a contract with ingham county, LEAP provides enhanced economic development services to help optimize and align economic development opportunities across the region creating more jobs and assist business startups and business investment. 2024 involved substantial work with the ingham county economic development corporation (edc) and brownfield redevelopment authority (bra), with a growing project pipeline. Micro contracts that are part of the contract services had various priorities and progress. For dansville dda focus was on repairs on their roads downtown, parks and trails and an audit was successfully completed. Also talking about parcel of land next to water tower, adding it to their housing development. Vevay TWP's priority has been to upgrade parks and trails. Phase i environmental assessment on key parcels of land for economic development interests. Completing installation of walkway around park, talking about drainage issues. Webberville dda is mostly waiting on updates regarding the ford building. Reworking parking lot in downtown area, drainage issues. Preparing to celebrate the 150th anniversary in 2025. City of leslie has a project with trail upgrades and is also intereste din improving their budget. A buyer purchased land in their industrial park related to a powder coating company. City of williamston is actively working on 2 mixed-used projects, dda is reactivating as well for new developments. Ongoing support of the village of stockbridge continued.
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Early childhood investment corporation grant - LEAP is focused on not just physical infrastructure like roads and utilities, but also the infrastructure of people, such as housing, childcare, public transportation, and inclusive and connected educational and career pathways to enhance a diverse and skilled workforce. This past year the capital area child care coalition (caccc) completed the regional action plan and began implementation. Caccc is a group of community leaders in eaton, clinton, and ingham counties who want to increase the supply of high-quality child care co-led by LEAP, camw!, and south central united way. Over the course of the grant program, there were 74 members of the coalition, 348+ community members engaged with via meetings, surveys, and focus groups, and over $340,000+ secured. There is also a brand new resource for the region and that is a new navigational website for child care providers and employers looking to learn more how they can support their staff. LEAP led a business summit on the topic of childcare that garnered 50+ attendees. The caccc hosted the first ever employer roundtable which brought together 50 stakeholders to discuss the opportunities employers have to support child care.
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Small business & innovation - in 2024, the small business and innovation department assisted in the creation of 79 new companies. As part of this economic expansion, the clients of this department created 483 full and part-time roles. The follow-on investments for active clients, which include (private, public, sbir, FCF, bank/loan, owners investment etc. Were $27,094,117.28. The lansing regional smartzone, which is part of this department, completed a total of 27 grants to tech startups for a total of 167,435.28 deployed.
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Small business support hub (SBSH) - in 2024, the sbi department launched the trek small business support hub, which is an initiative funded by the michigan economic development corporation through funds from the american rescue plan focused on supporting socially and economically disadvantaged individuals who experience outsized impact form the covid-19 pandemic. This program served and educated 380 companies. These businesses went on to create 195 jobs and generated $8,160,209 in revenue. Through this program the department deployed 36 grants totally 178,066 in funds deployed to companies.
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Lansing proto/proto accelerator - became the region's first physical product-focused equity investment fund. Lansing proto developed an insuretech accelerator program with key industry focused on insurance technology and digital transformation of the industry. Successfully raised the necessary capital to support the program for two years and selected three global companies to move here and participate in the program. The companies were from israel, great britain and ireland. Two of the three were awarded proof of concept contracts from delta dental and farm bureau. This rate of initial success far surpasses the usual success rates of insuretech programs nationwide. In 2021, we worked closely with farm bureau to devise innovation strategy/thesis and attract multiple potential pilots. In 2024 the board decided to wind down operations and liquidate assets in line with new strategic vision.
