University Place

Continuing on in the arts and economic development in Vilas County leadership, Vilas vision. I want to introduce Mr. Barry McLeane, Special Projects Manager for the Vilas County Economic Development Corporation, to give us an update on Vilas County economic development activity. So, welcome, Barry, thank you. (applauding) Good to see you. Thank you very much. Vilas County Economic Development Corporation. I've got 30 minutes, and some people would think five would be enough to give you everything we do. We, like Lola, we were formed in 2010, the corporation was formed. In fact, the then agent for the university helped us form our corporation. And the Vilas County Economic Development Corporation is a huge umbrella. We didn't know, I didn't know what I was getting in for when I applied to be on the board originally. I thought, it sounds like something I should be a part of. I'd done a lot of volunteer work for 10 years I've been up here, and I thought it sounds like I should be involved. And when I did get involved, our original executive director, Ken Stubbe, and I started looking at pieces of this. Ken had been a professional in economic development for a number of years, and we looked at all these different pieces of economic development. I mean, you've got-- certainly the arts. By the way, my wife has been a professional artist for the last 40 years, has worked in collections all over the country, including corporate collections. She's done a marvelous job, and so I know that everything you said about artists isn't true because they do have temperaments. (laughing) And they do have bad periods. Maybe that's just my artist, but I don't think so, they go through all kinds of different periods, but when we were talking about this big umbrella of economic development, the arts certainly came up initially as a really strong part of that. Lola was a great example for us as we moved forward into the arts, we started in Eagle River with a small building there. We rehabbed the cranberry building. Some of you will be familiar with that, and we took a group of Nicolet College students and rehabbed that building and turned it into an incubator. We moved our offices into there, and an incubator, at the time, wasn't very well known up in this area. Although, there are almost 40 of them across the state. Incubators bring people in that are either moving out of home businesses, or moving, or have an idea that they present to us for a business, and they need an office or they need manufacturing facilities or they need storage facilities. But what we do, as a part of bringing them in, is mentor them through the entire process. We've got a good close relationship with Nicolet College, so we offer what we call the EC classes to these folks. It's a 12-week class where we cover virtually everything from soup to nuts on starting your own business. From writing a business plan to insurance to marketing to legal aspects of the business. Virtually all of it, and you end up, after the 12 weeks in this class, you end up with a brief business plan. And that is great. Most people choose to move forward from that point. Some people get discouraged when they write the business plan and find out maybe this isn't the right time for them, maybe their funding isn't quite in place, etc., and that's as important a part of our classes as success rates. So some of those folks we move into our incubators and move forward from there. One of the other things that has happened as a result of Vilas County Economic Development are investments in Vilas County. This building being a great example. This building was bought 2.5 years ago by our now chairman, Carl Ruedebusch, because he saw a need in Phelps to do some things. Phelps, of all the communities that we looked at around, Phelps seemed to have the most need at the time. And we looked at Land O' Lakes, and we looked at all various communities. But this community seemed to need some help more than the others, so we bought this building. Carl went ahead and bought the downtown store, if any of you are familiar with that, we took that down. We've now got, if things go well, we're hoping to have a grocery store, hardware store, lodge, restaurant down there. I mean, all of it is on the drawing board right now. We'd like to get started next spring on the first two phases of that, but the investment of real estate came as a direct result of Carl's involvement with this group. As well as a couple of other folks that have been involved. We have a building in Land O' Lakes now. We bought the-- I believe it was the old Burkett Realty building, that is next to the Gasco building. In fact, I just put a sign up on that building yesterday to indicate Vilas County Economic Development is going to have an office in there, but I really appreciated what you said about the empty buildings in Land O' Lakes. We're very much are in favor of that where all of our buildings are, we don't like to see empty buildings. And if that building next door to ours, the Gasco building, it's been empty for a long time, needs fixing up, we're going to see if we can help with that next spring. It's got a big front to it, there could be a lot. Performing arts could go on in there. You take some walls down and do stuff. It's so easy to visualize that stuff. And then when you have the back end financing to go with it, you can get it done, it can all be done. So we have two buildings up in Manitowish Waters as well. We bought a fairly large building up there that had been empty for a couple of years, and we've converted that into an incubator, our Wisconsin magazine is now in there. They've expanded from one office. I just got the email yesterday. He wants the fourth office in there now. So he's hiring a new executive editor. So all of that, that's exactly what we want to do. Our Wisconsin had been a magazine operated out of a home up in Presque Isle, and so moving those folks into an incubator has given them the way to expand, the way to train new people, and a way to offer more to the community. In addition, FYI, Northwoods is located in our incubator up there, so we're the publishing mini empire for Manitowish Waters, right now. In Eagle River, another piece of real estate we've recently bought and we've moved out of the cranberry building that we rehabbed now, and we bought the flour sack building, which many of you have seen that big eyeball we've got out there. It was supposed to generate a lot of interest when we first put it up. A lot of people ended up thinking it was kind of creepy. But what it is is the eye on entrepreneurs building. That's what we've got going in there. And that has become, for us, Carl bought that building and as chairman of VCEDC, he wanted that to be a creative enterprise in there. So we've got, it's full now, we've got four businesses in there now. Stitch It, which was across the street, they do embroidery work, she moved into that building, but we put a gallery up front, we put a very small gallery up front for a good friend of Carl's, Mark DePuydt, or Mugsy as some of you may know him, and, anyway, he uses that gallery for his work and he does quite well in there and we're always looking for some more artists. We need some 3D people in there right now, some glass people, we're looking for that. Then, almost in the back, we've got a really great space in there called Goose Cap Media. A young man named Isaac Doud graduated from Northland Pines two years ago maybe. I don't know, two years ago. One of those kids that is so tech savvy, that it would almost be a shame to see him go to college because he is so tech savvy he needed to be involved right away in doing things. So we got one of the teachers who had left Northland Pines, Scott Subach, who moved to Appleton. So we formed an LLC with Carl as one of the partners, Isaac Doud as one of the partners, and Scott Subach as one of the partners, and what we have in there is we have 3D printers, we have some really high end PC software. We've got a big, fancy high end Macintosh coming this week, and we invite kids in there just to let the juices flow. Kids that Isaac knows or kids from the high school that can come in and just use that space any time during the day just to do things, just to create things, just to make things, just to have ideas. And we've got a gathering space up front where they can sit down, and all of these different folks can exchange their ideas. Then on the very back of that building, we have a, it's called the Blank Canvas. A young lady named Erica Johnson moved in there, and she offers lessons, art lessons, in all kinds of media. But she gets groups in there, they're as big as 25, and they just, she leads the class and they draw, or they throw pots, or they do whatever they do, write, and they just make signs. They can do all kinds of things in there, and she's just been a marvelous addition to our community. Eagle River, very much like Land O' Lakes, is becoming very much an art center in the Northwoods. I mean, with the opening of the Northwoods Center for Performing Arts behind the old Catholic church there, with the photography studio in town now, with our gallery in town, with the warehouse folks that have opened up and offer all kinds of classes there, it's becoming a real center. And I loved the analogy of coming up Three Lakes to Eagle River and up to Land O' Lakes. I mean I love the idea that we can do all of this is Vilas County. This can really be a huge destination arts community. Summer or winter, it doesn't matter. Folks will come up for a weekend or three or four days in the middle of the winter if they can come up for the right reasons. And the husbands or wives can do what they want to do, and the spouses can do what they want to do in the arts. I think it's a great idea, and we've got some folks working on that right now. So I kind of got, let me-- Okay. I've been told I better do questions at the end. Part of being in here. So the real estate, the arts have all been part of that. One of the more boring parts of what our mission has been in Vilas County is, quite frankly, broadband. We can't expect people to come up here and stay for any length of time unless we can offer them not only broadband but I mean going forward we're going to have to offer them fiber optic. It's got to be fast broadband, we can't just do, you know, five up and 10 down, We've got to offer them fiber optic. So, to that end, we're offering that as of today in both of our Manitowish Waters locations. We're offering it right now at the eyeball building in Eagle River, fiber. Fiber means a minimum of 20 up and 20 down. That's, you can do anything with that right now. Now, is that going to be enough 10 years from now? No, we're going to need 100 up and 100 down, but that'll come, that'll all come. Getting the initial fiber there is the important thing for everybody in this room that has ever thought about having a business, you've got to have that. So, this fall we hope to have it in Land O' Lakes. We've helped with ChoiceTEL's grant that they're now coming to Land O' Lakes. We hope that'll all go smoothly coming all the way up there and spread to all the downtown area, fiber. And then Carl, if he has to hire it done himself, we will have it here in 2017, the year after that. We're dead certain about that, particularly with the development that we see going on downtown. So, economic development is so many things and can be so many different things to different people. It's all about what you perceive that you need to stay here, to run a business here, to operate here, or to have your friends from Milwaukee and Madison and Minneapolis come over here and say, "Why don't you rent my house for an extra two weeks." Yeah, I can run my business out of here. So, so many businesses are run out of homes anymore. I think that's pretty much what I've got to say. Are there any questions about what we do or how we do it? We have a pretty significant board of directors, and we've started with a really impressive board of directors and we've built on that. We've had some retire, and we've brought some in. Mark Long with Discover Wisconsin has just joined our board of directors. From out here in Phelps, Wally Beversdorf has just become part of our board of directors. So these are all good people. We've got tribal members on our board of directors that are also excellent, excellent people. And they work with us very closely. Debbie. My question was, as far as how the Economic Development Corporation, is that a nonprofit? And then like you were mentioning who, I'm sorry, I forgot his name already, who bought here. Yeah, we're a nonprofit. We are. Carl, I'm sorry. So Carl, does the then, he owns it as an individual entity? Carl does, Carl is one of those rare individuals that he's made a lot of money in the construction development business down in Madison, does buildings in 25 states, and he is, I mean seriously, It's hard to believe in this day and age sometimes, but he seriously is about giving back. He doesn't make any money on this building. He doesn't make any money on that building in Land O' Lakes or the first building in Manitowish Waters, and he's certainly not making any money in Eagle River. I mean, he does all the remodeling, buys the building. He is genuinely a person that gives back to the community. So I am just fortunate to have met him before I died, I have to tell you, because people like that just don't, they just don't exist. You don't run across them very often. -

Voiceover

That's very cool. Yeah. He's a great guy. Any other questions? We're available all the time. I have cards right up on the, back here on the thing. So please come see me if you have ideas or thoughts about a business or anything you want to talk about business-wise, we're happy to do it, and we're happy to provide mentors for any, you don't have to have a location in one of our buildings to get the mentorship that you might want for legal or marketing or whatever it is. Yes? So you have Vilas County in your name, but is it strictly Vilas County? What was the driving force? What made the group start up? Originally, some members of the County Board had... These organization have existed in other counties for some time. I don't know how effective they were, I really don't know. But members of the County Board, certain members, decided they wanted to give this a try. So the initial try, they went to Kelly Haverkampf, who was the extension agent at the time, and sad see what you can put together. See if you can put together a board of directors. We had to go through all the procedures that just kill me. I can't stand to go through how to set up the corporation, the mission statements. I just hate that because I'm really hands on with stuff, but we did it and I was part of it. I became part of the board, and by the time we were done, then we started saying, well, we should do this, this, or this based on the county. The county gave us a stipend of 100 thousand dollars a year for the first three years we were in business, and they have since continued that for obvious reasons. The investments made in Vilas County are bringing back more than that in tax dollars right now than they invest in us. But we've also reached out to the community and had a lot of private and corporate donations to us. So that's how we formed, the need. It was just simply a need. And, you know, as often happens with corporations like that, particular 501(c)(3)s, people don't really know what they're getting into when they first get, but you say, well, we could do that or, you know, this is part of that. This is a gallery wall for us, this is our second one. The first one we started was up in Manitowish Waters. I was up there and I just said, you know, we've got this great space, let's paint it a color and have a different artist in here every month. And Manitowish Art League jumped all over it. We literally have, for 2.5 years now, had a different artist on that wall every month. Some two-dimensional, some three-dimensional, some woodworkers, but it's great. We have a reception for them every month. They love it, we get lots of people in there. So we are well known up in that area. The same thing we want to do here. The last exhibition we had here was the high school kids from Phelps High School, and they did a great job. We've got an artist coming in in May from, is it somebody from, Lola I can't remember. I think so. I can't remember her name right off hand. But anyway, we've, you know, that's what we do. I look forward to seeing you again. (applause)