Karl McCollester (00:02.287)
Welcome. yeah, I'm here. I see, I hear you.

Yeah, it's probably just depends. I've noticed yours has done that a of times too. yeah. Okay. Okay. Ready? Welcome to Mighty Municipalities, the podcast about small municipalities and how they can punch above their weight. I'm your host, Karl McCallister, and along with my co-host, Mark Parton, and our guests, we take you through the highs and lows of working in a small municipality. Whether it's the hardship and frustration that is holding you back or the progress and wins that are propelling you forward, we're here to share the lessons learned and give you strategies to help improve your community.

Well, Mark, how are you doing today?

Mark Partin (00:40.346)
Doing great. I've had a good weekend so far. Normally we record this on a Friday, but today is Sunday afternoon and a good way to end the weekend. Yes.

Karl McCollester (00:51.598)
Right, yeah, it's a little more chill. Yeah, the Friday afternoon's frankly winding down also. But it's very quiet here, where I am at the very least. So that's a little different. So Mark, today we were talking through various topics and we landed on a topic that you found kind of interesting, which is the idea of small town recruitment, but not for industry. Tell us a little more.

Mark Partin (01:17.296)
Yeah, so, you know, it's very common for us to hear about economic development from the point of view of industries being recruited and, you know, the bigger the industry, the better. I know here in South Carolina, Scout Motors is, you know, was a big acquisition for the greater Columbia area up above the north of Columbia. And then, you know, recently here in Sumter we had the EVAC.

Karl McCollester (01:36.014)
Certainly.

Mark Partin (01:41.818)
facility that came online, which is Rare Earth Magnets and a few years ago, Continental Tire. So you're used to hearing about those big industrial economic developments where incentives are given to bring the companies in. Those incentives may include tax delay on property taxes, fee and lieu of taxes, infrastructure put in place.

training, you know, in South Carolina's case through the technical college system. You know, and all of those incentives are very important to bring in industry, but they can also be very pricey. And some of our smaller communities may or may not have the ability financially or from an infrastructure point of view to do that, but they do have other amenities they can offer. And the examples we're going to talk about today take advantage of that. They're, they're looking for people resources.

And they, you in many cases we're talking about gig workers or remote workers. So really the only resource that is needed is good internet access and possibly, you know, an office space, a shared office space, or even a dedicated office space. So, you know, a lot of communities can offer that access for our remote workers. So it's a great way to get people to move in to an area. In many cases, housing is

Karl McCollester (02:51.405)
Sure.

Mark Partin (03:05.88)
readily available and fairly inexpensive. Quality of life is great if you have a family, kids, just less traffic, less congestion and on and on and on. So a lot of communities are starting to look at different ways to do economic recruitment compared to the traditional ways of bringing in big industries. And a recent article that was on MSN online from Travel and Leisure Magazine,

Karl McCollester (03:14.029)
Mm-mm.

Mark Partin (03:34.704)
highlighted several communities around the country who are doing this and have done it successfully. And some of them won't surprise you because the biggest one is from West Virginia. And most people are familiar, West Virginia has had a big hit to their economy because of the shift away from coal and the coal industry being so primary there in West Virginia. But West Virginia offers a really strong incentive package if you will move into the area.

Karl McCollester (03:47.84)
Okay.

Mark Partin (04:04.84)
and stay there for at least a year. And you have to have been, you know, from outside of West Virginia. So you can't just move out and right back across and, you know, get a big payout. But their total package is worth $23,000. That's, that's considerable, you know, between cash and other, other offerings. And, know, if you are an outdoors person and you really like outdoor activities, they're also as part of their package, you get outdoor, free outdoor gear rentals.

Karl McCollester (04:08.566)
Okay.

Karl McCollester (04:14.413)
Right, right.

Karl McCollester (04:19.223)
Well, yeah.

Karl McCollester (04:25.101)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Partin (04:34.286)
Which who would have ever thought about that? But you know, if you need hiking equipment or kayaks or whatever, that's part of the incentive. So that's really a great way to attract people to their state, but also take advantage of the natural resources they have. So they're really capitalizing on a lot that West Virginia offers beyond just money. And then other communities are similar in that they

Karl McCollester (04:35.479)
No, okay. Right, right.

Karl McCollester (04:42.061)
Interesting.

Karl McCollester (04:49.003)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Partin (05:03.672)
are bringing out their natural resources to take advantage of recruiting people.

Karl McCollester (05:09.963)
Right. that is the West Virginia example is certainly on a larger scale. What we've kind of talked before about for small municipalities, figure out what your thing is. In this case, West Virginia is capitalizing on their wild and wonderful moniker of the natural resources that they have to try to find the people who are of like mind, right? Who like the outdoors, who want to be outdoors and try to bring that in.

Mark Partin (05:22.672)
All right. Yes.

Karl McCollester (05:37.491)
And then I think you had a municipal example as well,

Mark Partin (05:39.844)
Yes. one or a couple of municipal examples actually, but, one of them is Folly Beach in South Carolina. And this is, if you're not familiar with the geography of South Carolina, Folly Beach is in the Charleston area. So, Charleston area beaches. And in that example, they are doing incentives for employees of the municipality and they started out incentivizing public safety. so.

Karl McCollester (06:05.005)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Partin (06:09.552)
911 operators, police, fire, and EMS. But they are currently in this year's budget cycle, considering expanding that out to include public works employees. And instead of offering a large incentive at one time, they're offering a stipend towards their monthly housing costs, whether it's towards their mortgage or towards rent. But in their case, it's $600 if you live within the city limits of Folly Beach.

Karl McCollester (06:23.702)
Okay.

Mark Partin (06:38.832)
$300 if you live next door in James Island or maybe John's Island, but next door where you can respond quickly. And this is the first one of these I've heard of where it's just towards your monthly housing cost and not towards, you know, a down payment or living in a specific housing development that was built for those purposes. So that's using a different way to recruit people, but solve a problem of housing availability and cost.

Karl McCollester (06:52.705)
Yes.

Karl McCollester (07:07.659)
Right. Yeah, absolutely. And there are two different directions or pools for the state or in case of Folly Beach, the municipality for what they're trying to recruit, right? Where West Virginia is trying to bring people in as a net economic driver. I think Folly Beach is recognizing they have a cost of living potential issue for their local employees at the pay scale they're giving. And so...

They're trying to make it more attractive to live in a place where their employees are not having to commute 45 minutes or something back to the municipality, have them more available, like I for public safety, especially, of course, your police officers living in the community is always a good thing, right? I think Columbia has an incentive like that too, where if you live inside city limits, they'll give you a stipend.

Because even if you're off duty, if you have your police car parked in your driveway, or if you're at least known by your neighbors as a police officer, depending on your town's policies, then that obviously encourages better behavior from people coming in and out of the neighborhoods, which is great. And I think this is something that I remember when we're talking about places with cost of living issues or challenges where this has been...

Mark Partin (08:18.16)
Yes.

Karl McCollester (08:32.877)
something tried with not only with public safety people but with teachers as well at the school district level.

Mark Partin (08:37.08)
Right. And an additional different municipality in South Carolina is Cheraw South Carolina, which is located sort of in the North Central part of the state. And they are offering, they're, they're copying the Tulsa example, Tulsa remote to where they are offering incentives to bring people in to live in the city of Cheraw. And again, remote workers that have access to good high speed internet.

Karl McCollester (08:55.117)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Partin (09:04.496)
And Cheraw has seen a decline in recent years, largely because they were heavily invested in textiles and, you know, textiles has declined all over the country. But Cheraw has really been hit hard with some of those plant closures and relocations, but they still have a great place to live, beautiful places, natural resources available. Cheraw State Park is just an incredible state park if you...

enjoy canoeing and kayaking and camping and so forth. So they've really done a really well run targeted marketing campaign towards attracting people to Cheraw with these incentives and their package is worth $10,000. So not an insignificant amount of money to relocate.

Karl McCollester (09:36.557)
Mm-hmm.

Karl McCollester (09:59.535)
Yeah, I think it's interesting because Cheraw and.. I was trying to look for examples that. Met the smaller municipalities that of course are our passion because when you're talking about Tulsa, Columbus, Georgia is another one you're talking about municipalities with at least 50,000. Some of many of them have 100,000.

Mark Partin (10:20.036)
Right.

Karl McCollester (10:21.102)
population or higher. Columbus is 205. And so you're talking about a larger potential budget, of money to try out something where you're giving an incentive package as far as a rental stipend, things like that. What I found interesting with Cheraw of course, they don't have that money. So a lot of it was just the

Mark Partin (10:27.151)
Mm-hmm.

Karl McCollester (10:43.256)
taking advantage of the idea of this and not so being heavy of a financial package, but being more of a, hey, we'd love to welcome you. And if you're interested, the mayor will take, or the city manager will take you out to lunch and show you around the town himself and give you a kind of a personal introduction into the community so you feel more at ease. And I think that's something where if I'm thinking of your smaller communities where you are limited budget,

If most of our communities do the math, and let's say Cheraw's let's say they were doing 10K, maybe only 2,000 of that was actual rental stipend. The other 8,000 was getting sponsorships of gym memberships and things like that around the community, just like West Virginia's was, right? It's not a full package of stipend. It's a combination of getting your businesses to come together and say, hey, you know.

Mark Partin (11:25.529)
Right.

Karl McCollester (11:38.957)
We all agree it would be good to have more customers and have our customer base growing instead of shrinking. If, you know, to that end, would you be willing to help, you know, have a welcome packet that's also advertising for you that helps incentivize people to move here and to take advantage of these kind of things? So I think that that part is interesting in that it's not necessarily a...

a cost, it doesn't necessarily have to be a pure cost to the municipality, I mean, obviously, a move-in stipend or something of that might help, but what's more, you know, what can be...

at least also effective to varying degrees, is that idea of having something where if you have a new family or something coming into town, having worked with your Chamber of Commerce to put together a welcome packet that includes, you know, the year's membership to the park events and the, you know, three free family passes to the roller skating rink or the bowling alley for a year, you know, things like that. It's a great way to team up with the other

Mark Partin (12:39.608)
Right.

Karl McCollester (12:45.392)
other members of your community as a municipality to have a way to make people feel welcome and also get them out and mingling with people because I think one of the things, one of the key indicators of people staying for the long term is how they found community.

Mark Partin (13:00.289)
Exactly,

Karl McCollester (13:02.326)
Yeah, so if you find, you know, five or six families who are like you, who, you you're comfortable with talking and your neighbor down the street is always willing to help you out, right, that's going to make it much more likely that you're going to stay in that space. Even if, you know, you might have a, you know, housing issue or something like that, you're more likely to repair it versus move off to the next thing. So I think those pieces are interesting.

Mark Partin (13:22.372)
Yes.

Mark Partin (13:26.719)
And it also gives the community a chance to everybody collectively is in this together. So it's not one agency or individual that's really pushing it, but we really all care about our community. We're all in this together. And, you know, and we can also feature different highlights of our community. You know, like you said, the bowling alley or the skating rink or shooting range or whatever it may be.

This is an opportunity for every organization to say, here, we're here, we want to welcome you and we're willing to put some chips in to help fund this because the municipality or county government themselves, they can't do it alone. And it doesn't have the same power as having a collective come together featuring people from all over the community, not just for the services, but like you said, also for the interpersonal connection that is so important.

Karl McCollester (14:03.438)
Mm-hmm.

Karl McCollester (14:11.342)
Absolutely.

Mark Partin (14:24.835)
for people to really want to stay and stick in a community.

Karl McCollester (14:29.76)
Absolutely. I think the one other place that I found was, course, Cheraw I think, was a great example of and of a scrappy example of what can be done. One other small municipality I found was McPherson, Kansas, 14,000 population, 30,000 in the county. And they are part of the... And when we're talking about the examples we're finding, many of the examples were on the makemymove.com website, which is a aggregator, a site that has

a bunch of these municipal programs a way to advertise and kind of pull them together. So you see there's a lot of them in Indiana, a good number them in Kansas. And the reason why, as I look down to it, is part of them are getting, they're getting state grant assistance for this thing. So I think that's an interesting thing too. For...

our state level to consider, because obviously we're, as a state, we're growing, but most of the growth is centered around the three major metropolitan areas. Four, if you count the Rock Hill, Metroplex, and then maybe 5, if you count the Myrtle Beach, the Grand Strand Coast, right? But there's obviously the I-95 corridor, the Aiken Lowcountry area, the Greenwood and the Oconee areas, which may not be growing, which either are not growing.

or shrinking or not growing as much. So that is something where, you know, potentially the state could look at as a way to, you know, alternatively put recruitment dollars instead of towards industry, putting it towards recruitment of high value people.

Mark Partin (16:06.544)
And one thing that makes all of this possible really emerged and became a feature during COVID is the access to quality broadband. you know, relatively speaking, that's an easy infrastructure to, for communities to get access to, but really to take advantage of in these recruitment efforts, because there is so much we can do remotely now if you have good connection.

Karl McCollester (16:18.498)
Right. Yes.

Karl McCollester (16:35.854)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Partin (16:37.123)
Just like 100 years ago, having telephone access was a new thing. Now having high quality broadband is a new thing that is really a basic for us to be able to do business and do business anywhere.

Karl McCollester (16:42.862)
Hmm.

Karl McCollester (16:51.331)
Right.

Absolutely. And that's something where I think, you know, I'm not as up to date on Georgia, but certainly where the Carolinas with the NC Rural Internet Access Authority and the South Carolina equivalent, and especially all the work that the state agency for broadband, rural broadband and Jim Stritzinger's group, shout out to him, as far as really improving the accessibility of high speed internet in all of these small rural communities.

I mean, frankly, know, those many of the small rural communities have better high speed internet options including Sumter Than than Columbia where I live Because of that because of the the incentives that were put together to try to expand that access and so that is something that if you're looking at Advertising if you're looking at you know, even just simply adding a page about living here to your website and considering that what are the internet options?

Mark Partin (17:32.9)
Yes.

Karl McCollester (17:53.331)
not only what are the trash and the utility, be very clear on if you have gigabit ethernet for a reasonable price, make sure that's included in there and that you're talking about that on that site so people can clearly look. Because I can bet most people's assumption is that that is not available. So if it is, making sure that people looking at your website are aware of that can certainly be a plus.

Mark Partin (18:02.319)
Absolutely.

Mark Partin (18:11.887)
Thanks.

Mark Partin (18:18.005)
Absolutely. And like you say, the assumption is it's not available, but in many cases it is readily available. So take advantage of that as well. Yeah.

Karl McCollester (18:26.037)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And of course, there's Starlink and things like that these days. And of course, I'll be interested to see how all these things...

change and I'm sure we'll have an episode eventually on AI and small municipalities, how these things and incentive structures and availability will change as AI is coming in and changing some of the marketplace and job capabilities of things that are remote and things like that. So that'll be interesting to see as well. Cool, Mark. Anything else on that topic you wanted to share?

Mark Partin (18:54.432)
Absolutely, yes.

Mark Partin (19:00.367)
No, other than just keep your eyes open if you're listening because there are a lot of great opportunities available for these incentives.

Karl McCollester (19:09.706)
Absolutely. And speaking of other great opportunities, we have two grants on the docket that we wanted to talk about today. So first, May, due May 11th, the National Endowment for the Humanities is having their collection stewardship grant, and that's up to 350K. And that is, know, the way I can read it is that it, I think its intent is especially for important

records of historical significance, but it could be read and I would certainly look to apply towards things like... That could even be towards municipal documents, especially if they're of a historic nature. But certainly if you have a local municipal library and you have a set of documents from the founding, early...

early local history documents, things like that. I think there's certainly an opportunity for you to be able to leverage the NEH grant for items like that so you can propel forward and start being able to share some of those documents digitally.

Mark Partin (20:19.055)
Great. Another grant we have this week is one from the Knight Foundation, which is from the former Knight-Ritter newspaper companies, which was really a large newspaper publishing business. But they have a grant around that is funding several new initiatives in four basic areas on journalism, arts.

information and culture as well as community impact, which you may think of as another economic development tool. But these are available if you are from one of the former Knight-Ridder communities. South Carolina had two communities in Myrtle Beach and Columbia and Charlotte up in North Carolina. And then, as I said, several others around the country.

But these are opportunities to get up to $200,000 grants to try new initiatives, particularly like in journalism. we know local journalism particularly has taken a really big hit in the last few years. And in some cases, local news has totally disappeared for some communities. So this may be an opportunity if you have a journalism background and a journalism interest to come in and create.

A new avenue of delivering local news and the Foundation is open to giving up to $200,000 grants towards these new initiatives. And as I said, it's not just under journalism, but under arts and economic development and community impact. So I'd encourage you, if you are in one of the former Knight-Ritter newspaper communities, to take a look at this grant and it's at KnightFoundation.org.

And maybe you can have some success with that.

Karl McCollester (22:18.668)
Yes, absolutely. And we'll have, of course, the links to both those things on our show notes. And I would even encourage you, as Mark mentioned, Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Charlotte, and the Carolinas, and then also Columbus, Milledgeville, Macon.

all in Georgia and of course then some several other places throughout the country but I would I would bet that even if for instance you're a small municipality on the outskirts of Columbia they would consider you part of the Knight Ridder community probably due to their distribution so I would I would not I would certainly take a hard look at that and ask them questions if you're even close to that whether you're you know

a Fort Mill up to the north or a Soccastee or a Blythewood, something like that. These may very well still be available to you, so I would certainly check that out. Right, exactly. And there's a good chance they're looking for a reason to say yes, especially with grants like that. So I certainly encourage that. Well, Mark, thanks for joining me on this Sunday. Talk a little about recruitment incentives that municipalities are doing across the country.

Mark Partin (23:09.067)
Absolutely. All they can do is say no.

Mark Partin (23:18.393)
That's right. Yeah.

Mark Partin (23:28.719)
It's been great and I look forward to our next recording session and new topics to come in the future.

Karl McCollester (23:36.622)
Absolutely. Talk to you later.

Mark Partin (23:36.782)
All right, bye bye.