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Follow-up from the 6th Chamber Roundtable Meeting

By April 20, 2016Uncategorized

Follow-up from the 6th Chamber Roundtable Meeting

The sixth Chamber Roundtable Meeting was held on April 13th, 2016 at the Ladysmith Little Theatre and represented the culmination of a little over a year’s work through the Roundtable Process.  Economic Development has been the focus of these meetings since they began in January 2015 and after sifting through many reports, and looking at many options, two Economic Development projects have been chosen as top priorities that the Chamber of Commerce and its community partners will pursue.   These two projects were chosen based on the availability of resources to complete them and their relative capacity to improve economic conditions in the community:

  1. A Business Retention and Expansion Survey (Business Walk):  To develop baseline information about local businesses, their overall health and satisfaction as well as developing strategies to better assist in retaining the businesses in Ladysmith and/or helping them grow and prosper.  The group suggested that this project should start right away, with a target date of June for the survey to be released and with the report to be made available as soon as possible thereafter.   The Chamber will form a steering committee to guide this project consisting of members from the Chamber, the Ladysmith Downtown Business Association, the Town of Ladysmith and the community.
  2. Cost of Doing Business Research: Research into some of the fixed and variable costs which are incurred by businesses in Ladysmith which affect the overall business climate, including but not limited to, commercial and property taxes.    This project will be targeted for the fall and the Chamber will seek assistance from Vancouver Island University to carry out the research.  A steering committee of community partners will again be sought to guide this process.

It was recommended by those in attendance that we suspend the Roundtable Meetings while we focus all of our efforts on these projects.  The Roundtable Process will then resume (presumably sometime in 2017) armed with the results of these two research projects to determine what to do next.

 

Stay tuned for more information about these two important projects in the weeks and months to come.