To start this year, I took over for the departing Ryan Twiss as the Executive Director of the Regional Development Authority (RDA). The focus has been on the obligation and implementation of the READI 2.0 Funds, the continued compliance and fund disbursement of our READI 1.0 projects, and the administration of the Strategic Development Commission’s state allocation.

We’d like to highlight a key feature of the READI Application and strategy going forward into the new year. The state challenged our region, and all regions, to think creatively to allow our region to create an evergreen source of funds to continue these programs as long as possible. The most direct way that we are pursuing this is via the use of loans and partial loans for the project.

To date, we have locally obligated $18.2 million, with approximately half of that obligation set to be returned to the RDA for future use. The RDA currently maintains $24.3 million left to obligate. We are maintaining a thorough and intentional review process to maximize the return to the region and leverage all funding sources available. One point of pride in the thoroughness with which we review these projects is that we began the process with the average request of $3 million, which implied that our region would only be able to fund 14 projects.

To that point, we have locally awarded 10 projects with 57 percent of funds remaining to obligate. The entire regional initiatives team has helped over the last quarter in reengaging the Northeast Indiana Lenders consortium to assist the RDA in crafting these loans into meaningful assistance to these projects while assuring that the funds in these loans are secure for our region’s future prosperity.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Mike Galbraith (rda@neindiana.com) or myself (jacob@neindiana.com).