Excerpted from Wisconsin State Journal
By Barry Adams

Plans to revitalize the creamery building, energize the city’s downtown and fill the historic brick structure with employees are being realized.

Mike Herl, a Dane County-based real estate broker and developer, and Adel Salameh, who has owned the Verlo store in the building since 2004, purchased the Creamery Building in late 2015. Over the past 17 months the duo has gradually begun to fill the spaces that for decades were used to make milk tanks and other equipment for the dairy industry.

The tenants include nearly 60 employees on the fifth floor from AC Business Media, a construction trades publication company. There are 80 employees on the fourth floor for RateWatch, a financial data company owned by the TheStreet, and Salameh’s Verlo store, which is undergoing a renovation on the first floor. What had been an adjacent warehouse for the creamery factory has been split in half for CrossFit Fort Atkinson, a fitness gym and a Mr. Brews Tap House that will open in a few weeks.

The project is being supported by the city, which approved $80,000 in tax incremental financing for improvements to the parking lots and $300,000 in the form of a revolving loan. The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. has also awarded a $250,000 grant to the city to help with further development on the site, which is adjacent to the Glacial Heritage Trail.

“It’s a catalyst project for the downtown,” said Matt Trebatoski, Fort Atkinson’s city manager for the past three years. “It’s definitely a welcome thing to the community.”

The Creamery Building was built in 1920 at the corner of North Main Street and Sherman Avenue, just a block north of the Rock River. The company had moved to Fort Atkinson from Chicago in 1898 after purchasing Cornish Curtis & Greene, another creamery equipment manufacturer, according to the Hoard Historical Museum.

Creamery Package grew into one of the largest manufacturers in the world for equipment for creameries, cheese factories, dairies and ice cream plants, but the Fort Atkinson facility was closed in 1967 in favor of larger quarters in Lake Mills.

And now it’s up to Herl and Salameh to ensure the lady can live another 100 years.

Read the full article.

Excerpted from Wisconsin State Journal
By Judy Newman

Madison is one of the few U.S. metropolitan areas with a rising share of tech jobs, according to a new Brookings Institution report.

And it may gain even more ground in coming years as tensions mount over the high cost of living on the East and West Coasts and over escalating political concerns, the report’s co-author says.

Madison ranked No. 20 in its growth in tech jobs between 2013 and 2015, with 2,900 jobs added during that three-year period in the fields of software publishing, data processing and hosting, computer systems design and other information services.

It was seventh-highest in the percentage increase of tech jobs, with an average gain of 11 percent a year from 2013-2015, the report shows, using Moody’s Analytics data.

“This is a thin slice of tech,” said Muro, senior fellow and policy director of Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program.

Even more important: Madison’s share of tech positions increased 0.1 percent from 2010 to 2015. It’s a small but significant number, Muro said.

“Lots of places are adding jobs; only a relatively few are actually increasing, substantially, their share,” he said. “That Madison is able to do that means it is truly one of the ‘rising rest’ that Steve Case was talking about.”

The Brookings report didn’t surprise Vicki Ryan, vice president of human resources at Nordic, a fast-growing consultant company serving Epic clients.

“We’ve got a strong academic infrastructure, great entrepreneurial spirit, and the Madison community is a great place to make a home,” Ryan said.

Read the full article.

 

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Madison, WI – The Madison Region Economic Partnership and the Greater Madison Convention and Visitors Bureau announced today they were successful in winning the bid for the 2018 Business Facilities LiveXchange event.

LiveXchange is a unique, exclusive event for site selectors and consultants who are searching for locations for their corporate expansion and relocation projects. The event will bring more than 60 professionals to the area for three days in May, 2018. The consultants will hold meetings and tour the region, seeing firsthand all the Madison Region has to offer.

“Securing this event is a boon to the Madison Region,” said Paul Jadin, president of MadREP. “Site consultants are exactly the people we want to bring here so they see the spaces, opportunities, talent and potential for their clients’ expansion possibilities into the Madison Region.”

Attendees will include representatives from Fortune 500 organizations, high-growth companies and leading site consultants. “Selecting a host city for Business Facilities LiveXchange is a very competitive process, and is something that is of critical importance,” said Ted Coene, Co-President of Group C Media, Inc., the parent company of Business Facilities.

“We were pleased to be able to collaborate with MadREP and lend our expertise in showcasing Madison in hopes of landing this important event. Bringing these key decision makers here in 2018 will help strengthen the Madison area’s reputation both as a location for building and expanding a business as well as an excellent place for groups to meet,” said Deb Archer, President and CEO of the Greater Madison Convention & Visitors Bureau and Madison Area Sports Commission.

MadREP and GMCVB worked closely together to submit the winning proposal and will help the conference planners plan tours and site visits while they are here.

“The Madison Region was chosen to host our 2018 event because they submitted a very attractive proposal that included a strong financial commitment, their location is ideal for our nationwide audience of corporate site selectors, and their hotels and facilities are first-rate. We’re very excited to bring the 2018 Business Facilities LiveXchange to Madison, Wisconsin,” said Coene.

“When it comes to attracting new businesses to the state, it is imperative that Wisconsin is on the radar screen of site selectors and consultants because they often play a key role in a company’s relocation decision,” said Mark Hogan, Secretary and CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC). “Hosting this conference in Madison will complement the ongoing efforts by WEDC to ensure national site selectors are aware of all the competitive advantages of Wisconsin.”

Contacts:
Paul Jadin, pjadin@madisonregion.org, 608.571.0401
Judy Frankel, frankel@visitmadison.com, 608.255.2537

View the full press release.

Excerpted from In Business Magazine
By Joe Vanden Plas

It’s been five years since Madison has developed a worthy successor to the High-Tech Directory, but MadREP appears to be creating something that might go much farther in the cause of business development.

The High-Tech Directory, compiled by Madison Gas and Electric, was discontinued in 2013, but a lot has changed in four years. That change is being captured in a new map of information communications technology organizations. The prime mover in this map-making project is Michael Gay, senior vice president of the Madison Region Economic Partnership (MadREP), and the project is about more than simply identifying components of the local information technology ecosystem.

With the assistance of a mapmaker intern at MadREP, Gay is developing a map of organizations engaged in information communications technology — both companies and entities such as University Research Park.

With a combination of logos and business descriptions and geocoding to their postal address, MadREP will use the map to market Madison’s critical mass of technology firms, available capital resources, and talent to site selectors. The idea is to explain that Madison’s ICT chamber is loaded, not only with established companies like Epic, but also emerging local companies such as Forward Health Group, Filament Games, and Per Blue.

In the spirit and necessity of promoting the entire ecosystem, the map also will include co-working spaces such as 100 State, business resources such as Sector 67, gener8tor, and Capital Entrepreneurs, and the noteworthy presence of technology giants Amazon and Google.

The map also will help tell a story about the depth of IT talent being produced by UW–Madison’s computer science program and talent being lured to Madison by technology employers. An ancillary but very important benefit could also be to limit whatever brain drain still hampers local efforts to develop the ICT cluster.

The map was created for ICT site selectors such as Newmark Cornish & Carey in San Francisco, one of northern California’s largest commercial real estate brokerage firms. The firm does a great deal of site selection work for prominent ICT companies looking to expand geographically, and its site selectors visited Madison last June on what MadREP refers to as a “fam” tour (familiarization tour). While here to investigate the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, particularly in information technology, they also talked about the value of such a cluster map.

Paul Jadin, president of MadREP, says the site selectors have developed something similar in the Bay Area, and the local map would primarily be used in presentations to other site selectors and to explain exactly what kind of technology density exists here.

MadREP, the economic development agency for the eight-county, south-central Wisconsin region, also is collecting data for a broader version of the ICT map for the Greater Madison area — with a Dane County focus — as technology organizations in Fitchburg, Middleton, Verona, and other local communities get some recognition, as well.

Jadin says the map will not only be replicated for Greater Madison, but for ICT organizations in the south central region and then for other technology sectors such as biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, and health care.

Read the full story.

Excerpted from The Cap Times
By Lisa Speckhard

For the Mount Horeb’s sixth annual Scandihoovian Winter Festival, residents will don traditional Scandinavian nisse and tomte, pointy red hats, and participate in a spate of winter activities including snowshoeing, skiing, sleigh rides and the ever-popular frozen turkey bowling.

The activities are spread around Mount Horeb, but visitors to downtown will notice changes. The village is in the middle of a major transformation representing tens of millions of dollars of private investment.

A local volunteer organization helped make these and other downtown development projects a reality.

The recession hit Mount Horeb pretty hard, and it’s seen slow growth since then, said Brad Murphy, the former executive director of the Mount Horeb Area Economic Development Corporation. There were vacant buildings and buildings in need of updates and facelifts.

In 2012, about a dozen individuals decided to take it upon themselves to get the ball rolling for downtown revitalization. They formed their own volunteer, nonprofit economic development group: the Mount Horeb Area Economic Development Corporation (known as the EDC).

The EDC’s first major contribution didn’t actually take place downtown, Murphy said. Members started looking for investors to build a hotel, an effort that the village had been attempting for nearly three decades. Six months later, the EDC had found local investors to fund the $6 million GrandStay Hotel and Suites Mount Horeb, now open on Lillehammer Lane.

The hotel changed Mount Horeb from a day-trip destination into a weekend getaway, said Dave Hoffman, chair of the Downtown Revitalization Committee at the EDC.

In 2015, the EDC formed a downtown study committee to look at how other cities were surviving and building budding downtowns. They were especially interested Sun Prairie’s Cannery Square mixed-use development that had been funded by a Tax Incremental District. It led the committee to consider a TID of their own.

The village was willing, and implemented Tax Increment Financing in August 2016.

Property owners downtown were also willing. When the EDC met with them to discuss potential development, they were met with enthusiasm.

New businesses started popping up in 2016. The former Dick’s Meats turned into the Sunn Cafe, Madison’s Trail This Bicycle Shop started a second store in Mount Horeb and there’s a new retail store on Main Street called “McFee on Main.” The EDC helped them along.

What’s happened since is what Hoffman calls a “positive domino effect.”

If you look at the development that’s happened since the EDC was formed through to the development that’s likely to take place this year, you’re looking at about $50 million worth of investment, Murphy said.

It’s all happened quickly, surprising even those at EDC.

“Frankly, I’ve been surprised (at the pace),” Hoffman said. “There’s been a perfect storm of us communicating, willing property owners and a village that’s willing to come behind it and help private investment.”

He gives credit to the EDC, a unique village organization that’s focused solely on economic development. Many times, economic development falls to the village administrator, who has many other responsibilities, he said.

“A lot of this I’m convinced is constant, persistent, everyday attention to some form of economic development,” he said.

Read the full article.