Port authority prepares to request proposals for strategic plan

Staff report

WARREN

The Western Reserve Port Authority is ready to request proposals from companies that can write a strategic plan for the port that will define its goals and clarify its role in relation to other economic-development organizations and other airports.

At the authority’s meeting Wednesday, the board authorized its director to seek proposals.

“There are issues that need to be clarified,” said Sarah Lown, senior manager for economic development at the port. The port has never had a strategic plan.

“Every agency needs a strategic plan,” Lown said. “It makes you more competitive, and it helps your cohort agencies know what you do and can’t do.”

The process also educates port authority board members and county commissioners, for example, about the port’s role, she said.

Some people have recently criticized the port’s economic development team of her and Executive Director Rose Ann DeLeon for not “going to Houston and wining and dining the oil industry,” Lown said.

“That’s not what we do. The [Regional Chamber] does that,” Lown said. The port authority’s job is to arrange bond financing and other types of financing and acquire tax abatements for companies expanding or relocating.

She and DeLeon, who recently won approval of a $600,000 Environmental Protection Agency grant, also work on brownfield redevelopment.

Business attraction is usually done by the Regional Chamber, Lown added.

In other business, the port authorized Dan Dickten, director of aviation at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport, to solicit proposals to build a replacement car wash at the airport for rental cars.

The facility will cost around $185,000 to $200,000. Some of the money that will pay for it will come from fees paid by rental-car customers.