A member of the senior management team with the Municipality of Chatham-Kent has taken Economic Development Services under his umbrella of responsibility.
John Norton, the General Manager of the Community Development Department, will oversee economic development “in order to balance regulatory functions and business friendly practices.”
Norton sat down with the Sydenham Current shortly after the move was made back in August.
Here is the full interview:
First order of business
“Economic Development has just come under the department I lead which is Community Development,” Norton said.
“So my first order of business there is this, late summer now and fall, we have several tasks. One of them is obviously I have to meet with all of the staff. So I am doing that on an individual basis. I am trying to have a good long interview with them and get to know what they do.”
Norton said order of business number two is to think about hiring the director.
“You know we have had an acting director in that role for now almost two years, so what we are going to do is post the position and have a competition,” he said.
“We will hire a director. Stuart (McFadden) is the manager under the director. We sort of have the manager and then the director in terms of hierarchy. So Stuart will either become, assuming he applies to become the director, and then he will have to hire a manager or he will go back to the manager roll if we recruit someone else to be the director. I think that is kind of the first order of business because I don’t want to make too many decisions without knowing who the director is and what vision they have.”
Norton said another major impact with economic development is work closely with the Mayor, CAO’s office and Council.
“We will wait and see who is elected Mayor, see who is on Council and we will get their vision and find out in terms of their vision what is their mandate and how do they want economic development to roll out,” he said.
“You know the current Mayor has had a big emphasis on foreign direct investment. He has been trying to recruit a lot of that. We have had some success there. If he is re-elected I imagine he will continue in that capacity. If we get someone else in the Mayor’s chair they might have a different vision. Part of my role is I think with the new Director that we have the right staff and supports in place to support the Mayor’s direction.”
Norton said besides developing a strategic plan and staffing plan for economic development with the new director, another priority is to start thinking about how to integrate economic development into the larger department of community development, which includes: planning services, building services and legal services.
“Those are the three areas that probably work so closely with economic development,” Norton said.
“Economic Development is often at the forefront in going out and trying to support businesses. What I find is that new businesses or existing businesses, we will contact them and say ‘ hey can we do something’ and they will be the lead of that, but then build relationships and help them understand what the Municipality can do and what the Province can do and point them in those directions. Try to find grants for them and things like that.”
Helping businesses “navigate through the bureaucracy of the Municipality” is another focus.
“So what we are trying to do is figure out how they can more helpfully walk businesses through you know if they are going to build something,” he said.
“There is the building process. If they are needing re-zoning or planning approvals for land development, then walk through the planning process. Then often we are doing MOU’s or legal agreements if the Municipality is making contributions so then there is a connection to legal as well.”
Norton added: “So those are all the things we are trying to bring together and we are trying to make it all work under one umbrella. I will be able to hopefully be able to direct and help develop a system that will be more business running, more user friendly.”
Other responsibilities under Community Development
Norton said he is also responsible for fire and emergency medical services, health and safety, prevention and fire inspections, the clerk’s office and licensing.
“What we are trying to put the CAO’s ideas, Don Shropshire would like to put all of that under one umbrella,” he said.
“So we have been putting those pieces under one department and the one piece that wasn’t there was the actual economic development group, which are like the front line of helping businesses. So we have continued to support them and I have seen in our department in the past is while I didn’t have responsibility for economic development, was certainly economic development came along and said ‘well, we have a project, can you work with us’. So we were working together with them already closely but this is now an opportunity for them to be right in the same department and have the same leadership.”
Norton said the Municipality will work with businesses and developers.
“Sometimes there is some tension there, right? Which is a healthy tension where you have got say a building inspector saying ‘ well they have constructed this wrong’ and maybe the owner of the building feels sometimes that they are not being treated fairly or ‘that is going to cost me a lot of money. Is there a way around this?’,” Norton said.
“You know the economic development team, sometimes if they have had that long term relationship in working with that business, they can come and advocate on behalf of the owner and say to the building inspector ‘do we have to do it that way or is there a work around? Something that is still legal but this is going to cost them a lot of money’. So having that within one department I can kind of mediate a little bit and help resolve issues and tensions. So that is what we are doing.”
Point person assigned
Norton said the economic development team has one employee who has been assigned to this process.
“We are kind of calling it like a ‘red tape’ exercise or a review. So what can we do to review the process from a business perspective. What can we get rid or what can’t we get rid of. And if it is things we can’t get rid of what can we explain to the business owner in a very simple way so that they understand why we are requiring this from them,” he said.
“Sometimes they don’t understand. Why is the Municipality putting up roadblocks? That is how it is perceived. Sometimes there is nothing we can do about it if it is in the building code or the fire code. It has to be done that way. So even if we can figure out how do we better explain that to business people, landowners and how do we eliminate anything that is unnecessary.”
Norton said the Municipality wants to be extremely competitive.
“Already in (the first) 10 days since Economic Development was transferred into my area, we have already met with two local business owners,” he said.
“One that is interestingly being sort of enticed to come to Windsor and do a project and they have come to us and said ‘well you know, Windsor has a very competitive program from their Municipality to attract businesses’. They are targeting some of our business owners here saying ‘move down to Windsor. We will give you tax incentives. We will give you this and that’.”
“So we are saying, we have to be at least that competitive if not better. We want to be extremely progressive. We want to be competitive so we are saying ‘I will do everything I can to make us as competitive as Windsor.’ We will provide you as good or better customer service. you know we will help you through the process. We will assign a staff member to walk with you. If it is a two year project we will walk with you all the way. You don’t have to deal with different employees maybe. Maybe assign a point person on that project. If necessary we will go to Council, because Council obviously has to make the decision around how competitive we can be with tax relief but lets go to Council and recommend that you know hey they are doing this in Windsor we should be doing this here. I think it is pretty exciting.”
Recent announcement of Whyte’s coming to Wallaceburg
Norton said the recent announcement of Whyte’s Foods moving to Wallaceburg, bringing 100 new jobs and a $16.5-million investment, has been in the works for about two years.
“That was the Mayor (Randy Hope), Michael Burton, Geoff Wright, Stuart McFadden, Kim Cooper. They have worked really hard on that. They as a team have worked really hard to attract that company and they have done a fantastic job in helping that company see that Chatham-Kent is the place to do this rather than some other place,” he said.
Norton said the project now gets passed off in some ways, due to the renovations taking place.
“So for example, everybody thinks that story is over but of course now they still have to renovate their building. So we will continue to work with them through our building department now. They go in after the public announcement and they have to go in and actually approve things under the building codes and actually make it happen,” he said.
“But from a strategic perspective, you know that is a good example of and industry that builds already on our success because we are known for our agriculture. We are already one of the leading ag communities, in all of Canada really, and so for us now to start attracting value add services. We have got the farmers growing the cucumbers and if we can get a company like Whyte’s Pickles to come along and say ‘why truck the pickles to the other side of the province
to be ready for becoming pickles. Let’s do that here in Chatham-Kent.’ So I think that is really exciting and we want to continue to do that”.
Norton said the Municipality is working on a whole bunch of levels, but their end goal is really
to see that manufacturing.
“I think as we know from 10 or 12 years ago when the down turn in the economy happened across North America, we were hit hard in our advance manufacturing. Our auto manufacturing. Some of that is coming back. We are still focusing on that very much. I also believe we have a big potential with the ag industry to see now sort of the higher end ag work come to Chatham-Kent. We are already growing it here, let’s bring in the businesses that are going to do the canning, the manufacturing, the freezing or whatever it is they want to do. So that is pretty exciting. We have got that with our fresh water fish industry down in Wheatley. Some exciting things are happening down there. So a lot of different pieces connecting to the food industry and I think that is super exciting.”
Lack of people ready to take jobs
Norton said a major concern of the Municipality’s continues to be a lack of people in Chatham-Kent ready to take jobs.
“When I first started here, and you probably heard us say this before, but eight years ago when I first came here, our whole mantra was jobs, jobs, jobs,” he said.
“We were trying to attract businesses to create jobs. We had a high level of unemployment. Now we are seeing a reverse of that. Now we are seeing businesses tell us that they can’t find people to fill the jobs. I can go through everything like the large companies like TekSavvy and Union Gas to smaller businesses with even 10 or 15 people. They are telling us we are having trouble finding people to fill these jobs.”
Norton said C-K is starting to turn around their resources to address how can they attract people to Chatham-Kent.
“There is lots of ways to do that,” he said.
“We want young people who have grown up in Chatham-Kent, what can we do to get you to come back to Chatham-Kent. We are also focusing even on refugees or other immigration. What can we do to get people to stop from immigrating and wanting to live in Toronto or Montreal? Are they interested in coming to Chatham-Kent? So I think we are going to see that is going to be increasingly a challenge for us in Chatham Kent.”
Norton added: “Our population is starting to stabilize. We are starting to see some indication that our next census that there has been a slight increase instead or a decrease. We know that we lost people from Chatham-Kent. Now we have got to get people to come back to Chatham-Kent and we need people that are in that age group and are ready and willing to work. Hopefully that will help turn around communities like Wallaceburg that were certainly hit hard during the downturn in the economy.”
How economic development supports current businesses
Norton said Chatham-Kent has three business units in economic development: foreign development investment, business retention and expansion and the Small Business Centre.
“Foreign Development Investment, which tends to be maybe more the flashy bigger investments. Our mayor has gone overseas and tried to attract some big investments and we would love to get those. Even Whyte’s Pickles falls into that because they are coming here and it is 100 jobs. That is a big announcement, especially in Wallaceburg,” he said.
“Then we have our business retention and expansion unit. We have Geoff Wright and Kim Cooper in that right now. I envision that area may need to grow because we only have two employees there, so we may need more and you are going to see from me a big, wait and see who the director is, but from me I want to put a big emphasis on that.”
Norton added: “Whatever we can do to retain our existing companies. We are going to try and create a more business friendly environment. We will be coming to Council. We have got community improvement plans that allow for tax relief for businesses that want to grow and I am going to be coming back to Council asking for those even to be expanded. Certainly expansion of businesses is so important.”
The third area is the Small Business Centre.
“I was just talking the other day to our staff member who has been there for over
10 years managing it and we almost need to rename it,” he said.
“When people think of small businesses they think we are talking about a lemonade stand or something like students. While they do some work with students trying to work with a small grant. We have a summer program where students get the opportunity to receive a small grant and start their own business. In fact the vast majority of her work and the other gentleman’s work who works in there is with businesses who have 10, 20 & 30 employees, which I don’t consider really a small business.”
“If you have got 20 employees that’s a pretty big business and if we can help a company that is being successful with five or 10 employees and grow that to 15 or 20 employees, we will take that all day long.”
Norton said in some ways it is better to have 10 businesses with 10 employees, as opposed to one business with 100 employees.
“If one of them gets in trouble financially and disappears or moves, you have only lost 10 employees whereas if you lose the big businesses with the 100 employees, then that hurts us,” he said.
“We have seen that you know in decades past where we lost Navistar and others and you lose a whole bunch of jobs at once. It’s the smaller businesses that we want to support and I would like to think about even re-branding that and not calling it a Small Business Centre. It is more of like a medium or just a business centre. They are doing fantastic work and we want to create programs to focus on them.”
Norton added: “I agree with the idea that maybe the news gets you excited and people in the community get excited about the big factories or the big job creation programs, but if we can just focus on those small businesses that’s really the heart and soul of Chatham-Kent, isn’t it? If we can get one or two people employed, we are very excited to do that. That is one or two people that are going to buy a house, they might need to buy cars, they are going to the grocery store, they are supporting their kids, you know they are supporting their family and they are paying taxes and all of that and they are being successful in our community.”
Is C-K prepared for potential big opportunities?
Norton said preparing for a bigger opportunity is something the community has to work on.
“We actually had a call from the Province (recently). They have got a company that is looking to build somewhere in Ontario. It is a very large project and they are just starting to look. Where can they go? So we are moving very quickly. Those are the kind of opportunities that are available where we start to say ‘do we have land they could buy? Is it zoned properly?’ As we know one of the problems with some of the investors who looked at us from China or from India in the past have found that we didn’t have zoning or industrial parks ready to go.”
Norton said keeping tabs of this notion over the next couple of years is important but it is expensive for a Municipality to do.
“We did build the Bloomfield park down by the 401. We have our industrial park in Blenheim and we have got to figure out whether they are zoned properly. I think it is about having a conversation in the community because sometimes we have to be careful that we don’t get ahead of the people. If for example we couple go out and spend a lot of time to attract a factory that might come, but if it is going to have a smoke stack or cause some kind of pollution, even if it’s acceptable to the Province, it’s within limits, it might be that the neighbours say ‘but I don’t want that’ or ‘we don’t want that in our community.’ That’s the kind of thing we need to figure out. How do have that conversation in the community.
Overall, Norton said he believes taking a multi-prong approach is the best way to move forward.
“We are certainly trying to attract some foreign investment if it can also fit in with what we do well already, like agriculture. Value add on agriculture like greenhouses. Value add in terms of canned or manufacturing, food processing. That all works well in Chatham-Kent.”
Looking for feedback
With his new role, Norton said he is looking for feedback.
“We hear from time to time that some people think we are doing well and other people think we are doing terrible and we get that,” he said.
“We want to really step it up and make some changes over the coming year to increase confidence in the work we do as Municipal employees. I would want to say that we want to send the message that Chatham-Kent is open for foreign investors outside of Chatham-Kent and by that I don’t necessarily mean we are going to be going back to China and India. By foreign, we might just be trying to attract businesses from Michigan or Quebec or Toronto.”
Norton said if they can attract them to come to Chatham-Kent, “that is what we want but we also want to send the message that our existing businesses, whatever we can do to help you grow, please come and talk to us.
“I would say have a quick conversation with us before you move ahead because there might be grants or programs that we can help you get access to funding whether it’s Municipal dollars or Provincial dollars. We will also if you are going to be doing any kind of construction work with you to get your planning approvals, your building permits,” he said.
Norton said staff is really privileged to work in Chatham-Kent.
“We are here to serve the people,” he said.
“I am trying to communicate to our staff that you know when someone walks through the door, they have a question, that person pays taxes so that’s really our boss and we need to do as good of customer service with our residents as any other business has to do it. You go into a restaurant and you are trying to get a sandwich at lunch and you are not being treated well, you probably aren’t going to go back to eat again. So we need to provide excellent customer service as well so that people say he I am paying my taxes but I am also getting good service. Good value for money.
Norton added: “So that’s our emphasis. I think that is the view of our entire leadership team here at the Municipality and hopefully we can get the word out and people will feel like we are actually delivering on that promise.”
Visit Chatham-Kent Economic Development Services online, here.
