FRESNO COUNTY – Before finalizing a plan that will help shape the economic profile of the region for the next five years, the Fresno County Economic Development Corporation (EDC) wants to give the public ample opportunity to weigh in.
The plan, known as the Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy, or CEDS, is intended to be a roadmap for economic advancement in Fresno County between 2025 and 2030. After almost a year of working on the CEDS with its partners at the County of Fresno and consulting firm TIP Strategies, the Fresno County EDC plans to have a public review draft of the document available by the end of April.
Once the draft is published, a 30-day public review period will begin before it is officially adopted by the county. Although extensive public outreach occurred as the CEDS was drafted, Fresno County EDC Director of Business Services Lauren Nikkel said this public review period is the time for anyone who was missed during other engagement opportunities to weigh in.
“When we think about additional state, federal and private funding to come into this county, we absolutely want a document that is reflective of this community as it stands right now, and it’s important for people to plug into that because this will be the CEDS that we have from 2025 to 2030,” Nikkel said.
While the CEDS may sound like something that is full of bureaucratic gibberish, indecipherable to anyone who doesn’t work in government, it is an essential planning tool that focuses less on buzzwords and more on what Fresno County residents need to succeed.
Through data collection and stakeholder engagement, those working on the CEDS have outlined goals for business expansion, workforce development and infrastructure investments and have mapped out ways the region can achieve those goals.
For example, the CEDS could identify that there is a need for workforce development in various industries like manufacturing, construction and distribution. This may have come about from residents saying that they have struggled to find good-paying jobs because they don’t have the right qualifications, and to become certified in a specific trade, they would need to attend a program that they can’t afford.
Knowing that this is a need, the CEDS would lay out why it is a need, what resources already exist in the area and what the county and its various community partners can do to address the need. This would give the county a clear path forward to achieve its goals and put the county in a good position to receive federal funding for programs that align with those goals.
In fact, this was something included in Fresno County’s previous CEDS, which Nikkel said laid the groundwork for two major investments in the region from the federal government.
One of those investments was the Good Jobs Challenge, also referred to as Good Jobs Central Valley, a project that spans Fresno, Madera, Kings and Tulare counties. The project helps residents get skills training in manufacturing, construction trades, distribution, logistics and broader business services and puts participants on a path toward landing a job in their respective field.
“Had the Good Jobs project not demonstrated alignment with the CEDS, that funding would not have come down, and therefore there’s training dollars that would not have been accessible to folks,” Nikkel said.
This is why public input on the CEDS is so important to Nikkel. When the public draft becomes available, she said some good things for people to think about and comment on include strengths and weaknesses related to economic growth, new projects in other states that could be good examples for the county to look at, infrastructure challenges and so on.
During community roundtables, Nikkel said one thing that came up frequently was that limited access to childcare is one of the biggest barriers to employment for many. Another issue talked about often was access to broadband, whether that meant the service itself being available in an area or it being affordable. Those kinds of complex economic problems are what the CEDS is trying to solve, Nikkel said.
“There’s no one funding source or one project that’s going to fix all of it, but it’s a call for us to figure out how we do these things with multiple partners,” Nikkel said.
‘Not your grandad’s CEDS’
The CEDS is a vital document for the county and its cities to have when it comes time to apply for federal grant funding. The U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA), which is housed under the Department of Commerce, requires all regions — which could be one or multiple counties or cities — to have a CEDS that is updated every five years in order to qualify for grants.
Fresno County’s most recent CEDS covered the years 2016 to 2022, which means that it has been nearly 10 years since formal discussions around the region’s economic needs occurred, Nikkel said. The county has been operating on an extension for the last few years, and Nikkel said when it came time to start the update, the EDC really wanted the CEDS to be an evergreen, living, breathing document.
“We here at EDC sat with our partners at the county … and said it’s time for us to update the CEDS, but if we’re going to do this, we don’t want it to be to check the box,” she said.
Nikkel went on to say that most CEDS require the region’s governing body to convene a strategy committee, conduct some interviews and identify priorities that are then codified into a document.
“(It’s) like 160 pages and it sits in a binder or in PDF form on a website and just kind of collects dust,” she said. “It’s there for reference when people decide that they’re going to go to the federal government to the EDA for funds, but it’s not alive.”
To make sure that that didn’t happen to the 2025-2030 CEDS, Nikkel said the EDC and county’s project team brought on third-party consultants, TIP Strategies, to help with robust stakeholder engagement and to make the finished product fully digitally integrated.
Once complete, the CEDS will live on the EDC website. Data that was collected through the fall of 2024 during the project’s “discovery” phase will be available and the document will be available in multiple languages. Nikkel said the strategy committee and project team will also revisit the CEDS every year over the next five years to update it and ensure it remains relevant.
Nikkel said that when they put the project together, she joked that the design for it is “not your grandad’s CEDS.”
The update to the CEDS covers all of Fresno County and every city within the county except the city of Fresno; Nikkel said when the county began to update its CEDS, the city of Fresno already had its own update underway. Although the CEDS are separate, the goals outlined will align with each other.
Once the CEDS public review draft is ready, it will be available on the Fresno County EDC’s website and at some branches of the Fresno County Public Library.
