By Pamela Shupp, President, PEDA

I want to start out by thanking everyone who attended the spring legislative conference in Harrisburg. The content was great, the networking was great, and, of course, all the PEDA members, partners and sponsors who attended are great too! I was happy to participate in two dine arounds - a new idea we tried to expand our networking base and food horizons! I thoroughly enjoyed dinner on Monday and Tuesday evening at Bricco with some new PEDA members and some great economic development professionals! If you have the chance to participate in one of these dinners at future conferences I highly recommend it.

At the conference, we adopted our legislative and policy priorities for 2017 (oh my goodness on my voice dictation the word policy just came out as prayer!). So we need your help to communicate these priorities to local legislators and elected officials. As you know, it is always an interesting time during budget season and we are seeing a lot of funding threats to economic development programming and incentives. Make sure your voice is heard and that you share specific stories about businesses and development in your communities and how they are impacted.  Please communicate back if there's something that you need PEDA to follow-up on.

NOTE:  On Wednesday morning at 5:30 a.m. as I was leaving the conference to come back to Reading for a board meeting at which I was scheduled to present and then be back by 10 AM to rejoin the conference I had a little mishap. So while you were getting legislative and DCED updates, I was at urgent care being told that I broke my shoulder and was unable to return to the conference. I am sorry to have missed it and thank my colleagues who picked up my slack. Good news is that I will be all healed by the time the regional meetings roll around and I hope to see many of you during these summer meetings. Stay tuned for more details.