Portage Regional Economic Development's executive director laid out his vision for PRED at last night's City Council meeting.

Vern May says the focus will be strictly economic development, rather than community development, because there are a number of organizations like ROK, PCRC, and the PRRA already doing that.

"Economic development, we need to work with those agencies, because how well they build up the community is part of our sell to potential investment. But when you taxpayer dollars that are funding an agency, they need to know that we're fulfilling our mandate. And economic development is about investment attraction."

May says PRED's dealing with about ten files already, but he wants to make certain the city's investment ready, pointing to an exercise that was done about 18 months ago.

"In terms of what the questions that a developer's going to ask when they come. And of all the communities that took the investment readiness test, the top scoring community that was willing to share their answer, only scored 54%. And that was a community much larger than ours. I've shared that information with Council, to say let's take a look at this, because these are the things that are going to be coming from PRED, in terms of how we get investment ready."

You can read the entire presentation here.