Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a great Holiday Season. I wanted to let you know how honored I am to have been re-elected President of such a fine organization! With JoEllen Seil taking a new job with the City of Grayville she was no longer eligible to remain on the board as Grayville does not have an Enterprise Zone. Congratulations JoEllen, we sure miss you!

Now that we are in the new year it is time to get back to business and make plans for the association. Our board met in November to set 2008 conference agendas, create new goals and objectives, approve a budget, and to work on changes to the By-Laws. Those proposed changes can be found on the web-page and will be voted on at the Spring IEZA training conference in Bloomington. We also discussed what items we need to be working on to improve our organization and zones throughout the state.

Many changes have taken place on the state level dealing with economic development and none of them really what we wanted to happen especially with a career change for our close colleague Thomas Henderson. We are sorry he is no longer with the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity but are happy we will still be working with him through the Illinois Tax Increment Association as their new Executive Director. Congratulations Tom!

Dues notices will be going out in January and we hope you will once again join the IEZA or if you are not a member become one.

Dues remain the same this year but we have added a little incentive to getting them paid in a timely manner. That reminds me, please don’t forget that if you are not a paid member your zone and contact information will NOT be listed on the web-page. Speaking of the listings on the web-page please remember to notify me of any changes in your contact information. I have received several phone calls from prospective businesses who wanted to locate in areas or expand and they had not been able to get in contact with the local Enterprise Zone Administrator due to obsolete information. I would sure hate for you to miss out on new investment in your zone because you cannot be contacted!

IEZA will be conducting a survey that will be posted on the web-page. I know I told you I would do that before the end of the year but with my assistant taking a new job I have been a little overwhelmed at work. Anyway, we will be asking questions such as, would you like the board to start work on extending the termination date once again? It seems like we just accomplished this through the legislative process. However, many zones are already into the last few years of their extension. The survey will also ask about other issues like how many acres you have remaining, salaries and benefits for administrators, for how many years or how your abatements are structured, do you charges fees for projects or additions to territory etc. If you have a particular question and would like it added to the survey we will consider adding those. Please email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Brandi Stennett from Mt. Carmel has agreed to be our newsletter co-chair along with Mark Williams. Brandi has already started getting a newsletter ready so if you have anything you would like included please email her at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Our goal is to no longer send newsletters through the mail but distribute all of them via email. Make sure we have your current email address so you won’t miss out. Send any updates to Sally Heffernan at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Don’t forget if you have any news items or announcements to be posted on the web-page please get those to me. We don’t want our IEZA web-page to be stale news plus this is a great way to get out the word about how our zones are benefiting their communities.

Here’s wishing you a Prosperous and Great New Year!