The Frisco Economic Development Corporation held its monthly board meeting for the first time via conference call on Wednesday.

Topics discussed ranged from performance agreements with GEA Food Solutions North America and Blue Star Land-Frisco, to the termination of performance agreements with Cornerstone Automation Systems. 

Another topic a part of the regular agenda was Item 9, which passed unanimously and read “Consider and act on a Resolution regarding administrative implementation of potential amendments to existing performance agreements in response to business disruption and economic downturn directly related to the COVID-19 outbreak and pandemic.”

“In terms of board members, we had an extended conversation in executive session about a number of items related to this,” FEDC president Ron Patterson said about Item 9 during the call. “In general, this will allow us to implement our go forward plan and allow us to then reach out our out-reach process to a number of businesses to be able to work with them.” 

Board member Jason Dudley believes implementing Item 9 will help the FEDC provide support to contract holders and companies amidst COVID-19. 

“As you see in the Resolution, we’ve tried to capture a number of scenarios of how we can potentially assist companies,” Dudley said. “By enabling the president, and/or the president’s designees, to be able to make any of those changes, or work with companies to make those changes, may help provide some flexibility leads or breaks to companies while we also protect the fiscal efforts of the EDC. Our go forward plan is still in draft form, we will continue to tweek and revise that. We appreciate the guidance you provided earlier and we look forward to trying to implement this in order to support some of our existing EDC contract holders, and find ways to proactively outreach to those other companies and provide some non-financial assistance as well until we have a better idea of our budget.”