Greater Yellowstone business and civic leaders are invited to spend $60,000 tackling their greatest off-season challenges to economic prosperity.

On Thursday, a yearlong effort funded through the Yellowstone Business Partnership will kick off in six subregions to press social, economic and natural assets into service for year-round economic activity. Workshop sites in Bozeman and Billings; Lander and Jackson, Wyo.; Pocatello and Idaho Falls, Idaho, will be connected by videoconference, unifying the Greater Yellowstone region as it tackles common socioeconomic and transportation challenges.

The Billings workshop meets at MSU Billings Downtown, 214 N. Broadway, on the first floor. All workshops will begin at 1 p.m. with the videoconference beginning at 1:30 p.m. Dr. Larry Swanson, director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West and principal investigator for the Turning On the Off-Season report, will be the featured speaker.

Thanks to a U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Business Opportunity Grant received by YBP last year, each subregional team of volunteers will receive $10,000 for strategic research and planning into expanding their nonsummer economies. The subregional teams will include a broad range of citizens, educators, business owners and members of local agencies, chambers of commerce, professional organizations and economic-development groups.

Joint meetings of all six teams are scheduled for the YBP annual meeting in May and at the YBP Seasonality Summit in Cody, Wyo., on Oct. 6 and 7. An equally important focus of these gatherings will be a $40,000 parallel study to develop a "Concept of Operations" plan for connecting public and private transportation providers across the tristate region. Funding for this regional networking effort is being provided by the Idaho Department of Transportation and USDA Rural Development.

For more information, call Janice Brown at 888-583-8283. To download a copy of the Turning on the Off-Season report, visit http://www.yellowstonebusiness.org/.


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Published on Sunday, February 24, 2008.
Last modified on 2/24/2008 at 1:24 am