Mundelein_web

We could not compete with the regional mall in Ver- non Hills, right next door; we could not compete with Libertyville that has a quaint downtown with an enter- tainment area. But what we could do better than both of them, was provide better customer service to our businesses, and to be more business-friendly. JOHN A. LOBAITO VILLAGE ADMINISTRATOR MUNDELEIN simple strategies. “In the three of four years that we’ve run the program, we’ve given away a little more than $200,000 in grant money, and we estimate that the private investment in the community is somewhere around $1.7million. If you were in the private sector and you looked at the re- turn on the investment, you would say that was success- ful.As a government, howev- er,we have other interests– we’re not profit-driven,we’re just trying to be a better community. “So, if we’re true to our brand promise about being Central Lake County’s pre- mier location for entrepre- neurs, then we have to un- derstand what businesses want. The cost doesn’t have to be free, but the fees have to be reasonable. Part of that is we have lower start- up costs for businesses in town.We also implemented a program in the building department to turn minor building permits around in five days or less, and we wanted to be successful at that 90 percent of the time. The report we get is that the actual turn-around time is one-and-a-half or two days. There’s an urgency to help people get through these processes and to do it as quickly as we can–not to approve everything that comes our way because we’ve set a very clear vision of what we want - but it has to be a reasonable amount of time, because time is money.We’ve become very focused on the start-up business- es, because we think that we can do it better and faster than the communities around us. Another way in which Mundelein eclipses its neighbors is its ability to help potential busi- nesses quickly identify buildings or parcels that are available for sale or development. “One of the things that’s been critical for us, and that we discovered early on, is that there wasn’t good data out there on what’s vacant and what’s not vacant; how much of our commercial and in- dustrial space is vacant and what can we do to help fill it.Major data providers have limited re- sources out in the field obtaining this information, so we went about quantifying all of the space in town and put it into a database in order to have good information.Nowwe know better when somebody calls us and says,‘I’m looking for X,’ we can give them good data the same day.That’s unlike any other community around us.” Lobaito credits Amanda Orenchuk, Munde- lein’s Director of Community Development, with the marketing tool that delves further into opportunity site processes: “She developed maps of different quadrants of the communi- ty with all the ‘opportunity sites,’ whether it’s vacant land or vacancies in buildings that are opportunities for development, redevelopment or appropriate for new business operations. Each map includes all of the contact informa- tion for every one of those sites.We send those PHOTO CREDIT: FREMONT LIBRARY