Thank you to everyone who attended our Annual Meeting last week.
It was wonderful to celebrate a productive year, to honor 3 economic development champions, to share a bit about our new direction moving forward, to thank Dean for his leadership, and to welcome our Board leaders into their new roles. For those of you who missed our 30-year celebration, you missed out 🙂
Honoring Gail Miller’s generous gift of the Utah Jazz and Vivint Smart Home Arena to the people of Utah through the creation of a legacy trust was one of the highlights of my professional career. I admire Gail deeply and am inspired by her business acumen and community giving. Because of the Miller Family’s profound impact on our community through their job creation and charitable giving around self-sufficiency, we decided that from here on out, our Cornerstone Award will be called the Larry H. and Gail Miller Family Cornerstone in Economic Development Award. Renaming it felt right.
Alan Rindlisbacher of Layton Construction is one of the coolest guys I know. As EDCUtah’s first employee and a longstanding supporter, Alan knows as much about the history, the purpose, and the impact of our organization as anyone. He shows up, leans in, and helps out in so many capacities that it was super cool to highlight Alan’s decades-long contribution to EDCUtah and to economic development in the State by awarding him with the Nick Rose Award.
And finally, having learned so much from Governor Herbert over the years, it was wonderful to be able to honor him. The Governor set an audacious goal for Utah to become the best-performing economy in the country and through leadership and teamwork, we got there. For his longstanding and unwavering support of economic development, Governor Herbert was highly deserving of our Thayne Robson award.
It was bittersweet to thank Dean Luikart of Wells Fargo for his two-year-long service as our Board Chair. Dean was the right guy for the right time and his quiet steady leadership set us off on a great course. We are excited to have Jay Francis from the Larry H. Miller group take the helm. Jay has spent 2 years training for the role and he will be an excellent and highly engaged Chair. We also thanked Mayor Mike Caldwell of Ogden for his great service as our Public Sector Vice Chair, and welcomed Cindy Crane of PacifiCorp as our new Private Sector Vice Chair and Mayor Bob Stevenson of Layton City as our new Public Sector Vice Chair. What a dynamic leadership team!
Thanks to Taylor for putting on a great event, to the team for putting a bunch of W’s on the Board (see our annual report here), and to our great stakeholders for supporting what we do. Cheers to the next 30!
