2008 Annual Report Executive Summary

Upper Kanawha Valley Enterprise Community

The UKVEC located at Chelyan, West Virginia recently completed its ninth year of operation, its tenth and final year of funding and its seventh year of occupancy of its business incubator. The Business Center Incubator remains at capacity with a waiting list of prospective lessees. During 2008 four significant new benchmarks were added and seven were updated with progress being made and another six benchmarks were completed. This benchmark progress helps to sustain our economic and community development in the Upper Kanawha Valley. UKVEC is constantly being called on by the Fayette and Kanawha County Commissioners to aid their Planning Commissions. We aid their enforcement and development systems and programs of razing, infrastructure and town hall meetings. The Starting Points program that teaches pre-school children and their parents nearly doubled its number of clients and its funding in 2008 is under our umbrella. This is probably the finest program of its type in West Virginia. Starting Points began with one employee and are now at four full time and several part-time and summer employees.

We have aided the Upper Kanawha Valley Economic Development Corporation in its endeavor to fill its Technical Center. We have done that by steering our prospective lessees to them for accommodations. During 2008 we refurbished more than seventy computers that were donated to us and gave them to area students that could not afford a computer, or to senior citizen groups or to other non-profit organizations in the area. We continue to receive used computers from government agencies and businesses for this purpose. We razed two houses and cleaned the grounds that were on property that we acquired to enable us to build an annex and to enlarge and expand our business incubator. Through the Governor’s Community Partnership grant program, the West Virginia Legislature and the Kanawha County Commission we were able to leverage almost $1.4M for schools non-profits, fire departments and the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Department as well as smaller municipalities and their police departments.

One significant accomplishment was to work with Congresswoman Capito’s Office and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to keep eighteen homes from being damaged by or falling into the Kanawha River. From the Abandoned Mines Land Funding, we were able to persuade the governor’s office and the Kanawha County Commission to expend these funds in Winifrede Hollow and now eight more families have potable drinking water. Twenty-three more houses were razed in Kanawha and Fayette Counties due to our collaboration with the planning sections of government.

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