PORT TOWNSEND — David Ballif, EDC Team Jefferson’s newly hired executive director, said he hasn’t stopped smiling since he arrived in Port Townsend at the beginning of June.
Ballif grew up in Mount Vernon, where he said his parents owned and operated the Grocery Outlet for 30 years. Returning to Washington feels like a homecoming, he added.
His initial weeks in the position have involved an ambitious schedule of meetings with area leaders from the city of Port Townsend, Jefferson County, the Port of Port Townsend, local tribes and more.
He said the conversations are helping to steer his vision.
“Something that I’ve really noticed over the last couple of weeks is the high level of civic involvement and engagement of people out here,” Ballif said.
EDC Team Jefferson was awarded $1.2 million of the $35 million in Recompete funds as a sub-awardee under Peninsula College.
Winning the competitive grant is an emblematic example of the region working together, Ballif said.
“It’s necessary for Jefferson County to work with Clallam and Kitsap and the surrounding counties,” Ballif said. “We’re a relatively small and rural county, so to get the kind of scale we need, while advocating for our values and our interests, whether that be at the federal level, at the state level or at the regional level, it’s important that we work together.”
Ballif has been familiarizing himself with the grant requirements.
The money is funding three programs: A business advisor program, planned to result in 25 business advisors over the next five years, a coordination between local employers and workforce trainers, and investing more time and advising in south Jefferson County.
Workforce Coordinator Phoebe Reid was hired at the beginning of June to lead the workforce coordination.
Business Advisor Patty Schmucker will spend half of her time engaging with businesses in south Jefferson County.
The requirements for the funding are extremely ambitious, Ballif said.
“We’ve got a target, over these five years, to advise 952 startup businesses,” Ballif said. “We’ve also got a target to advise 1,760 micro-enterprises and growth-stage businesses. Really big numbers, so just kind of wrapping our arms around that.”
Nailing the requirements of the award is crucial, Ballif said.
“The most important thing, in addition to following all the rules, is ensuring that we’re actually going to achieve these outcomes of, not only businesses advised, but these businesses seeing net profit increases,” Ballif said. “Also, seeing jobs created.”
One of the grant requirements specifies that the EDC should play a positive role in the creation of 320 living-wage jobs over the course of five years.
Ballif noted that the EDC’s mission is to serve the entire county, including south and west Jefferson County.
The EDC won a $50,000 grant from Washington State Microenterprise Association, which recently paid for a website for a number of west Jefferson County businesses, Ballif said.
The businesses are sharing the website as a storefront. Visit the website at https://www.ancient-coast.com.
Ballif noted high education levels, the maritime trade, craft trades, tourism, music and art scenes and proximity to Olympic National Park as strengths.
“The farmers market here, I don’t want to exaggerate, is maybe one of the best farmers markets in the world. It’s absolutely remarkable,” he said. “Then you have the challenges: We’re not on the I-5 corridor, we’re subject to the ferries, we’re a long way from the international airport. These are aspects that make it all the more important that we collaborate together and coordinate.”
Before coming to Jefferson County, Ballif was a U.S. diplomat posted in El Salvador with USAID, where he managed programs for six Central American countries.
The programs had a physical presence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras while supporting programming in Panama, Costa Rica and Belize.
Ballif’s main directive was to reduce the flow of migration to the United States by supporting the creation of jobs for migrants passing through those countries.
“Essentially, what that was about was creating legal pathways for migrants from other countries to stay in central America and not carry on to the United States and create economic opportunities and jobs for those migrants,” Ballif said.
The offices would provide training to local businesses so they could expand their ability to hire migrants. The primary focus on that particular directive was on Panama and Costa Rica. The largest flow of migrants came from Venezuela, Ballif said.
“We also had a lot from Colombia and Ecuador, all over parts of South America,” Ballif said. “As I was serving El Salvador, we were seeing increasing numbers of migrants coming from all over the world.”
One of the challenges Ballif saw and worked on was that many of the migrants, particularly Venezuelans, tended to be very highly educated, with backgrounds as engineers, journalists and doctors, Ballif said.
“Like in many cases around the world, these are people who end up selling cupcakes on a bus,” Ballif said. “One of the things you’re looking at from a regulatory perspective, as well as from the businesses themselves is, if these people are choosing to stay in, say, Panama, and the country Panama has agreed to provide them with legal status and a work visa, it makes more sense for everybody for these people to use their skills to the full extent that they can.”
That entailed working with certification systems as well as working with business owners on how they could incorporate people into their businesses. Realistically, those individuals were unlikely to work in exactly the same positions they had previously occupied, but finding ways to better utilize their skill sets was a win-win, Ballif said.
Previous to his time with USAID, Ballif worked for the Center for International Private Enterprise, the international arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he won a $450,000 grant to support the peace efforts process in Colombia.
The public vote to ratify the peace process between the rebels, FARC and the government had failed in 2016, but the government decided to move ahead with the process, making modifications, Ballif said.
“It really showed that the government had to do a better job at legitimizing this process and had not done well,” Ballif said.
Ballif said he believed in the leadership of then-President Juan Manuel Santos.
Ballif said he and his team worked to consider the question of how well the government had done with incorporating the views of Colombian businesses in the peace process.
“I designed a program. One of the elements of that was looking at post-conflict, more rural parts of Colombia and convening roundtables with local businesses from those areas to hear what their perspectives on the central government was and what it was doing, to develop those into digestible talking points and analysis, and then to feed those up to the office that was actually working through the peace process so that they could adjust what they were doing,” Ballif said.
The team also worked with a leading economic think tank within Colombia to ensure the details of the peace process were economically viable and passed legal muster, Ballif said.
“I really enjoy working at that nexus between peace process and human rights, but also of the business sector,” Baliff said.
While working at the chamber, Ballif had an opportunity to work for the Department of Defense in the Defense Security Cooperation Agency as the director of its global training program.
“(I) was taking senior Department of Defense civilians and training them to go abroad and be embedded in partner nations’ ministries of defense and interior to help them increase their capacity and do better governance,” Ballif said.
Ballif would recruit the best country study instructors in the world to guide administrative experts in areas like human resources, procurement, strategy and policy to translate their skill sets from the domestic context to that of whichever country they were going to, he said.
After completing what Ballif called “super intense” eight- to 10-week training programs, those experts would embed in one- to three-year stints, sometimes longer, as advisors to ally countries. They would work under the U.S. Embassy, Ballif said. They often would have offices within the agency of the foreign government they were advising, he added.
“We sent advisors to Ukraine. That was the No. 1 country that I’ve trained folks for,” Ballif said. “I was able to bring one of the leading Ukraine scholar, practitioners in the world, because he was working right there at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., at the Keenan Institute.”
In addition to cultural studies and language studies, Ballif would design specific courses for the senior Department of Defense civilians. For example, Ballif designed a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) course outlining particular details on how to work in the environment, he said.
Ballif has been aware of economic development councils in Washington state for many years, he said. He has followed the council in Skagit County, his home county, closely.
“It’s sort of always been in the back of my mind, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to get back to serve the interests, values and prosperity of people in my own home state after I retire from the foreign service, when I’m 55, 57, 60? Wouldn’t it be neat to go back and be the executive director of an EDC?’” Ballif said. “All these things happened, and I sort of sped up my personal life plans by a few years. But this is something that I’ve sort of had in mind for a long time, being able to bring that skill set from the federal government, from working across different countries, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and hopefully make a great impact back here in Washington state for regular people.”
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
