Paulding County Economic Development Press Release May 15, 2025
PAULDING – Representatives from the villages of Antwerp, Cecil, Grover Hill, Haviland, Oakwood, and Payne gathered for the Q2 Paulding County Mayors Association meeting this week at the Paulding County Economic Development (PCED) office.
Following introductions, the group was introduced to Nikki Reese, the new Economic Development Director from the Maumee Valley Planning Organization (MVPO). Reese is replacing Will Burns at the office, who recently retired. Reese shared that she grew up in the West Unity area of northwest Ohio before attending Wittenberg University. Her studies led her to the Darke County area, where she engaged in watershed studies and grant writing. The opportunity to come back to Northwest Ohio, in a similar role, enticed her to this position. She shared the low-to-moderate income studies with each village and expressed how individual studies can be provided with the help of MVPO for future designated projects.
Hans Rosebrock, with the Mannik & Smith Group, introduced himself and shared information about all the resources they have and can provide for the villages. With the many arms of engineering, environmental studies, surveying, planning, and project implementation, their team can be a full-service provider to small communities.
Village of Payne Mayor Lora Lyons then provided a brief presentation to the group about how the village is using some Chat GPT features in letter writing, project planning, and graphic design. She shared some other features, including the development of new digital file documents from older existing hard copy documents, and they weren’t sure where they originated. This led to an interactive conversation about the possibilities of taking multiple village zoning codes and overlaying them with each other for a county comparison. This could help guide further discussion on getting closer to comparable zoning around the county. This could also be done with township zoning. With the growing use of artificial intelligence, all in attendance agreed this would probably not be the last discussion on this topic.
PCED Director Tim Copsey updated each attending community on their current open land bank projects and where the land bank is in bidding out the new round two projects. Copsey also shared that if there is a list of homes in each community that the Land Bank should be aware of for purchase and rehabilitation that each village should provide a list of those homes to the Land Bank committee.
