County Council Briefed on Team Volusia Activities

Saying it has been a “very exciting year” so far, Team Volusia President and CEO Keith Norden recently briefed the Volusia County Council on what the economic development agency has been up to in 2024.

Norden began his presentation with an overview of what Team Volusia does and how it operates.

“We are a public/private partnership,” he said, adding that more than half of the organization’s funding comes from private sector partners, and about 44% comes from the county.

“We work collaboratively with all the partners,” he said, which include more than 80 private sector companies. “It’s a great leverage of public sector funding and private sector funding. We are the business marketing arm for Volusia County.”

Norden said the primary goal of Team Volusia is to raise awareness that Volusia County is “an excellent destination for business.”

To that end, the organization focuses on seven target markets, including two recently added sectors of information technology and finance and insurance services.

“All of our activities from now on will be centered around these seven targets,” Norden said. “Our municipalities are very interested in us doing outreach because they cannot do the outreach.

That commitment to outreach kept Team Volusia staff busy during the first half of the year, with 260 face-to-face meetings with potential prospects, three new investors, 16 outreach events and 25 community events, according to Norden.

Over the 10 years between 2013 and 2023, Team Volusia was involved in attracting 54 established projects to Volusia County, creating nearly 7,000 jobs with a payroll of $332 million. The total economic impact of those efforts was just over $2 billion, Norden said.

County Council Chairman Jeff Brower praised Norden and Team Volusia for their work, citing the announcement earlier this year that Boeing is creating an aerospace technology center at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University that is expected to bring 200 engineering jobs to the area.

“When you got Boeing here, that opens the door to other aeronautical (and) space industry firms,” he said. “I would just say, job well done.”