Welcome to Curated Morning. A compendium of news, information, and stories that economic development professionals, community development leaders and elected officials read every week to stay in touch with what is happening in our economy.

The Main Thing:

When you're in your early sixties, and you move back to the community where you were born and raised, back to the actual house where it happened, you expect some things to be the same. They won't be.

That happened to me. Of course, I'm realistic. Even I have changed (mostly my waistline and my hairline). But I was disappointed to find that some civic structures and social constructs were different or absent.

I'm talking about how the business community functions and how we receive our news and respond to what's happening in the community. But more than that, I think that since COVID, and since the onset of what I'd call "mean" culture, we have become a dissociated, unconnected society bent on achieving "likes" and asserting our "rights," even though most people couldn't tell you what their legal rights actually are, they just like saying it because it sounds good.

"I have my rights!" As they point a finger in your face and scream.

You see it on social media channels… oops, I just admitted to doomscrolling. See, I've changed too and occasionally succumb to the (bad) habits of our world. I'm no different than you.

This all points to isolation and a lack of connection. We have become personally lonely and, as communities, lonely. It's a condition serious enough that a former Surgeon General called it out.

I've been writing a series about this: loneliness, not just as a personal condition but as a civic one. This week's piece is Lonely at the Top — And Everywhere Else: When a Community Stops Talking to Itself.

Read it here.

Focus On the Green Economy

From Film Rolls to Fashion Loops: Rochester Lands a $390M Circular Textile Factory on the Old Kodak Campus

What do discarded t-shirts and a storied photography campus have in common? They're about to be partners in one of the most compelling circular economy stories in recent memory. French textile regeneration company Reju has selected an 18.9-acre vacant lot at Rochester's Eastman Business Park to build its first North American facility. This is the very site where Kodak once churned out photographic film.

The $390 million Regeneration Hub will use proprietary technology developed with IBM Research to recycle the equivalent of 300 million garments annually that would otherwise end up in landfills, creating approximately 70 new jobs, including engineers, technicians, and machinists, with operations expected to begin by the end of 2029. The recycled polyester it produces carries a 50% lower carbon footprint than virgin polyester and is engineered to be recycled multiple times. Your old yoga pants might one day become your new ones.

Why This Matters: This project is a masterclass in brownfield redevelopment that meets circular-economy investment goals, and it's a combination that economic developers everywhere should study closely. Reju reportedly scoured 30 different locations before selecting Rochester. Maybe you were among those sites considered. It ultimately chose Rochester for its transportation access, proximity to textile feedstock from the U.S. and Canada, and engineering talent from nearby universities.

The Eastman Business Park story itself is instructive: a legacy industrial site that once represented a dying industry now hosts over 100 companies and 6,000 workers, and is landing transformative investments by offering the infrastructure and partnerships that emerging manufacturers need.

Circular economy facilities like Reju's are a new and growing category of industrial prospects. It is one driven by sustainability mandates, near-shoring trends, and the increasing corporate pressure to prove supply chain resilience. Communities with brownfield sites, manufacturing infrastructure, and proximity to waste streams are better positioned than they might think.

Take Action:

Here are three things you can do today to potentially replicate Rochester's success:

Audit your brownfield and industrial sites through a circular economy lens. Instead of marketing them generically, identify the specific assets, such as power capacity, water access, rail, and highway proximity that recycling and regeneration manufacturers need, and package those into targeted recruitment materials aimed at this growing sector. While you're at it, map the dominant waste streams in your region: textiles, plastics, electronics, and construction debris. Where there's waste, there's a potential feedstock and a potential prospect.
Contact your state economic development office -- Ask specifically about incentive programs tied to sustainability, circular manufacturing, and extended producer responsibility legislation. Reju cited New York's evolving EPR policy as a meaningful factor in choosing Rochester. If your state is moving in that direction, or hasn't yet but should be, you want to be ahead of that conversation, not catching up to it.
Get your workforce story straight. Reju chose Rochester in part because of the engineering and technical talent available from nearby universities. If you have community colleges, technical schools, or universities producing graduates in advanced manufacturing, materials science, or engineering, make sure that story is front and center in your site selection pitch. If the pipeline is thin, now is the time to start the conversation with your educational partners about building one.

Read Polyester recycler Reju picks Eastman Kodak site for first American plant by Elsa Wenzel | Trellis

Read more articles about the Green Economy:

4 sustainable construction trends to watch for in 2026 by Diana Kightlinger | Trellis -- Architecture, engineering and construction firms will implement new tools and techniques to cut carbon, curb waste and build more sustainably — when they’re a priority for clients and jurisdictions.

Facing $32 million in federal cuts, Austin looks to self-fund rooftop solar by Keaton Peters | Straight Arrow News -- The Trump administration has attempted to rescind about $40 billion in energy and environmental grants, including $32 million for solar power in Austin.

Other Articles of Interest this week:

Technology -- Virginia to consider joining states creating volunteer cyber civilian corps by Nathaniel Cline, Virginia Mercury | RouteFifty -- A proposed volunteer group would help local governments fend off cyber attacks and security breaches.

AI -- Nvidia launches powerful new Rubin chip architecture by Russell Brandom | TechCrunch -- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang officially launched the company’s new Rubin computing architecture, which he described as the state of the art in AI hardware. The new architecture is currently in production and is expected to ramp up further in the second half of the year.

Data Centers -- New York lawmakers propose a 3-year pause on new data centers -- New York state lawmakers have introduced a bill that would impose a moratorium of at least three years on permits tied to the construction and operation of new data centers.

Housing -- Building More Homes Isn’t Enough to Solve the Housing Crisis by Claudia D. Solari, Christina Plerhoples Stacy, and Brendan Chen | Urban Institute -- Very few cities have an adequate supply of affordable housing. To ensure all residents can achieve upward mobility and have the housing they need to thrive, communities must not only expand the housing supply but also implement policies that ensure housing is affordable and available to those who need it.

Economic Development -- What the Winter Olympics could mean for northern Italy’s economy by World Economic Forum -- The Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics could bring economic, social, and environmental boosts to urban and rural areas across northern Italy. One forecast suggests benefits could exceed $6 billion, but the history of legacy impacts from previous Games is mixed.

How to do Leadership

You Can't Lead Alone and You Were Never Supposed To

There was a season in my career when I led an economic development organization in a community where some of the most powerful people in the room did not want me to succeed.

I don't say that with bitterness. It's just what was true. Political tensions ran deep. Certain power brokers had decided, before I ever walked through the door, that I was the wrong person in the wrong seat.

And so, rather than working alongside me to move the community forward, some of them spent their time and energy working against me. For five years, that community burned resources — time, money, political capital — on conflict rather than on progress. In the end, there was little to show for it.

What made it hardest wasn't the opposition. I've had opponents before. Opposition can sharpen you.

What made it hard was not knowing who was with me. When you can't trust the room, and you don't know which conversations are being used against you, you stop having the conversations. You pull in. You lead from a smaller and smaller circle until, eventually, you're leading from inside your own head.

I had no peer network. No group of trusted colleagues I could call on a Tuesday afternoon and say, here's what I'm dealing with — what would you do?

No one who had been in a similar seat, who understood the particular pressure of leading a public-private organization through political turbulence, who could offer perspective without agenda.

The state was full of economic developers. I knew very few of them well enough to be honest with.

And yet, and this is the part I want you to sit with,I was grateful every single day.

Not because things were going well. But because I had something to hold onto. My ethics. My training. The conviction that I was doing the right thing even when I couldn't prove it to anyone else. Those weren't things I'd built alone either. They came from mentors, from peers earlier in my career, from communities of practice I'd invested in long before I needed them. The savings account I didn't know I was building.

That experience is a big part of why I built the Circles of Seven and the Next Wave Leadership programs. Not as a theory. As a response to something I lived.

When you're leading, really leading, the kind where the stakes are real, and the decisions keep you up, you need people around you who are not your board, not your staff, not your family.

You need peers who can hold the complexity of your situation without flinching, who have no stake in the outcome except your growth.

Leadership is not a solo act. It never was. We've just built systems that make it feel that way.

Here arre four things you can do this week to build your “trust savings account:”

1. Name your three. Who are the three people you could call right now with an honest, difficult professional question? If the list is empty or only one name long, that's your starting point, not a judgment, just data.

2. Make one reach-out that's purely peer, not transactional. Not a networking ask. Not a referral. Just a check-in with someone in a similar role: How are you actually doing? You'll be surprised what opens up.

3. Ask yourself: what am I holding alone that I shouldn't be? Is there a decision, a conflict, a personnel situation, a strategic question that's been living only in your head? Write it down. Then identify one person, the one you could share it with safely.

4. Invest before you need it. The peer relationships that save you in a crisis are built in the ordinary moments before the crisis. If you're waiting until things get hard to build community, you're already behind. Start now, when the stakes are lower, and the trust can grow.

Leadership doesn't get easier when you're isolated. It gets quieter — and that's not the same thing. The goal isn't to find people who will make the hard decisions for you. It's to find people who will sit with you in the difficulty and remind you who you are.

You were never supposed to do this alone.

If this resonates, the Circles of Seven program was built exactly for moments like this. It's a peer mentoring model designed specifically for leaders who need a trusted circle — people who get it, have no agenda, and show up for the long haul. If you're curious, learn more here or reply to this newsletter and we'll talk.

Overheard:

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

― Arthur C. Clarke

The Rabbit Hole:

There is a fungus among us!

I don’t know where that little rhyme comes from, but it is fun to say. And for better or worse, it's more true than many of us might want to admit. Fungus is one of those things that are prevalent and have both positive qualities and qualities we want to steer clear of.

How many of us, especially those who are athletes, haven't experienced…well, I won't go there. See, it's something we don't like to talk about. Fungus. There, I said it

The newsletter 1440 does all of us a service by taking topics and going into detail about them, and it also offers a generally good newsletter on everyday news topics. In this version of diving deep, the cover fungus…the one among us. I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself.

Let's work together!

With over three decades of experience in economic development, public administration, and small business, I can now bring my expertise to benefit you. What are the issues facing your community? What obstacles are you facing in growing your business? Let's work on this together.

While I am experienced in a wide variety of sectors and issues, here is where my interests lie, and thus where I can benefit you most:

Organizational and Leadership Development -- Culture assessment, culture shifts, board and leadership development, mentoring, coaching, strategic planning, innovation, economic development education, and strategic foresight. Click here to schedule a conversation about how we can collaborate on this topic.
Small Business Ecosystems -- Start-up environment assessments and benchmarking, scaled peer-to-peer mentoring systems (C7), Incubation, and small business ecosystems design. Click here to schedule a conversation about how we can collaborate on this topic.
Personal Transformation -- Transformative personal coaching, training, and education in high-level productivity concepts of Flow, Grit, Resiliency, and leadership. Additionally, leadership masterminds cater to both new leaders and wise elders. Click here to schedule a conversation about how we can collaborate on this topic.

If you have any thoughts or comments regarding any articles in this newsletter please feel free to contact me through email at martin@martinkarlconsulting.com.