Monrovia Launches Business Friendly Website

A business friendlycity has just become friendlier. On July 28, the City’s Redevelopment and Economic Development (R/ED) Team unveiled its Online Business Resource Center, designed to guide Monrovia’s existing and future business owners through the entitlement processes that come along with opening and growing a business.

The Online Business Resource Center is the perfect tool to answer questions for potential businesses interested in relocating to Monrovia, as well as a great place for our current businesses to find answers to questions about the City,” Monrovia Mayor Mary Ann Lutz said.   “This important ‘open any time’ resource is just one more reason why businesses want to be in Monrovia, and represents the type of concierge-service businesses need in these trying economic times.”

The public unveiling comes after a “soft launch” of the website on June 15. In the past month and a half, the website has already received nearly 1,200 hits – and Project Coordinator Lauren Vasquez expects that number to only going keep growing.

 “The R/ED team’s focus is not only on growing sales tax dollars, but on creating and maintaining jobs here in Monrovia – and in our eyes, new and expanding businesses means more local jobs,” Vasquez said.

In the past, information about how to open a business has been available on the City of Monrovia’s main web site, but through a variety of different pages. The new website is intended to make information available on Monrovia’s existing website easier to find by providing all the tools a business would need to open, expand and relocate in one consolidated site.

“Sifting through the entitlement processes associated with opening and growing a business can be complex, overwhelming and time consuming. Our hope in designing the website was to create a user friendly guide to help the businesses through the process with ease. Additionally, we wanted to create a one-stop shop for the business community,” Vasquez said.

The website, available through the City’s main website at www.cityofmonrovia.org/red-home, has sections including “Grow Your Business,” “Bring Your Business to Monrovia” – which walks people through the entire process of how to open a business here – and “Why Monrovia.”

Other categories include incentives, green business policies, and information on Monrovia’s Redevelopment Agency. It has also created a section for the city’s Office of Filming – an area that has received particular interest as filming has become more popular in the past year.
Another new feature of the website is the My Monrovia Business Blog, which includes regular posts about new businesses, profiles on business owners and posts on current events that may impact our business community. The intent is to provide a place where both businesses and those interested in what our businesses are doing can go regularly.

“We hope that our business community will visit the website and get the message out that we are business-friendly, and are ready to assist,” Vasquez said.

The Online Business Resource Center was one of the items identified in the Economic Development Action Plan, which was approved by the Monrovia Redevelopment Agency Executive Board on April 5. The Plan focuses on ways to attract and retain businesses, as well as developing a comprehensive marketing strategy for these activities.

While economic development has been a primary focus of Monrovia for the past four decades, the strategy for implementation has never been formalized. The Action Plan lays out this strategy by identifying things such as specific incentives, describing the role of a project coordinator and identifying key areas for redevelopment. It also clearly articulates a marketing strategy – which includes the creation of the website.

Implementation of the Economic Development Action Plan is being led by staff in the Monrovia Redevelopment Agency, which is tasked with creating economic growth by helping businesses grow and redeveloping blighted properties. In the past 40 years, the Agency has created or saved more than 3,250 jobs. Among the list of employers the Redevelopment Agency has attracted or helped grow include Home Depot, Living Spaces, Trader Joe’s Headquarters, City of Hope and over two dozen technology based firms located in Monrovia’s High Tech Corridor on Huntington Drive.