Veldrome Group Bike Race presentation by volunteer Corley Pearse

This is part of the presentation the entire presentation is in the recording below.

RDA Presentation to propose RDA participation regarding planning & promotion of the Veldrome Group’s Bike Race by volunteer Corley Pearse

“The point is we really want to be overly prepared.  This is a great opportunity for a lot of people coming into the City… This is an opportunity to start to change the perception. We are going to be bringing people, we think, that maybe have never heard of Coatesville even before… We want to leave them with a good impression or maybe we want to come and say, ‘Hey, I had no idea that Coatesville was this much fun! Maybe I should come back next year.” And then they start to tell their friends and it builds on itself.

So we really want to emphasize the opportunity to gather in one City to bring all respective groups together and harmonize our plan to execute together.

For anyone who hasn’t seen the route of the bike race, this is the loop that is currently planned. We’re not going to go into detail about this tonight. But suffice to say this is a broad a wide space and we really have a lot of detail that are either in planning or we still need to address…

So I’m standing here before you and I’m saying, hey, we have an opportunity but we still have things that need to be addressed. So what do I propose?

We would like to create a central program framework where we coordinate all teams to work together and we are asking for a single point of contact from each work stream so that we can streamline communications. Not to be exclusive or anything to that effect but really we want to maximize the reach of the framework that we have.

And we also, given the fact that we have only… 8 weeks between now and the race we really need to streamline… so that we have a clear process to estimate any issues of key risk.  Right, so we want it to go off without a hitch and if we do have an issue or we do have something that we need to work through we’ll have that process to address it together…  And I can’t emphasize enough that we have more than enough work to go around.

And we want to look at this as an opportunity to set a baseline. Next year we want to build on that baseline, subsequent year’s etcetera.  This will be a great year to put all the bits and pieces in place, have an overall concept for a project plan for how we are going to do this every year.

So with that being said, here is the program framework that we are recommending. You can see in the upper right corner there are 5 key areas:

There’s staging

 Sponsorship

 Publicity

 Administration

 Overall plan

Those will be the 5 main work areas. And then you can see myself and Dave Collins would be requesting service from a central coordinating function.

So we would be requesting bringing, streamlining communications. There is a ton of work that each one of these buckets down here. But we would help set up bi-weekly, there would be bi-weekly meetings that we are proposing. We would help with minutes actions follow up…

We would like to ask Mr. Rollins to be the single point of contact for the City to help streamline communications. Besides myself and Dave we would also like to ask Matt Baker to be a single point of contact for the RDA. Greg Krajewski for the Rotary Club as well as Rich Roth from the Wright Commission….

So we really want to get out fast, get a line, organize a work stream, identify the key risks. So there some things, some big decisions that are still not been made or solidified and we’d like to first get together the high risk items and move those forward. So things that are standing in our way from a critical path perspective and then get an agreement on what that overall plan looks like in the work sessions…

Just recognizing that we need as many people as can help, we need sort of all hands on deck at least 2 times maybe 3 times before the race.  And that would be to do things like: walking around, making sure that we slog through all the details in terms of logistics; sprucing up the City making sure that we can make that great impression; building awareness; and that would be doing things with people out there in the City and we’re doing volunteer work, it’s beautiful weather and were doing something and people will say, “Hey, what’s going on?” and we’re building awareness that way too…

So we want to have our nuts and bolts locked down at least a couple of weeks before the race. As you all know, you know, the best plan, is the best plan but there’s going to be  lots of things, the weather, somebody changes sponsorship, so it will be better to have things locked down for 2 weeks to give us a little wiggle room…

So we have 3 actions that we would like to ask for your support:

It may be slightly obvious but I’ll say it anyway; we just want to re-empathies that you guys are supporting the race and that you’re behind it and there are no reservations about the race taking place.

We’d like to ask Mr. Rawlings to be the single contact point for the City.

We’d like you to agree to the proposed framework e.g. the central program management and coordination and ask for full collaboration from everyone.

And we’d also like to ask if you could please place an item on the agenda as sort of a standing item for the race so that we could give you a status, and provide full transparency in that respect.

So just from a next step perspective we would like to propose 2 to 3 meetings; one in person, ideally and one through a conference call. In my day job I program manage as well and so it may sound like a lot but really, but again, better be prepared than be behind, right? We’d like to be able to talk to you this week just to get everyone together and to be on the same page and really identify those top issues that are critical path items and leveraging Mr. Rawlings to bring us back if we need to come to you on another issue…

City Council President Karl Marking, “Well I think you can count on everybody’s enthusiasm,” Ms. Jones, “For sure!” Mr. Marking, “I think we’re excited about this.” Ms. Jorgenson, “We’re all looking forward to it, it’s great!”