The city of Geneva is looking for someone to head its economic development efforts, after Ellen Divita, the current director, announced that she is moving to DeKalb.
Divita, who has been with Geneva since 2008, will be in charge of reconstituting DeKalb’s community development office.
She leaves Geneva after leading the city’s economic development office through the economic downturn.
“We did a lot of support programming” for Geneva businesses, she said, including monthly meetings with merchants and training opportunities.
City administrator Mary McKittrick said she’s hoping to fill Divita’s job by the end of 2014.
“Ellen professionalized the department,” McKittrick said, and built relationships. But “every organization has to be ready for change,” she said.
As Geneva’s economic development director, Divita was in charge of downtown development, business retention and recruitment, long-range planning, tourism and marketing. Divita said she counts as accomplishments during her tenure facilitating the arrival of the Roquette America Innovation Center and the Northern Illinois Food Bank, as well as helping develop the city’s southeast master plan.
She also said she was proud of how she helped Geneva’s downtown weather the economic downturn that began the year she took the Geneva job.
“I called all the property owners downtown together” that year and offered them strategies on how to weather the economy, such as reducing rents, she said.
Ninety percent of the property owners followed through, one of the reasons “Geneva did as well as it did,” she said.
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McKittrick said that Divita also helped build databases that help staff keep track of what spaces are vacant and tell outside businesses what’s available in town.
She recalled that she and Divita took “walkabouts” each Friday in recent years, in which they would meet for lunch then walk a city block or two, stopping to solicit feedback from each business owner along the way.
Divita said she regrets leaving without providing more entertainment options, though she noted that restaurants have more than doubled in the last 10 years.
“We still have visions of more entertainment downtown,” she said. She also said she had hoped to get an auto parts store at East Side Drive to provide another key service on the east side of town.
In her new job, Divita said she was looking forward to reorganizing a department that will include community development (in Geneva, it is a separate department) and working on property maintenance and inspections.
DeKalb will offer opportunities presented by having Northern Illinois University in town, she said, especially in engineering and technology. She is also excited about the possibilities for industrial development, she said.