City's new information booth debuts at League Conference

Plainfield's Urban Enterprise Zone [UEZ] will host an informational booth at the 90th Annual NJ League of Municipalities Conference in Atlantic City next week.

Economic Development Director Pat Ballard and UEZ Coordinator Jacques Howard took a tutorial in setting up the pop-up display background yesterday morning in the second-floor landing at City Hall.

The display opens up from a small cube about one foot square by 18 inches high into a booth-sized background 8 feet wide by 8 feet high. The actual display panels are photographic montages of Plainfield business people and activities, printed on high density plastic. The photographic panels attach to the frame by way of magnetic strips on the back--much the way refrigerator magnets work.


Once they got the hang of it, assembly went quickly--it is expected to take less than thirty minutes to set up the entire booth in Atlantic City.

The League Convention is a traditional crossroads for municipal, county and state elected officials, vendors of every kind of product or service needed by local government, media people of every stripe, and businesses looking to locate or expand in New Jersey.

In fact, many municipalities have information booths to engage business prospects in preliminary conversations about locating in their community.

Plainfield's UEZ will be staffed by city employees attending the Conference as well as by Ballard and Howard. Materials on hand will tout the advantages of Plainfield's UEZ, as well as materials highlighting the city's business, cultural, retail and housing advantages.

2005 marks the 20th anniversary of Plainfield's participation in the Urban Enterprise Zone program, designed to make urban areas more attractive to businesses through various incentives, and to shopper through the reduced sales tax of 3%--half the state's sales tax rate. The sales taxes collected by members businesses are remitted to a Trust Fund administered by the State, from which the City draws funds on the basis of grant proposals approved by a statewide UEZ committee.


Keywords: Plainfield, UEZ, marketing, trade show