BELLINGHAM, WA (MyBellinghamNow.com) – Staff writer Jason Upton got a chance to catch up with Guy Occhiogrosso – President and CEO of the Bellingham Regional Chamber of Commerce – to find out how he made his way to Bellingham, how he’s seen the business landscape change over the years, what challenges local businesses are currently facing and much, much more.

 

JU: Introduce yourself a little bit. What does our Chamber of Commerce do and how are you involved with it? 

GO: I think the concept of a Chamber of Commerce is something that has been around for years, decades, centuries even. It started I think in the 1600s, actually over in Europe, with the European Trade Union, and certainly made its way stateside through the formation of the country and then the westward movement across the country. And so, what we call the Bellingham Regional Chamber of Commerce has actually been around for about 130 to 140 years in this community. And simply put, it is a membership organization for the business community. 

We [in the chamber industry] often say you’ve seen one chamber, you’ve seen one chamber, because we’re all so different. And that’s because we’re responsive to the needs of the community. We often think of ourselves as problem solvers, really with that lens of business success and connection, but there’s certainly a community engagement part of it as well. 

We host our Whatcom Report radio show, one program that we do. We also started Ski to Sea almost 40 years ago. And we’ve had these big community events. Most recently, the Fourth of July Spectacular is produced by the chamber. And then there’s very programmatic deliverables for the business community that function around advocacy, connection, education, promotion, workforce development, economic development, business development. So doing a lot of things that are sometimes behind the scenes to the general public, but very impactful to business success. 

So that’s probably as succinct as I could describe what is a chamber without getting really in the weeds. And as far as my role with the organization, I am the president and CEO, which means I’m the top paid staff person of a small staff team working for the organization.

 

JU: What is your background around this area?

GO: So I, just this past week or so, celebrated my 20 year anniversary moving to Bellingham and Whatcom County. I was not born here, even though I have family that were born here because my dad moved here back in the early 60s. So a deep, deep connection, I would say, some roots in the community as well. But I was born, raised, educated, graduated in Southwest Louisiana. And so after college, I moved up because I have three siblings and eight nieces and nephews that I wanted to get to know.

And that’s why I moved here 20 years ago and, you know, in a post college world, as many of our post college graduates in the community desire to do, go get a job. And so 18 years ago, roughly, I started with the Ferndale Chamber as their executive director. Their role, what they did as a programmatic deliverable, was different than what we do here with the Bellingham Regional Chamber, but 18 years doing chamber work in Whatcom County.

 

JU: So over that time, in what ways have you seen the business landscape of Bellingham, or just Whatcom County as a whole, change? Are there any specific areas where you’ve seen that change in? 

GO: In Whatcom County, we love – I’m going to frame this positively – a good debate, right? We love having conversation. Sometimes it looks like people, you know, disagree and conflict, but I’ve seen some of the really big conversations over time as a real identifier mark for what our business community exists in. 

I think we often struggle with growth in Whatcom County. There’s a lot of individuals that don’t want to see any of that and, for me, there’s a little bit of an irony there when you look at the fact that there’s 7 million people roughly an hour and a half from downtown Bellingham who call that home. We have a lot of people within our general area and a lot of business is driven from that. You can’t deny the cross border impact.

Retail has often been a pretty robust conversation, and I think as we move further outside of the pandemic, we’re seeing retail change. As I mentioned, we often have healthy debates, and probably 10 to 15 years ago, one of the big debates in the community was whether or not Bellingham wanted large retail, or big-box retail, and wanted to cap the size of big box. But the market has shifted, so much so that now online is arguably the biggest driver in changing the retail landscape that the conversation is almost moot to this point.

I think one of the other pieces is when we look at our job base. This is a big, big idea, an issue that we have to face as a community with the skyrocketing cost of living – largely pinned on the cost of housing in our community. We need good paying jobs that can keep up with that. And again – we love a good debate – when we think of one of the biggest employment sectors in our community, Cherry Point Industries, we spent a lot of time as a community arguing about whether they should or shouldn’t be there. 

And so when we talk about setting an environment for business success, businesses need some things. They need access to employees. They need good, trained employees, which we check the box on. We have some amazing higher-ed institutions. Businesses also need reliability and understanding that the landscape isn’t going to change so radically, so quickly. And that is something that, unfortunately, we don’t do as a community. And I think we’re – to this point in a post pandemic world – starting to see and feel a lot of those pain points, particularly our business community.

 

JU: What specific things have you noticed that business owners are identifying at this point that are at the top of the priority list for them?

GO: A big advocacy point for me is housing. We talk about housing in so many different frameworks, right? You often hear affordable housing as a concept, as a term, and it doesn’t mean anything. What is affordable for you may not be what’s affordable to me. It functionally doesn’t mean anything unless you want to tie it to the median wage in the community, then that’s a different framework, but most people just say we need more affordable housing. Well, what does that even mean? 

I say we need more available housing. In a supply and demand world, more housing will keep the costs down. When you look at the population density here, in our greater region, so many people want to be here. 

I said earlier, businesses need a good supply of trained workers and a trained workforce. Well, if you don’t have any place for people to live, you’re not going to have that workforce. And again, poor regulation over taxation, all of those still bubble up as big issues as well.

 

JU: So what’s the best way for the community to be involved with the Chamber of Commerce, see what’s going on and just get active in the business scene?

GO: I think the biggest thing people can do is engage with our local employers and our local businesses, recognizing that we are in an inflationary time and those inflationary costs impact businesses too. I recognize that there’s a purchase decision point for our residents and our community members, but that’s one of the biggest pieces. 

We don’t really do many community events anymore, so there’s not as much of an engagement opportunity for residents to engage with us in that way, but if you’re a business we have a lot of different offerings and programmatic deliverables that you can take part in. We’d hope you’d consider joining the chamber and participating in our networking events, our education events and we’re always there to support our business community through advocacy too.