April 24, 2008

Memorandum for Foreign-Trade Zone Grantees

From: Andrew McGilvray
Executive Secretary

Subject: Transition to Communicating with Grantees via E-mail, Annual Report Process Changes, and Grantee Outreach Sessions

As we pursue ways to make the FTZ program more efficient and more responsive, there are several key improvements and process changes that I would like to highlight:

Transition to E-mail Communication:
This should be the last mass mailing to FTZ grantees that our office performs. Given the existence of e-mail and ongoing resource constraints, we will not be able to continue with mass, paper-based communications. Over the next few months, we plan to contact each grantee by e-mail (in cases where we already have an e-mail address) or by telephone to confirm that we have the correct e-mail address(es) for your organization’s primary contact(s). Please be thinking about which contact e-mail address(es) to provide to us.

Annual Reports - List of Late Reports and Automation Plans:
Enclosed is a copy of the recently published FTZ Board Annual Report to Congress for FY 2006 (also on our web site along with previous reports). I appreciate how most grantees submit their reports on time and respond promptly to follow-up questions that the FTZ Staff may have. However, we continue to have problems with timely submission of information from a small number of grantees. To help grantees know whether we have received their annual report, we are posting on our web site – www.trade.gov/ftz – a list of zones for which we have no record of receiving a FY 2007 report (which was due 1/31/08). Please check this list and let us know if your zone is incorrectly listed as not yet having submitted its report.

We also continue to move forward with development of an optional process for automated submission of annual report data, and I hope to have much more information to share later in 2008.

Regional Grantee Outreach Sessions
One of our recent improvements to administering the FTZ program is conducting a series of regional outreach sessions for FTZ grantees. These day-long sessions allow for a small number of grantees to meet with me and have a true dialogue, as well as benefit from training on key aspects of the FTZ program. Outreach sessions to date have included Ohio, Southern California, Texas/Oklahoma, New York/New Jersey/Connecticut, and Florida/Puerto Rico. We now have a New England and Upstate New York session scheduled for Boston on June 26 – see details on our web site – and we hope to be able to arrange additional sessions in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest over the next year. For each outreach session, our office also makes every effort to contact directly the individual grantees in the region to help ensure that they are aware of the scheduled event. Our goal is for every grantee to benefit ultimately from this initiative.