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The Mayor's position in Evansville pays a yearly "salary" of $3,500. Successful Economic Development professionals make $100,000's. If I had the answer to this, I would be applying for the other job! I do however have a little experience in this. I used to scout out and negotiate the terms of new locations for MindSpring's expanding Internet network, and I know what they used to look for. Business is like water, it takes the path of least resistance. From the time the decision was made at MindSpring to go to a certain city, they wanted to be up and running within 90 days preferably. Build-to-suit offers were rarely accepted. Price was also a huge factor in location determination.
ReplyDeleteEvansville needs not only to be proactive but we need to be agile and fast moving so as not to lose any good opportunities that may come our way. A call of inquiry from a company may only come in once and if we can't project a sincere "let us help you", then it's over at that moment. I'm not suggesting we give away the farm, and we are already being pro-active with our Large-Scale Commercial Development Committee. They are determining what our ordinance should look like to deal with larger-scale businesses. This is a great start. We have one TIF district in place to offer financial incentives and another one proposed. The poles are shifting in Evansville and we are gearing up to refocus from residential development to economic development. It's an exciting time.