Russ Steele
The Saturday Union (12-15-07) Jeff Pelline had an editorial on economic development with some interesting suggestions. Jeff is a new comer to the community and to economic development in Western Nevada County. Since I have been involved before the Economic Resource Council was formed, I would like to share some of my views on local economic development and some of Jeff’s suggestions. Some of the subjects I am going to cover include turf wars, visioning, broadband, transportation, and education.
Due to the length of this article I am going to break it up in to multiple posts. This is Part Three
Jeff Wrote:
Draw more tech companies to places such as the Nevada City Tech Center. We need to do a better job of providing a "one-stop" shop for prospective companies, making relocation data more readily available to them. We need to find more people with the expertise and big Rolodex files to recruit more businesses here. Let's get out on the road more often, not just hold local bus tours.
One of the major issues in convincing companies to relocate here is access to cost effective transportation infrastructure. A number of start up companies have moved because the cost of transportation was too high. It costs more to transport in the raw materials and the finished product to market, than it does for competitors with better access to freeways and rail terminals. Thus green business which require significant transportation will not be locating to our area, due to these high transportation costs.
As for developing green business, the ERC supported the development of a local solar equipment cluster, but some companies have folded and others moved away. We lost one promising company to New York that promised 11 million in investment funds and tax incentives. This sumer, I saw an article where the company had moved from New York back to San Jose, California. I guess the 11 million was gone, no reason to stay in New York. Maybe the Union can contact the Solar Companies that closed. or left, and give us some insight in to why they are not longer in Nevada County.
A couple of years ago I was writing about design centers in Nevada County for Comstock's Business. At the time there was 32 design centers in the Grass Valley/Nevada City area. Products includes integrated circuit chips to building facades to training materials. Some of those design centers are now gone. Again, why did they leave?
Design centers do not produce products which generate tax revenue. Their designs are sent overseas, where the products are made and shipped back, or around the world. It is true that many of the high paid engineers and designer are well paid and can afford to live in Nevada County, but they do not generate the tax revenue that a local manufacturing company does selling tax generating products.
The ERC was set up to be one shop center for relocating companies. We built a leading edge business relocator system to promote available business properties. In building the ReLocator we did extensive research on how business look for communities to relocate. Eight four percent started on the Internet. Part of the decision process is to contacting established local business, especially support business and peer business by phone and e-mail and asking about the business environment. In the past they got an ear full on how hard it was to deal with City and County Planners. The planning process has improve significantly, due leadership by the BOS, and help from the ERC and the Contractors Association. To help companies relocating the ERC has a data base with local business contact information.
One problem is that over time the demographics data in the ReLocator has gone stale. One of the major problems was the lack of funds to buy the demographic and business data. It was going to take between three to six thousand dollars to purchase the CDs with the latest data, and have the consultant integrate in the ReLocator. Then three to six months of intern staff time to make the update to the local business SIC codes to the new NAICS codes. The ERC tried to find grants to pay for the update and the intern's salary. None could be found, and the City and County were not willing foot the bill. It is clear that more money will be needed to being the Business Relocator up to date I understand from Jeff's article he has some suggestions that can be incorporated in the update. Look forward to those suggestions.
