“It was a pleasure to have you speak to our community leaders and since that time Grant County has continued to follow the guidelines you presented. Now we are being rewarded with extraordinary economic growth.” Terry Brewer, head of the Grant County, WA Economic Development Council wrote to me recently.
I was in Moses Lake, WA (population 14,593) in June, 2004 touring the town and doing a talk to their ED group. I was honored to receive to be named an honorary citizen and to receive a key to the city, the only town out of the several hundred I’ve visited to do so. During my talk I told them of the potential I saw for them to recruit companies from booming but congested Seattle because of a number of natural resources that they possessed including low power costs, ample land, lake and water, airfield, etc. Little did I know how quickly they would leverage those
assets into billion dollar success.Four Seattle based companies (Microsoft, Yahoo!, Intuit and Ask.com) have data centers under construction in Moses Lake, investing a collective $1.6 billion! At least 750 new direct jobs will be created and estimates are that an additional 2,000 jobs will be indirectly created from these new facilities.
What resources do you have that you could leverage as Moses Lake has?
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