Regional Site Readiness Report provides plan for growth
In today's fast-paced site selection landscape, enhancing a site’s marketability is crucial to landing business investment, and in the QC we’ve identified some opportunities. Companies and site selectors are looking for sites that will effectively mitigate risks and speed up their time to market.
The Quad Cities Chamber will integrate, convene and facilitate our work around site readiness in three key areas over time: strategic partnerships, marketing and site development. These strategic focus areas were identified as a result of a 6-month site readiness study and evaluation conducted by Hickey Global, a full-service, global economic development consulting firm.
“Having a good plan of action, good data around site readiness – and understanding what we need to have ready in the sites we have available for development is a key, crucial question for all the communities represented here,” said Peter Tokar III, Chamber President & CEO. “We’re excited to take this another step forward in our economic development journey.”
Julie Forsythe, Senior Vice President, Business & Economic Growth for the Chamber said, “Hickey Global’s plan created a roadmap for the region with areas of focus, and partners over time. Everyone has a role in this – public sector partners, landowners, utilities and the Chamber. Hickey Global started their research back in January, and they came to the region in February, visiting and evaluating 32 regional sites. The study was completed in June.”
Implementation stages for the identified areas are divided into short-term (1-3 years), medium-term (3-5 years) and long-term (5 years +) timelines to allow the work to be staged out over time, with more strategic conversations to come regionally for some of the larger concepts. The Chamber will integrate the strategies into our overall economic development plans and goals.
According to Jenelle Wolber, Director, Business & Economic Growth Services for the Chamber, "In the short term, the Chamber team will be researching possible funding streams and advocating for additional funding, meeting with power companies and using our site characterization tier levels to encourage development locally. Then in the future, we will work with our partners to explore options such as public/private development partnerships and industrial land banks.”
From the report, a newly developed five-tier system to characterize sites was created as they progress from initial site awareness to true site readiness, giving property owners and potential users a more granular perspective on a site’s current status and the steps required for industry use.
Results were shared with leaders representing public sector partners, regional economic development practitioners from the 6-county service region, the Regional Opportunities Council and the Chamber Board of Directors at a Site Readiness Summit on August 21.
