News and perspectives from the ExecutivePulse team
On July 22, OpenAI announced a $20 billion data center campus in Effingham County, Georgia. 1,400 acres inside a privately developed logistics park outside Rincon. 3.2 gigawatts from Georgia Power under a 25-year contract, delivered in phases from 2028 through 2032. A 50% property tax abatement for 15 years. Talks with the industrial development authority […]
Castlegar’s economic development team wanted something simple on paper and surprisingly hard in practice: a clear, up-to-date view of the businesses in their community, and an easy way to share that view with the public. Getting there meant rethinking how their business data lived and moved across systems, and it’s turned into one of the […]
On July 1, the federal nomination window for Opportunity Zones 2.0 officially opens. For some states, that date is largely academic. The real deadline was dependent on your state’s governor! Many states have been running their nomination window since spring and several have already closed. The rules have changed substantially from the original program. Eligibility […]
For most of the last two decades, the first question in site selection was about land. Is there a site? Is it entitled? Can we build what we need to build on it? Those questions have not gone away; however, there is a new one sitting in front of it now, and a lot of […]
A pattern shows up in conversations with economic development directors who are new to their roles. It almost does not matter whether they are taking over a two-person county office or a regional authority with a full staff. Within the first few months, they run into the same wall. There is no system. Or more […]
Mark Muro and his team at Brookings just published something every economic development professional needs to read: “Turning the data center boom into long-term, local prosperity.” It’s the clearest analysis I’ve seen on what’s actually happening in data center negotiations, and why communities finally have a seat at the table. For context: I met Mark […]
A mid-sized city (population ~135,000) recently joined the Executive Pulse family and asked us to import the community’s entire business population into the CRM. In the end, there were just under 10,000 records. I participated in several internal calls about the data migration and realized that the majority of businesses that our team and our […]
Every economic development professional has experienced that sinking feeling: learning that a major employer is relocating, only after the decision has already been made. By the time you see the press release or hear through the grapevine, it’s often too late to intervene. But business relocations rarely happen overnight. Companies typically signal their intentions months […]
For many economic development organizations, Business Retention & Expansion (BR&E) work starts in spreadsheets. They’re familiar, inexpensive, and flexible. But as relationships grow and the work becomes more strategic, spreadsheets begin to show serious limitations — not just in efficiency, but in the quality of insight teams can deliver. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system […]