Economic Development:

Making Your Community Attractive to Businesses

This is the first in a series of articles on economic development. Businesses consider multiple factors in making decisions about where to locate. Each community must take an active role and foster an environment for prime business development. Consider these aspects for your community:

• Quality of Life. When a business prospect comes to visit your city or town, it is likely that a member of their team will be looking to relocate their family to your community. Quality of life is very important. This includes schools, parks, neighborhood, recreation, entertainment, stores, technology, health care and low crime rates.

• Education and Job Training. A trainable and available workforce is a key factor for businesses. Prospective companies look at employee availability, labor history, education level and training opportunities. For example, a local Ivy Tech campus could provide technical training for a company's employees.

• Type of Businesses to Attract. Community leaders and economic development staff should evaluate resources and skills already available in your community such as: a local college, agriculture base, foundries or a manufacturing base. Think about what your community needs: jobs, large investment or both?

• Water/Sewer Plant Capacity. New businesses may need assurance that your community has enough water and sewer capacity at reasonable rates to meet their production needs. Your leaders will need to be willing to work with prospective companies to meet their needs.

• Welcoming Attitude. Community officials and existing business leaders should have a welcoming attitude for new development to occur.

• Industrial Parks. Choosing an area within your community for industrial development and preparing the site with utilities, drainage, roadways, rail, local permits and zoning is appealing to developers.

• Shovel-Ready Sites. Being a few steps ahead in the site creation process will enhance your community's chances of attracting new businesses. The Indiana Economic Development Corporation's "Shovel Ready" program allows your community to pre-permit sites to be development ready.

• Incentives. Local tax incentives are tools to reduce overall site and business costs, and may be the tie breaker among site locations. Tax credits, tax abatements and tax increment financing are just a few local incentive options. Some communities establish tax abatement criteria based on type of business, size of investment, job creation, etc.

Umbaugh assists many Indiana counties and communities with an entire range of services to support, attract and retain high quality development. For additional information, contact us at footnotes@umbaugh.com.