Mississippi won an economic dogfight to attract Nissan's new automotive plant by covering everything the company might need, from infrastructure to trained workers to economic incentives, according to a site-location specialist.
On a more local scale, the Leflore County area has to do the same thing if it is to compete with other communities for prospective industries, Dr. C.R. "Buzz" Canup said at the Greenwood-Leflore-Carroll Economic Development Foundation's annual meeting Tuesday night.
"Every project you look at is driven by some type of need, some type of business objective, and the better you understand those needs and those objectives, the better equipped you are to develop your sites and your assets in order to attract that company," he said.
Canup should know. His Jackson-based firm, Canup & Associates Inc., assists corporations all over the world in selecting the most appealing sites for their operations. His expertise led Mississippi to hire him for the Nissan project.
Robert Ingram, executive director of the Greenwood-Leflore Industrial Board, called Canup "the leading site location consultant when it comes to developing supersites and superprojects for the automotive industry."
Canup revealed "the cold, hard facts about the site selection process" Tuesday night. While communities are promoting what they have to attract companies, his firm is figuring out what they don't have, he said.
Canup divides into two areas the most important criteria communities have to consider when trying to attract industry - the musts and the wants.
The first factors eliminate most places from the get go, he said. "If they come to you and say I need 2 million gallons of water a day, and you say no - if that is a must criteria, it doesn't matter any of the other resources you have available - you're gone."
Most of that determination is done with electronic data before a community even knows it's being considered, Canup said. His firm looks at wage rates, transportation access and the proximity of competitors before a company even begins to visit possible sites.
The other criteria, the wants, are the compromises that winnow the most viable candidates later on in the process, he said. These include tax incentives and investments from the community.
The wants are what won Nissan for Mississippi, Canup explained. The state matched the automotive company's $1.4 billion investment with $415 million of its own money, including $8.5 million workforce training center that opened last week.
"This is major," Canup said. "This is playing big league site location work, and this is candidly what it takes now for states to be able to land major projects."
Leflore and Carroll counties are going to have to engage such efforts on their own scale if they are to attract quality business to the area, Ingram noted.
"If we want to play with the big guys and the big communities in locating these companies, we have to be just as smart as they are," he said, adding, "We actually have to be smarter than they are."
