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everal years ago, the Council for Urban Economic Development (CUED) and the American Economic Development Council (AEDC) convened a joint task force to address an issue of their membership. The two associations merged earlier this year to form the International Economic Development Council (IEDC).
At issue was the concern of the economic development community that site selection consultants often requested a plethora of information in a short period of time. These information requests, usually in the form of a faxed questionnaire ranging from two to 40 pages in length, ask for a wide variety of statistics, from basic population to average salaries for select positions to major employers in select industries to tax rates to specific information on available properties and/or existing space.
Each request is different depending on both the specific project and the consultant. And each response needs to be “re-keyed” with the appropriate information. Weekend work by the communities was not uncommon. This task is onerous for many economic development organizations and daunting for smaller communities.
Couldn’t the location consultants get together and provide some consistency in their requests, members of the associations wondered? Examples include consistency in the type of information needed and in the required format. Perhaps the site selection consultants could also provide some guidance on how and where to get the required information, they surmised.
CUED and AEDC, the professional organizations whose members included the majority of economic development organizations, formed the Site Selection Task Force. Asked to participate in this task force were consultants from the leading site selection companies, consultants who worked with the economic development community and members of AEDC and CUED representing both large and small communities. CUED provided the business support for the task force.
The original focus of the task force was to identify those elements or data points typically used in the location identification process and, to the extent possible, to agree on a common format for requesting the information. We were also asked to identify where and/or how to ascertain this information. In essence, we were asked to develop guidelines for the economic development community to use in gathering information about their communities.
In addition to the mission at hand, the task force spent time discussing the process that the site consultants use in identifying locations for their corporate clients and the role of the economic development community in the process. Typically, the location consultants narrow the number of communities for consideration before any contact is made with the local community. This is done using a variety of methodologies and strategies, including readily available information from such sources as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census. When the location consultants contact the communities it usually is for targeted information to evaluate the current labor market (such as current average wages by specific job title and recent relocations into and out of the community) and availability of specific office space or real estate.
However, during these discussions it was discovered was that while this was true for a majority of location consultants, including the ones in the task force, many communities were being contacted for basic census information in addition to the more customized data. And more and more on companies were doing their own site selection work and contacting the communities directly. Further, the resources available to economic development organizations varied, from small communities with a part-time economic development person to regional and state organizations with a large staff and million-dollar-plus budgets. Most had requested some assistance or guidance in addressing the needs of the location consultants.
What had begun as an initiative to develop a protocol for the exchange of information between the location consultant and the economic development community had grown to become a means of addressing all or most of the data elements that may be used in any location evaluation, by anyone.
The task force released the preliminary data template of about 25 tables approximately two years ago. The sheer number of data tables and amount of information required at first glance appears huge — and for some communities impossible to complete. It is a large amount of information.
To further complicate the situation, during the last five years the availability of information and use of the Internet to further economic development efforts has exploded. Aside from local and state economic development organizations’ Web sites, several companies have Internet sites that provide a mechanism to compare community information. And a cottage industry to assist communities in “filling in the forms” to get onto these Web sites has begun to emerge.
What started out as data standard guidelines have incorrectly become known as data standards, further confusing the situation and alienating some of the economic development community. As the project unfolded, confusion resulted from different interpretations of the group’s mission. Initially, “standard” referred to the customary method of collecting and presenting data. Unfortunately, when the data standard guidelines were released, the word “guidelines” was inadvertently dropped. And some in the economic development community began to believe that if they did not adopt the data standard guidelines and collect all the information, then the location consultants would not consider their community. This is not, nor has it ever been, the case.
The intent was and still is that the data standard guidelines be just that, direction in assisting communities in the information-gathering process. That is, if an economic development organization wants to collect data, the guidelines identify what type of information to collect and where to get some of the more common data. In fact, about 60 percent to 70 percent of the data identified in the guidelines is available through other sources, such as the Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics, and in most cases is available free or at minimum cost. Collecting real estate-related information could be a shared project with the local real estate community to enable them to not only participate in the economic development process, but also to encourage them to gather and continually update necessary details. The remaining information, such as major employers by function, average salary by selected occupation and ACT and SAT scores, is best collected at the local level. If communities are leery of attempting to collect all the data, they should concentrate on gathering the information that is only available at the local level.
A complete list of all the data standards guidelines and the local level information is available on several Web sites, including www.siteselection.com, www.developmentalliance.com, and www.IEDConline.org.
Another point of contention with the data standards guidelines is appearance. They are not pretty. The current design of the guidelines was meant to enable data entry — not be the final presentation of the material. Now that CUED and AEDC have merged to form the (IEDC) International Economic Development Council, the task force should move on to its next phase of implementation quickly.
Shari Barnett is senior manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers, in New York. She served on the joint CUED/AEDC Site Selection task force that developed the guidelines.
