< PreviousAMERICA’S BEST COUNTIES BY TOTAL POINTS: THE TOP 20 (JAN. 2023 – MARCH 2024) RANK JURISDICTION POINTS 1 Maricopa, Arizona 2,384 2 Harris, Texas 2,372 3 Franklin, Ohio 2,347 4 Fulton, Georgia 2,343 T5 Dallas, Texas 2,342 T5 Cook, Illinois 2,342 7 Tarrant, Texas 2,331 8 Bexar, Texas 2,328 9 Montgomery, Ohio 2,322 10 Washoe, Nevada 2,321 11 New York, New York 2,310 12 Chatham, Georgia 2,304 13 Wayne, Michigan 2,288 14 Monroe, New York 2,280 15 Collin, Texas 2,266 16 Hamilton, Ohio 2,264 17 Los Angeles, California 2,263 18 Marion, Indiana 2,259 19 Saint Louis, Missouri 2,258 20 Oakland, Michigan 2,252 Source: Conway Projects Database, Conway Data Inc./Site Selection Not all counties per capita have that advantage, but the projects they win are no less impactful. In fact, they can be more so. Rural Haywood County, Tennessee’s population is under , , according to the census, but it’s in the top for per capita performance. County Programs Are Recognized For the past years, the National Association of Counties has been bestowing NACo Achievement Awards in categories to U.S. counties across a range of functions, including community and economic development. In that category alone, Maricopa County, Arizona, our fi rst- place county for total projects, won seven Achievement Awards, including one for In Demand Industry Prioritization. It prioritizes funding and workforce training for health care, construction, advanced manufacturing, transportation and logistics, IT and fi nance. SITE SELECTION JULY 2024 65 AMERICA’S BEST COUNTIES BY POINTS PER CAPITA: THE TOP 20 (JAN. 2023 – MARCH 2024, MIN. 10,000 POP.) RANK JURISDICTION POINTS POPULATION 1 Saint James, Louisiana 2,368 19,200 2 Washington, Nebraska 2,356 21,200 3 Waller, Texas 2,342 61,900 4 Carroll, Kentucky 2,327 10,900 5 Decatur, Georgia 2,326 29,000 6 Candler, Georgia 2,320 11,000 7 Defi ance, Ohio 2,301 38,200 8 Boone, Indiana 2,300 74,200 9 Haywood, Tennessee 2,293 17,600 10 Ohio, Kentucky 2,290 23,500 T11 Mason, West Virginia 2,259 25,000 T11 Macon, Alabama 2,259 18,500 13 Saluda, South Carolina 2,249 18,900 14 Clark, Indiana 2,245 124,200 15 Ouachita, Arkansas 2,242 22,000 16 Banks, Georgia 2,239 19,300 17 Hancock, Ohio 2,225 74,900 18 Allen, Kentucky 2,215 21,300 19 Simpson, Kentucky 2,211 19,900 20 Chatham, Georgia 2,201 301,100 Source: Conway Projects Database, Conway Data Inc./Site Selection “ is new policy eff ectively allowed us to be more intentional around how we were supporting both job seekers and industry alike,” the county explains in its program description. “ rough career exploration, and by providing labor market information to each client, we can ensure clients not only obtain employment but also enter a fi eld off ering a fair wage with growth opportunities.” Second-place Harris County, Texas, won three community and economic development Achievement Awards, including one for its Biz Empower Accelerator Program for supporting Minority Women Business Owned Enterprises. “Biz Empower is a free eight-week, lab-based small business accelerator program that provides training in procurement basics, government contracts, credit and fi nancial viability, competitive bid pricing strategy, and other crucial skills needed to successfully grow and scale a small business,” the program description explains. In third-place Franklin County, Ohio, home to the state capital of Columbus, the Franklin County Digital Equity Coalition is committing $ million to improving under- resourced residents’ access to aff ordable, high-speed Internet and other digital resources. “Empowering underserved residents with aff ordable digital access to healthcare, fi nancial management, and job opportunities represents signifi cant steps forward to generational and impactful progress in Franklin County,” said Board of Commissioners President John O’Grady when announcing the initiative in November . Foreign Investment in the Per Capita Counties e top three counties per capita also are parts of metros, and vice versa, which helps them land projects and the jobs that come with them. Many of these projects are foreign direct investment from companies outside the U.S. St. James Parish, at the top of this ranking, is part of the New Orleans- Metairie, Louisiana, metro. It’s also where FG LA LLC, a member of Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics Group, is investing $. billion in e Sunshine Maricopa County The McDowell Sonoran Preserve in Scottsdale, Arizona Photo: Getty Images SITE SELECTION JULY 2024 67 Project, an industrial complex for making chemicals and plastics. About , people will work at the facility when it’s operational. In second-place Washington County, Nebraska, Danish life sciences company Novozymes began making enzymes for ethanol production in Blair, in the Omaha- Council Bluff s metro, in . A $ million protein production facility is now in development. Waller County, Texas, in third place, is part of the Houston metro, and one of its communities, Brookshire (population , ) has also caught the attention of foreign investors. Waaree Energies, based in India, is building a $ billion solar PV module production facility that aims to produce GW of solar panel production by . Similarly, Turkish owned Elin Energy has built a , -sq.-ft. solar panel manufacturing facility in Brookshire that eventually will employ . U IAN U IAN . James Parish . James Parish Oak Alley in Vacheria, Louisiana Photo: Getty ImagesProjects involving DOE National Labs deliver industry- relevant innovation unfolding across the entire federal research facility portfolio. V alue: It’s a word that’s often debated in economics circles, most eloquently in economist Maria Mazzucato’s seminal book “ e Value of Everything: Making and Taking In the Global Economy,” where she quarrels with standard accounting’s notion of value that counts such things as government expenditures on police, teachers or R&D as fi nal consumption rather than investment. It all goes back to the fi rst United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA) guide in . It wasn’t until , she explains, that company spending on R&D went from being labeled as a cost to being “reclassifi ed as an investment in the company’s stock of knowledge, to be valued ‘on the basis of the total production costs including the costs of fi xed assets used in production.’ It became a fi nal productive activity rather than just an intermediate cost towards that activity.” In the same way, she argues, government investment in innovation is glossed over as a cost rather than being recognized as an intrinsic player in a nation’s value. Pharmaceutical industry primary molecular research is a case in point, she says, noting that “the research leading to real pharmaceutical innovation, broadly defi ned as new molecular entities, has come mostly from publicly funded laboratories. e pharmaceutical industry has increasingly concentrated its R&D spending on the much less risky development phase and on ‘me too drugs’ — slight variations on existing products.” “By not having a way to capture the production of value created by government and by focusing more on its ‘spending’ role, the national accounts contribute to the myth that government is only facilitating the creation of value rather than being a lead player,” Mazzucato wrote. e network of federally backed laboratory and R&D facilities is vast and serves as the spine for an innovation ecosystem that includes the nation’s research and science parks, many of them on or adjacent to university campuses. A survey of such leading organizations could encompass the entire universe of U.S. government primary research organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. For the purposes of this article, here is a survey of innovation coming from one important slice of that overall pie: eir offi cial number is , a prime number suitably representing the unique value each of the U.S. Department by ADAM BRUNS adam.bruns@siteselection.com RESEARCH & SCIENCE PARKS 68 JULY 2024 SITE SELECTION Major Players Photo by Travis Lange courtesy of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory70 JULY 2024 SITE SELECTION of Energy’s National Laboratories brings. eir locations number , an apt numeral for their ’round-the-clock work pushing scientifi c frontiers across branches of science reaching far beyond energy alone. California It only makes sense to begin in California, the leading National Laboratory state with three: Sandia, Lawrence Berkeley and the lesser known SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, whose linear accelerator laboratory, at over , meters long, is one of the longest modern buildings on the planet. Operated for the DOE by Stanford University, the lab, which turned in , “explores how the universe works at the biggest, smallest and fastest scales and invents powerful tools used by scientists around the globe.” It’s grown from employees at its founding in to , employees from over countries today. Among its clients are companies that uses its x-ray facilities “for research aimed at developing medicines and other products.” e facility’s research spans particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology, materials, chemistry, bio- and energy sciences and scientifi c computing. Among the projects to emerge from SLAC is a $ million camera. e ,-megapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera arrived at the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile in May after its construction was completed in April to conclude two decades of work at SLAC. After being installed on the Simonyi Survey Telescope, the camera will take detailed images with a fi eld of view seven times wider than the full moon of the southern hemisphere sky for years, building the most comprehensive timelapse view of the universe ever seen. “ e arrival of the cutting-edge LSST Camera in Chile brings us a huge step closer to science that will address today’s most pivotal questions in astrophysics,” said Kathy Turner, DOE’s program manager for Rubin Observatory. Researchers roasted green chile on top of Sandia’s National Solar Thermal Test Facility with concentrated sunlight instead of propane to produce a fl avorful chile with less carbon dioxide emissions. Photo by Randy Montoya courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories72 JULY 2024 SITE SELECTION New Mexico Sandia National Laboratories, with its primary site in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and its second principal lab in Livermore, California, is celebrating its th anniversary this year. It’s managed and operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International, Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. e lab’s operations include its rocket launch range in Kauai, Hawaii; the Tonopah Test Range for weapons systems in southern Nevada; a weapons evaluation test lab in Amarillo, Texas; and the award-winning, -acre Sandia Science & Technology Park in Albuquerque, home to companies with , employees and celebrating its th anniversary. Among its assets is the Livermore Valley Open Campus (LVOC) — an innovation hub along the boundaries of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories in the Bay Area. e LVOC features an expanding cluster David Smith, front, and Dave Martinez, behind, work on a computer server submerged in liquid as part of testing at the High Performance Computing center at Sandia Laboratories. Photo by Craig Fritz courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories SITE SELECTION JULY 2024 73 of advanced scientifi c and engineering centers that includes centers focused on combustion and on biotech, where researchers from private industry and academia collaborate freely with lab personnel. Ongoing work at Sandia’s High Performance Computing Center includes a project that Dave Martinez, engineering program project lead for Sandia’s Infrastructure Computing Services, says “could reshape the future designs of data centers,” by completely immersing computer components. e project immerses servers into a commercial nonconductive liquid system from Barcelona-based company Submer Technologies. “By submerging all parts of the computing servers in a liquid coolant that doesn’t conduct electricity, % of the generated heat can be captured, almost entirely eliminating the need for the power-hungry fans and chillers used in conventional cooling systems,” Sandia reports. Martinez says this system, using liquid with the viscosity of cooking oil, would cut energy consumption by %, a number sure to capture the attention of data center developers and stakeholders. “Sandia’s forward-thinking approach arises from projections that the increasing water and electrical power demands for cooling in high-performance computing eventually will exceed the resources of small towns and become an unsupportable burden,” the lab says. “Unlike water-chill systems that require evaporation to lower operating temperatures, no water is lost; the coolant gives up its heat to the open air, given the right temperature diff erential.” Other projects at Sandia include adding sulfur to large back-up lithium batteries, thus making them safer and less expensive backup options for high-renewables grid storage. Crucial to the project, says a Sandia release, is a partnership with local entrepreneurs facilitated by the DOE’s Boost program, a -week boot camp among FedTech, Sandia and a startup accelerator company, in this case a business being launched by New Mexico entrepreneur Charles Call to develop a solar- powered device for producing water from air that needed a battery capable of storing energy for long periods, allowing continuous water production when the sun wasn’t shining. “GridFlow, the startup company, is working on licensing Sandia’s provisional patent to aid them in the funding applications,” Sandia reports. “By this fall, Call aims to show the commercial viability of the technology and have a -watt or a kilowatt prototype ready for fi eld or home testing.”Next >