Editor’s View: Lawmakers – Listen Up, Site Selection Magazine, September 2003

bout the time this issue of Site Selection reaches you, I will be finalizing remarks I have been asked to share at a Midwestern state’s annual legislators’ conference. “Competition” is the meeting’s theme, and my role will be to put that state’s relative competitive performance in the context of other states’ and to introduce some benchmarks the lawmakers might find of interest as they formulate policy.

        The timing couldn’t be better. My colleagues and I are now at work compiling our annual Business Climate Rankings and State Legislative Review features for the November issue. I will have plenty of material to share at the conference.

        But there’s something else I would like to share with the lawmakers, which is where you come in. If you can spare a few minutes, pretend I was addressing your state legislature. Ask yourself, maybe even your colleagues: Is my state (or province) competitive? What are the three factors that make it so? What are the three factors that are missing that would make it competitive? What do neighboring states have in place that mine does not – an economic-development-focused governor? An aggressive foreign-office presence that gets results? Enviable infrastructure assets?

        With respect to your state’s business climate, what is the most important piece of legislation your lawmakers should act on in the coming year? What is the most important piece of legislation that fell through the cracks in the last legislative session? Do you consider the cost of doing business in your state to be higher, about the same or lower than comparably situated states? If you could shut down operations in the states in which you have a sizable presence and restart operations the next day anywhere you wanted to, would your state keep the business? If not, would the governor notice? Would anyone?

        You and I have an opportunity to be heard – heck, I have a captive audience – by the very people who can make operating in your location a rewarding, profitable, job-generating experience or, well, a sentence to be served.

        So send me a quick email with your thoughts on some of these questions, and I’ll use that input to remind at least one assembly of lawmakers what matters to you. They – and I – value your input more than that of anyone else with a say in state competitiveness.

        In the meantime, you can catch a glimpse of which areas globally are poised to compete anew for capital investment in the near future by turning to our 2nd Annual Global Infrastructure Report on page 524. The projects highlighted here are just a fraction of the airport, seaport, bridge and tunnel projects under way that, when open, will boost the desirability of their regions substantially.

        The siting of every major capital investment project since the Industrial Revolution – and most before that – has been driven in large part by existing or planned infrastructure. Today’s highways and bridges deliver at a faster clip the same access to market that yesterday’s rivers did. But today’s infrastructure projects are shrinking that access to market and reducing users’ shipping costs in ways that will make the areas they are in the envy of any competitive location. Come to think of it, that, too, may get the legislators’ attention.

Till next time,