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Sometimes even a popular place needs a makeover. Clearwater, one of the most visited beach destinations in America, is getting one right now. PLUS: Florida communities rank well in a new analysis of top U.S. headquarters locations.
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| FROM SITE SELECTION MAGAZINE, May 2023 ISSUE |
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FLORIDA
Customer input proved significant in the final site selection decisions.
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INVESTMENT PROFILE: HILCO REDEVELOPMENT PARTNERS
Since 2010, the real estate investment and redevelopment unit of Hilco Global has been transforming industrial properties into repurposed centers of commerce.
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Maps courtesy of BLS
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If workplace injury and illness rates play a role in your company’s site selection matrix, then data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in November can be useful. The Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (SOII) revealed that private industry employers reported 2.6 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses in 2021, a decrease of 1.8% from 2020. The incidence rate of total recordable cases (TRC) in private industry was 2.7 cases per 100 full-time equivalent (FTE) workers, unchanged from 2020. The maps above and below show which states led in total recordable cases and in rate of recordable cases per 100 FTEs.
As one might expect, the decline was due to a drop in illness cases, respiratory illness in particular. The BLS said there was a 37.1% decrease in employer-reported respiratory illness cases in 2021 at 269,600, down from 428,700 in 2020. “In 2019, there were 127,200 illness cases and 10,800 respiratory illness cases,” the agency said by way of comparison. Meanwhile, total reported injury cases increased by 6.% to 2.2 million cases in 2021, up from 2.1 million cases in 2020.
The largest increase in cases came in retail trade and in transportation and warehousing. Despite having a decrease in cases, however, the health care and social assistance sector had the highest rate of respiratory illnesses in 2021 with 99.2 cases per 10,000 FTE workers. “This rate, however, is 52.7% lower than in 2020 when the rate was 209.8 cases per 10,000 FTE workers,” the BLS said.
Click here to access a full range of BLS charts and infographics related to workplace injuries and illnesses in private industry. The Sustainability Rankings in the July 2023 issue of Site Selection will include data from the Fitwel certification standard for healthy buildings. — Adam Bruns
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Maps courtesy of BLS
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You can access all 208 pages of the May issue now. Inside you’ll find the Global Best to Invest and Prosperity Cup rankings, as well as the recipients of Mac Conway Awards for Excellence in Economic Development. See which projects made the list of Top Deals of 2022. Read industry reports on the North American automotive scene and global health tech and life science project trends. Hear one leader’s candid perspectives on tribal economic development. Gain an understanding of why Asian investment into the U.S. is climbing from our partners at Tractus and on what’s driving or blocking economic development in Latin America from our friends at Deloitte. Take notes on the importance of shovel-ready sites to one company’s major site selection process. Learn what’s driving project activity in Florida, Ohio, Arizona, Kentucky, Colorado and Utah, as well as in the Northeast and New England. Dive into the Costa Rica Investment Report and Iowa Intelligence Report. And in the latest Site Selection Investment Profiles, get the lowdown on opportunities involving Consumers Energy in Michigan; San Joaquin County, California; Portugal; Hilco Redevelopment Partners; Indiana Municipal Power Agency; and Salt River Project in Arizona.
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Portugal
German tire manufacturer Continental opened its new Solution Center in Lousado, Portugal, in April, next to its tire plant. The company has enlisted specialists from the fields of IT, AI and applied analytics, e-commerce and industrial engineering to provide “global support for the digitalization of tire solutions, production processes and business workflows at the Continental Tires group sector.” The center’s 80 employees are part of a global team of various IT specialists and related functions whose number is to be doubled by 2026. Pedro Carreira, head of the Continental tire plant in Lousado and one of the board members of the Solution Center, noted that “the nearby universities of Porto and Braga are ideal for the recruitment of highly skilled new employees.” Now in Portugal for more than 30 years, Continental is one of the biggest employers in the region and Portugal’s fourth largest exporter.
New Brunswick, Canada
Thales in April announced that it will develop a new National Digital Excellence Centre in the Cyber Centre at Fredericton’s Knowledge Park to strengthen its cybersecurity capabilities in industrial systems. It is the second digital hub of the Group in addition to the NDEC based in Ebbw Vale in Wales. NDECs are R&D facilities that “enable small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and micro-enterprises to test and develop digital transformation projects alongside large corporations,” Thales explained. “They are places of innovation to develop major technological breakthroughs.” This NDEC, projected to contribute up to $63 million in direct provincial GDP over a five-year period, is being established in partnership with the University of New Brunswick’s McKenna Institute and local economic development agency Ignite, with support from Opportunities New Brunswick (ONB) and from the Government of Canada, through the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA). “New Brunswick is an ideal place for Thales to invest and grow in Canada, where we are among the Top 100 corporate R&D investors,” said Chris Pogue, CEO, Thales Canada, in thanking all parties. “Together, we will collaborate across a talent-rich innovation value chain — educational institutions, academia, start-ups, small- and medium-sized businesses, industry and governments — to develop the cyber technologies, capabilities and resilience Canada needs to build a future we can all trust.”
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| MASSACHUSETTS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GUIDE 2023-24 |
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REGIONAL PROFILES
Massachusetts’ robust industry network expands across all five of its regions.
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VENTURE CAPITAL OVERVIEW
Even as VC investment declined nationally in 2022, Massachusetts enterprises hardly noticed.
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| SITE SELECTION RECOMMENDS |
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The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) Board of Directors this week approved the organization’s 2023 Top Research Priorities, beginning with one that anyone driving the nation’s Interstates will recognize: Expanding Truck Parking at Public Rest Areas. “The lack of available truck parking is perennially ranked by drivers as their top concern,” the ATRI said in a release. “This research will identify and map truck driver needs to rest stop attributes, develop best practice case studies and utilize truck driver data to identify strategies for expanding truck parking capacity available at public rest areas.”
Other priorities include identifying barriers to entry for female truck drivers (less than 10% of the truck driver workforce); examining the diesel technician shortage; and the cost of driver detention.
In March, the American Trucking Associations applauded the introduction of the Truck Parking Safety Improvement Act by U.S. Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) in the U.S. Senate and Representatives Mike Bost (R-Ill.) and Angie Craig (D-Minn.) in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bipartisan legislation would authorize $755 million in competitive grant funding to expand commercial truck parking capacity across the United States.
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Photo courtesy of EUMETSAT/ESA
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The European Space Agency this week released the first image of the full Earth disc from the Meteosat Third Generation Imager, which the agency said reveals “a level of detail about the weather over Europe and Africa not previously possible from 36,000 km. above Earth.” The higher-resolution images (including this one taken on March 18) provided by the instruments on board give weather forecasters “more information about the clouds cloaking much of Europe and visible in the equatorial region of Africa and the Atlantic Ocean. Sand and sediment in the waters off Italy are also visible, as well as dust or smog being carried from south Asia.”
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