Investor Watch: December 30, 2024

TALENT ATTRACTORS

This time it’s about talent.

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Archive photo of Magdeburg Cathedral by Jens Wolf, courtesy of Saxony-Anhalt IMG

“There is no more peaceful and cheerful place than a Christmas market,” said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Saturday, December 21, 2024, one day after a car-ramming attack in the German city of Magdeburg killed five people. “What a terrible act it is to injure and kill so many people there with such brutality.” Our thoughts are with the people of the city and state as they endure and recover from a terrible act of cruelty.

The relationship between Site Selection Magazine, the city of Magdeburg and the Investment and Marketing Corporation of Saxony-Anhalt goes back many years and includes a number of visits and reports, among them a long-running series of Investment Profiles. Editor Emeritus Mark Arend penned this Investment Profile in 2013. Our former colleague Patty Rasmussen wrote about Magdeburg in this 2016 piece and this 2015 Investment Profile. Our late company president Adam Jones-Kelley did the same in this 2017 Investment Profile.

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RFK Stadium in 1980

Archive photo courtesy of the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

In a move some described as “stunning,” Congress passed a measure forwarded to President Biden on December 27 that directs the U.S. Secretary of the Interior “to transfer administrative jurisdiction over the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium Campus to the District of Columbia so that the District may use the Campus for purposes including residential and commercial development, and for other purposes.” In other words, the NFL’s Washington Commanders would return to the city. As reported by the Washington Post, the bill “transfers control of the land to D.C. at no cost for a term of 99 years and allows for mixed-use development, including commercial, residential and a stadium.”

Based in Georgia since the beginning, Site Selection joins the rest of the world today in remembering President Jimmy Carter, who died yesterday at the age of 100. McKinley “Mac” Conway, Site Selection’s late founder, served in the Georgia Senate alongside Carter in the 1960s. Here they are pictured with their wives Becky and Rosalynn.

In addition to their shared interests in global affairs, economic development and in technology, both Carter and Conway shared rural backgrounds: Mac was from tiny Hackleburg, Alabama, while Carter came from the small Georgia town of Plains. They also both matriculated at the Georgia Institute of Technology: Mac graduated in 1941 with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aeronautical engineering. Carter graduated in 1946 from the Naval Academy after having enrolled at Georgia Tech in 1943, and was eventually awarded an honorary degree (the Institute’s first) in 1979, when, according to an account by the university, he said, “It took becoming president of the United States to get a Georgia Tech degree.”