Investor Watch: June 18, 2026

Could Milton in North Fulton County be a microcosm of metro Atlanta’s future? Ron Starner interviews Ministry Brands CEO Chris Bacon about his company’s move from Tennessee and talks to area leaders about everything from highways to hockey to horse farms.

NORTH AMERICAN AUTOMOTIVE

What would happen if you took all 42 industry codes related to vehicles, pumped them into the data engine that is Site Selection’s Conway Projects Database, set the navigation to track every project in North America since January 2025 and then stomped on the accelerator? You’d go on a road trip through an automotive ecosystem.

KENTUCKY

Governor Andy Beshear talks to Site Selection’s Ron Starner about several topics, including how Kentucky overcame trade obstacles to set exporting records.

OREGON

In Oregon, the same landscapes that inspire outdoor gear are shaping how it’s built, tested and brought to market. Just ask Steve Belatti, vice president of product at Portland-based bootmaker Danner.

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Construction on Virginia Transformer’s new power transformer plant at Shoals Research Airpark in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, will begin immediately, with the plant scheduled to be operational in January 2028.
Photo courtesy of Virginia Transformer

Norfolk Southern announced in May its portfolio of rail-served, high-quality REDI States has expanded to 24 locations across the railroad’s 22 state network. The sites are validated using the REDI Sites standard introduced by the Site Selectors Guild, discussed in a special contribution in the July 2025 issue of Site Selection entitled “Raising the Bar.”

The standard assesses infrastructure, feasibility, ownership, and workforce readiness. The top new designations include Platinum for Shoals Research Airpark in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and Gold for seven sites from Moberly Area Industrial Park in Missouri to I-85 Corporate Center in Lexington, North Carolina.

The ink was still wet on the May 13 expanded portfolio news when Virginia Transformer on May 19 announced a new power transformer plant to begin construction immediately at Shoals Research Park. Upon achieving full production, the new plant will employ 1,100 people, the company said.

Watch for Contributing Editor Savannah Yawn’s conversation with Norfolk Southern Industrial Development Director of Strategic Partnerships & Site Readiness MaryBeth Flournoy in the publication’s July issue.

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Among the 101 metro areas examined by Smart Growth America’s study of pedestrian fatality rates, Provo-Orem was the least dangerous. Pictured here is downtown Provo.
Photo by Dee Liu: Getty Images

Smart Growth America last week released Dangerous by Design 2026, which ranks all 50 states and the largest 101 metro areas by pedestrian fatality rates. “Every one of them is too dangerous for people walking,” the organization says. Measured by pedestrian fatality rate per 100,000 people between 2020 and 2024, the most dangerous states are New Mexico, Louisiana and Arizona, while Memphis, Tennessee; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Bakersfield, California, are labeled as the most dangerous metro areas.

“Only 18 of the 101 metro areas saw decreases in their long-term pedestrian fatality rates (comparing 2015-2019 avg. pedestrian fatality per 100k people to 2020-24 avg. pedestrian fatality per 100k people),” Smart Growth America stated. “Of the 18 metro areas that improved their pedestrian fatality rates in our 2024 report, only seven of those maintained their progress in this edition.” The report’s charts indicate that the biggest pedestrian death rate decrease was 0.62% in Harrisburg-Carlisle, Pennsylvania, followed by El Paso, Texas (0.62%) and metro Orlando (down by 0.45% but still the 25th most dangerous).

Go to the end of the 25-page report and you’ll find which territories are the least dangerous among the regions studied: Provo-Orem, Utah, comes out on top, followed by Madison, Wisconsin; Worcester, Massachusetts; Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota; and metro Boston. As for the states, Minnesota and Iowa tie for least dangerous, followed by Nebraska, New Hampshire and Wisconsin.

The portfolio of Switzerland-based generic and biosimilar medicines manufacturer Sandoz includes this manufacturing site in Kundl, Austria, where the company in 2024 opened a €50 million expansion that was part of an overall €200 million investment into the site to significantly upgrade penicillin API manufacturing.

When Sandoz opened the site’s penicillin production facility in 2023 (along with a biosimilar facility in Holzkirchen, Germany), it claimed to have the only major remaining vertically integrated production network for penicillins in Europe.

Kundl is located in the Austrian state of Tyrol, whose tourism agency describes the legend behind the topography: “Once upon a time the Wildschönau area used to be a lake that was inhabited by a tremendous dragon,” says the agency. “When a farmer succeeded in defeating this dragon, this creature bit the rock towards Kundl in its death agony, resulting in the emptying of this lake towards this direction. This is how the Wildschönau high plateau emerged, and how the Kundl Gorge (Kundler Klamm) was created.”