ED Now

CEcDs are recognized worldwide as having achieved the pinnacle of excellence in the economic development field. Four professionals passed the exam held at the end of January.

IEDC’s 2023 Leadership Summit will be held next week in Tucson, Arizona. A few of our conference speakers and sponsors shared some exciting economic development projects happening in the region.

IEDC's Accredited Economic Development Organization (AEDO) program recognizes organizational excellence in the areas of internal and external operations, structures, and procedures. This series profiles newly accredited AEDOs, putting some of economic development's highest-performing organizations in the spotlight. This edition: City of Garden Grove (Calif.) Office of Economic Development.

The City of Tucson Office of Economic Initiatives launched a free workforce development program in 2022 to address the skill gap in the industrial sewing trades. The program, named AZ Stitch Lab, is offered by a partnership between the City of Tucson, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, Moonshot, and Sonoran Stitch Factory. Erica Yngve, president and CEO of Tucson-based Sonoran Stitch Factory, was working to meet the needs of commercial clients from around the world wanting to produce materials made in the U.S. With business growing Yngve needed more workers to meet the demand, but at the time there were only 1,770 sewing machine operators in all of Arizona. Sonoran Stitch Factory happens to sit in the heart of a neighborhood that was already a ...

While the City of Tucson Office of Economic Initiatives continues to welcome large employers relocating or expanding to the area, including Sion Power and American Battery Factory, its work with small local employers is especially personal and innovative. Small, locally owned businesses make up a large swath of Tucson’s economy and contribute to the community’s vitality. But many of these are owned by soon-to-retire baby boomers—roughly 2,000 are legacy businesses more than 20 years old. The Office of Economic Initiatives has partnered with Project Equity, which fosters economic resilience through worker ownership, to hold workshops and meet-and-greet events on succession planning through employee ownership. Several ...

IEDC’s 2022 State of the Economic Development Industry report was presented at the Leadership Summit held in California’s Coachella Valley at the end of January. The report reveals the results of IEDC’s 2021 Member Survey—including a review of EDO priorities and challenges in 2021 and outlooks for 2022—and also takes a glance at IEDC’s 2021 Salary Survey results.

Since the turn of the 20th century railroads have connected U.S. cities, making it easier and quicker to transport goods and allowing for westward expansion. As railroads expanded, cities and towns formed along the tracks to take advantage of being a train ride away from larger markets. Speakers at IEDC’s 2022 Leadership Summit stressed that railroads are in no way obsolete and are still catalyzers for economic activity and real estate projects. Cecilia Harry, CEcD, IEDC board member and chief economic development officer at the Colorado Springs Chamber & EDC, told of plans for a new industrial rail park located one hour south of Denver. In partnership with the City of Fountain (Colo.) and El Paso County (Colo.) among others, ...

On the last day of IEDC’s 2022 Leadership Summit held in Coachella, Calif., Clint Nessmith, CEO of Resource Development Group, led a panel of leaders of successful and innovative regional partnerships in exploring the unique benefits a regional organization can create, as well as difficulties faced by regional developers, from navigating politics to today’s evolving economic development field. Nessmith opened the panel by espousing an “economic development truth”: all economic development is regional. In selling a project or proposal, developers must look at their work on a regional level, leveraging their region’s vibrant core, access to housing, quality schools, and other features. In failing to do so, ...