Where the money went, who moved, and why places win.
Welcome to Issue No. 2.
Site selection usually happens behind closed doors. A company narrows a list, a state builds an incentive package, the land and utilities get lined up, and only then does anyone hold a press conference.
Iowa is running it backward, and we get to watch.
WHY HERE? · DEVELOPING
Iowa is doing site selection in public
Mesabi Metallics' $15 billion steel mill was announced at the White House on Sept. 28 with about 1,750 permanent jobs and no confirmed site. The company says only that it will be in eastern Iowa. The incentives weren't written yet. The natural gas line, the power and the rail work a mill like this needs still have to arrive.
This morning, lawmakers went back into special session in Des Moines to change the state's MEGA incentive program, which as written splits tax credits of up to 10% of qualifying investment between two businesses. The proposal would let one project claim the full 10%. On $15 billion, that could reach $1.5 billion if all of it qualifies.
The Senate opened, set the day's agenda on a voice vote and sent the bill to Ways and Means. The fight over the money didn't wait for committee. Senate Democratic Leader Janice Weiner reminded the chamber that the deal was called done in the Oval Office, with no new state tax credits needed. "Clearly, this resolution proves those claims false," she said, calling the package "a billion-dollar corporate tax giveaway." No Republican answered her on the floor.
That's the part of a deal that usually happens in a conference room. Today it's happening on the floor of the Iowa House and Senate, and the line items may tell us more about where the mill lands than anything the company has said. We're covering this one to the end.
FROM THE TRACKER
Avio breaks ground, and the jobs number goes up
Avio USA → Hurt, Pittsylvania County, Virginia
$500 million. More than 1,500 jobs.
Avio USA broke ground Sept. 29 on its solid rocket motor plant at the Southern Virginia Multimodal Park, and Gov. Abigail Spanberger's office raised the jobs projection to more than 1,500, up from more than 1,000 when the deal was announced in February. Production is expected to begin in early 2029.
Run last issue's math and that's about $333,000 in capital per job, roughly one-sixteenth of Hanwha's figure in Pine Bluff. Both are defense plants. One is buying machines, and the other is still buying a lot of people. In a region like Southside Virginia, that difference shows up in every hiring fair for the next five years.
The tracker logs both the groundbreaking and the jobs change as project events, so you can see how a deal grows after the press conference.
One more tracker note: we're expanding coverage. The tracker is lowering its threshold to projects of $50 million or 100 jobs, so you'll start seeing more of the mid-sized deals that make up most of what communities actually win.
MOVERS, SHAKERS & AWARD WINNERS
Who moved
Kurt Fullbeck · He's joined The Kroger Co. as senior manager of economic development. He's worked site selection at EY, regional business development at REDI Cincinnati and development strategy at the Indiana Economic Development Corporation. Now he's sitting in the company's chair.
John O'Toole · The only executive director the Beaufort County Economic Development Corporation has ever had is leaving in mid-November for a role in South Carolina he hasn't named. The first leadership change in an organization's history is a big hire.
Steven Jenkins · Back in city hall as Nampa, Idaho's economic development director after a stint at Idaho Power. In a market where power availability drives the conversation, that's a useful résumé line.
Award: The Kansas Department of Commerce won eight IEDC Excellence Awards, and both golds went to housing programs. Housing now counts as site readiness.
One to Watch: OpenAI is hiring an economic development lead, $176K–$285K plus equity, to engage communities before projects go public and run incentive negotiations. Big Tech wants its own people at the table.
ACROSS THE TABLE
"Tell me what can go wrong"
Tom Croteau spent nearly 24 years selling Georgia to companies, the last six as deputy commissioner. Now, at Maxis Advisors, he advises the companies doing the buying.
His advice to communities on the other side of the table is to stop pretending. "Don't tell me nothing can go wrong. Tell me what can go wrong," he said. Give the range on permitting, he says, not the best case, and say who gets the call when something slips.
"The perfect site doesn't really exist," Croteau said. What wins is solvable problems and people a company trusts to solve them.
SECOND SHIFT
Pipelines with names
David Lunebach retired from the Army after 20 years and wanted to stay near Savannah. An eight-week SkillBridge mechatronics course later, he's a robotics and automation technician at Hyundai's Metaplant in Ellabell, Ga. The plant has hired 17 graduates of the program and wants to take a bigger share of each class.
Mickey Critton made a deal with his mom: he could go back to a Milwaukee school if he joined the district's internship program with We Energies. It meant quitting smoking and showing up at 7 a.m. He's now a full-time gas distribution apprentice. Hundreds of students apply each year for about 30 spots.
Fort Stewart and Milwaukee Public Schools aren't usually on a site selector's list of labor assets. Maybe they should be.
CONTESTED GROUND
Where the doors are closing
Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state regulators to stop issuing air and water permits for data center projects until they finish audits of their power, water, ownership and incentives. That reaches projects planning to make their own power, too. The update from regulators is due Oct. 19. Projects with their water and power numbers in hand will be first in line when the permits restart. Read more →
St. Joseph County, Ind. Home to the Amazon and Microsoft campuses that will total about 40 buildings, the county council voted 6–3 to start drafting a ban on new hyperscale data centers. Early host counties don't always stay open to later projects. Read more →
Amber, Okla. The town tried to annex the 850 acres Aligned Data Centers bought nearby so it would have a say. The annexation collapsed when landowners backed out, and Grady County has no planning commission. "They're coming, and there's nothing we can do to stop them," the mayor said. No hearing doesn't mean no fight. Read more →
RESEARCH, FAST
Scarce is getting expensive
Land with power sells at a premium. GI Partners paid about $2.71 million an acre for a 5.43-acre data center site south of downtown Phoenix, about 4.7 times what the seller paid in 2012, Colliers reports. Acreage alone doesn't set a site's value anymore.
Hiring is slowing, but not for everyone. KPMG forecast 95,000 new payroll jobs for September, down from 162,000 in August. Skilled trades are still hard to hire, and data center construction is a big reason why.
Labor and buildings, one map. Cushman & Wakefield paired industrial real estate with labor data for 17 central U.S. metros, which are projected to grow 2.8% over five years, ahead of the nation's 2.1%. A cheap building doesn't help if no one can staff it.
THE 30-SECOND VERSION
A $15B steel mill negotiated in public · 1,500 jobs at Avio, up from 1,000 · $2.71M an acre for powered land in Phoenix · A 6–3 vote to start closing St. Joseph County's door · 95,000 jobs, and still no electricians
That's the whole issue. You're caught up.
COMING NEXT
Behind the Deal: why a defense contractor spent two years assembling a few acres across the street from Tinker Air Force Base. Contested Ground: the founder trying to put a number on how much a community will tolerate. And more from Iowa, as long as Iowa keeps giving us more.
One last thing
Thanks to everyone who wrote after Issue 1. Keep it coming. Send me the project we missed, the promotion you're too modest to announce, the research everyone should read and the worker whose story deserves a bigger room. If we got something wrong, tell me that too: [email protected].
Andy Greiner
Location Decision