Like a lagging, but motivated student looking to remove the blight of a few bad grades from an otherwise praiseworthy report card, Greater Spokane Incorporated has begun developing recommendations aimed at improving areas of competitive weakness here revealed in a recently commissioned study.

The study, conducted by Tadzo, a Yakima-based economic development and site selection consulting firm, included a Greater Spokane Region Competitiveness Report Card in which consultants gave the Spokane area three As, four Bs, a C, and two Ds in 10 categories.

The Spokane area ranked high in human capital, sustainability, and permitting and regulatory environment, and above average in transportation, utilities and infrastructure, location, and entrepreneurship and innovation resources. However, it had only a middling grade in business climate and rated poorly in real estate and incentives.

A volunteer economic development action group chaired by local Wells Fargo Bank executive Ted Lane, who GSI President and CEO Steven Stevens recruited for the task, held a strategic planning session last month aimed at starting to formulate recommendations for addressing the area’s spotlighted shortcomings and improving its overall competitiveness.

The group has additional meetings scheduled for July 9 and Aug. 6, with the intent of presenting its recommendations to the GSI board in time for them to be incorporated into GSI’s broader strategic planning effort for its 2016 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

“The real bottom line is, can we grow jobs faster,” Stevens says.

“I think we’re on the right track. This can accelerate our speed to where we want to be,” he says.

The greater Spokane area regularly competes against cities and states across the nation for jobs and business investments, GSI says. 

It says its business recruitment and retention efforts create economic impact by helping retain current businesses and by attracting businesses from outside of the area to expand or relocate here. 

To be most effective in that effort, it says, it needs to know how well the Spokane area stacks up competitively in creating a thriving economic environment.

“We want to be a competitive community, and competitive communities are very aware of competitors,” Stevens says.

For that reason, it brought TadZo representatives to town in mid-January to begin that research project, titled “Driving Competitive Change for the Spokane Region,” which led to a three-part report that the consulting firm wrapped up last month.

Part I was the report card—a detailed assessment of how Spokane rated in 10 key factors considered important for job creation.

Part II was the “Greater Spokane Region Competitor Benchmarking Report,” which evaluated how the Spokane area stacked up against six other areas competitively as viewed from the perspective of aerospace, advanced manufacturing or health sciences employers that might be considering whether to locate operations here.

Part III was the “Greater Spokane Region Recommendations for Enhancing Competitiveness Report,” which sought to provide “a menu of actionable endeavors” that can be integrated into strategic plans for GSI, local jurisdictions, and economic development partners.

Among more than 40 listed “solutions” TadZo consultants suggested for recruitment challenges the Spokane area faces, and many of which it readily acknowledged were outside of GSI’s control, were the following:

•Conduct a target industry study to define “best fit” industries for this area, based on industry trends, capabilities of this area, and ability to leverage the state’s business-and-occupation tax structure.

•Create business cases for each target industry, and use more maps to tell this region’s story.

•Document industry “value chains” for possible regional clusters.

•Employ an attorney to conduct an analysis of state law to determine what incentives can be developed at the local level, since the Spokane area compares poorly with other areas in the incentives it’s able to offer under state law.

•Develop a signature industry or business park, as well as speculative buildings, to increase industrial building inventory, and bring developable sites up to certification level, verified by third-party experts, to correct a current shortage of such ready-to-go sites.

•Develop creative local incentives, create and adopt a formal incentive policy, and establish a port district to provide additional local incentives.

Stevens says GSI “was overdue for this kind of exercise,” and he expects the organization will use the TadZo report to establish both short- and long-term goals.

Of its overall report card, he says, “I think we feel pretty good about it, but we certainly expected we would have some deficiencies.”

One of the findings in TadZo’s research that he found most “ugly” was that the Spokane rated the worst in property crime among the six areas it was benchmarked against, and he says, “Poverty is high here compared to those areas we looked at.”

Robin Toth, GSI’s vice president of business development, says of the overall report, “I think it’s just validation of what we’ve known. This isn’t for the faint-hearted.”

To be sure, trying to convince developers here to spend millions of dollars to build tenant-ready speculative structures or a major new business park here for companies that might or might not come is likely be a huge challenge, she and Stevens acknowledge. The same is true of the proposal to create a port district here, which to date has proven politically unpopular.

GSI is determined, though, to create a strong action plan based on the TadZo study findings.

Stevens says GSI used to have an economic development advisory group, and it decided to establish the new economic development action group headed by Lane because it was “time for a group that’s strategic thinking and action oriented.”

Lane, a senior vice president and business initiatives manager here with Wells Fargo Bank, says the economic development action group is “using the TadZo study as a good solid base to work from.”

It’s pursuing four “work stream” focuses—local business climate and incentives, state business climate and incentives, real estate and product readiness, and innovation and tech transfer—that will involve community business and civic leaders who have an interest or expertise in those areas. Suggestions from those work-stream areas will be melded into the group’s recommendations to the GSI board, he says.

Of the group’s first meeting held last month, Lane says, “We had really good participation—a lot of interest and a lot of good folks.” 

Ultimately, though, he says the effort to achieve economic-development and recruitment goals that come out of the action-plan exercise will require much broader participation.

“Economic development is a team sport,” he says, “and we need the entire business community working with us.”