Consultants: Ready site, energy are keys to landing big projects

Companies seeking to invest in large projects are looking for ready sites and available energy. Financial incentives act as a “coupon” to encourage them to select a site over their competitors. Meanwhile, Arkansas is ahead of some states in working with schools to develop its workforce.

Those comments came from five national site selection consultants who spoke at a Power Up Little Rock luncheon Wednesday (Oct. 15) at the Clinton Presidential Center. The event was hosted by the Metro Little Rock Alliance^[1], a 13-county regional marketing coalition staffed by the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce^[2].

The five are members of the Site Selectors Guild, a group of about 70 nationwide economic development consultants.

Their appearance was part of a three-day itinerary that included breakfast with Gov. Sarah Sanders that morning and a closed door event at the Saline County Career and Technical Campus in Benton the next day.

They received a fee to spend three days in Arkansas, but their visit could bring employers to Arkansas, said Little Rock Regional Chamber Vice President of Economic Development Jack Thomas. Following their luncheon remarks, they were scheduled to visit economic development sites in central Arkansas.

Didi Caldwell, president & CEO, Global Location Strategies, said the best incentive for a company is a great site that has already gone through due diligence and has infrastructure extended to it. In an annual survey, 82% of Site Selectors Guild members strongly agreed that, for industrial projects, the availability of development-ready sites supported by sufficient infrastructure capacity was the top location driver in 2024. It along with electric power capacity and access to talent were the most important factors.

“Those three things: product, which is sites and buildings; power; and people are the three things that drive our projects,” she said.

Developers often focus on site readiness first. She had recently sited a $4 billion, 1,000-megawatt, 1,000-employee aluminum smelter outside of Tulsa. There were only three locations in the country where it could have been placed.

She said Arkansas is one of the states that has site readiness funding. However, she said she encouraged Sanders to do more. She encouraged communities to be ready when opportunity arrives. Site selectors will narrow the list of potential locations to the last two or three. At that point, the employers will do business with the people with whom they feel the most comfortable.

She noted that Arkansas was not the first choice when it won a $400 million Trex Co. campus at the Port of Little Rock in 2021. Her company was the lead on the project. When company officials arrived, the port had built a simple setup featuring Trex decking and furniture.

“Little Rock changed their mind,” she said. “Arkansas changed their mind. And that Trex furniture was no small part in that.”

Mike Mullis, president and CEO of J.M. Mullis, Inc., said available energy has become a key part of the site selection process the past five or six years. Whereas requiring 10-30 megawatts of power was a huge project in the past, now it’s normal. Meanwhile, more than 70% of the national grid network has not been improved in more than 20 years. Every major utility tells his company that it is at maximum capacity.

“What we are caught in is a quagmire now of energy deficiency like we have never seen,” he said.

Natural gas is another highly-desired resource. Many sources are booked and reserved if not in use.

“We’ve got project after project after project across the United States where we have had to walk away from billion-dollar investment opportunities because the transmission sources had no availability,” he said.

Mullis praised the increased regional concept displayed in central Arkansas and the rest of the state in recent years.

“I remember coming here to bring projects, when I either had to be on the north side of the river or the south side of the river,” he said. “I couldn’t do both.”

John Longshore, senior consultant at Newmark, said the site selection process looks much like a funnel in that it starts broad and then narrows through a process of elimination. Site selectors determine their clients’ needs and then request information from the communities. They next engage face-to-face with communities and narrow down their choices. The last stage involves incentives and negotiations.

Monty Turner, senior vice president at Colliers, said financial incentives are the “deal closer” that can tip the scales in favor of a particular site. Incentives can mitigate risk and uncertainty by paying for part of the costs of infrastructure upgrades, utility extensions, and other expenses.

“Incentives rarely make a bad site good, but they can make a good site great,” he said.

He described one employer who narrowed its selection to three states. Two states rolled out the red carpet with their incentive proposals. The third state’s proposal was “absolutely abysmal.” The client quickly eliminated that third option.

Turner said characterizations of incentives as “corporate welfare” are inaccurate. Instead, he compared them to a coupon that leads a customer to choose one pizza restaurant over another.

When it comes to workforce issues, Denise Mullis, senior vice president and partner at J.M. Mullis, Inc., said Arkansas is “ahead of the game” and is prepared to work with school systems as the Trump administration dismantles the federal Department of Education.

She said every community should have a manufacturing workforce council to address talent shortages. Colleges and technical schools should work directly with manufacturers to create programs for industrial maintenance. Community members should create workforce pathways for students.

She said communities should remove barriers to employment by investing in working families. In Clarksville, Tenn., economic developers looked for child care providers for their industrial park. Another client elsewhere seeking to hire 1,100 people asked about bus service. That city worked with the transportation department to ensure buses stopped at the facility.

Mullis said she has already done the research before she visits a community. What differentiates communities are the the people themselves.

“Workforce isn’t just a statistic,” she said. “Right? It’s a living, breathing asset that can become a powerful competitive advantage through intentional collaboration.”

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