Economic Development Strategies & Solutions
Competitive Community Assessment
Are businesses frequently choosing to relocate to nearby communities instead of yours? A Competitive Community Assessment will clearly identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that may make other locations more desirable. Understanding your area data and demographics is important; site selectors might be identifying problematic statistics that your community may not be aware of or have no strategy in place to address. Even the best marketing efforts cannot mask detrimental data.
For corporations, we can help you narrow your search while looking for the ideal location for your business. We
will provide workforce data, average salaries, educational attainment levels, effective tax rates, costs of doing business, housing statistics, commute times, available incentives and other key data to help you compare one community with another. Let us assist you in finding the best location for your corporation.
The Local Fiscal Impact Analysis is based on specific financial characteristics of a community including revenues, expenditures, tax structure, land values, average salaries, and capital expenditures from the proposed project. It is important to understand both the benefits and costs associated with new or expanding businesses in the community. This strategic information can help in the decision making process as well as in the negotiation of incentives for recruiting or retaining businesses. This quantitative information is equally useful for private companies during the incentive negotiation phase of a project. If a corporation is knowledgable about the positive impact it will have on a community, they can successfully utilize this data while negotiating an incentives package.
We utilize the LOCI analysis program developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a nationally recognized web-based model for economic developers to evaluate the local fiscal impact of new development projects. We offer two different types of Fiscal Impact Analysis with the LOCI analysis program. Phase 1 is based solely on effective tax rates, capital investment, average salaries and real or personal property investment. A more comprehensive Phase 2 analysis includes additional fiscal data based on water usage, trash generation, local sales tax generation and other more detailed considerations.
