Many of today’s standard site selection practices are incompatible with the principles of transparent government. Site selection goes largely unseen until, all of a sudden, a construction crew shows up in full neon at a new worksite. Though not predicated on secrecy, site selection nonetheless elicits language to talk about the subject with a certain stealth. Sites are to be “shovel-ready”; negotiations, “frictionless”; permitting and inspection, “a breeze.”
Even for the municipal staff or economic developers at the negotiating table, the matter of how they got there can be a mystery. Site selectors and their clients make it a habit to conduct their initial searches from afar, aggregating data from online resources in place of old-fashioned conversations to size up their options. For their part, local leaders are aware that their communities are being evaluated in this way all the time, but they really only know about the fraction of opportunities that materialize as viable leads.
Given the deficit of information available to high-ranking community representatives, it’s difficult to decide what the general public should know and when. Notifications with minute-by-minute deal details would be overdoing it, but if a line of concerned citizens starts to form at a council meeting, it’s too late. So where’s the happy medium?
Advance Education About Development Goals
In the hierarchy of public education topics, economic development content tends to be secondary to more pressing information about day-to-day services, utilities, and emergencies. However, these more regular interactions with community members pose an opportunity to sneak in economic development messaging that piques interest and leads to greater engagement with initiatives down the line.
Recurring events, social media posts, and utility bills are prime real estate for brief reminders of ongoing development work, building familiarity through repeated exposure. That way, when people eventually visit the economic development website, they understand and support the way their community is positioned for a site-selecting audience.
Call for Subject-Matter Experts
If the current wave of technology is any indication, the need for knowledgeable experts to provide context and decipher jargon-laden advancements is higher than ever. At the local level, community members with relevant professional experience can strengthen development strategies and negotiating positions in target industries. In many cases, individuals with useful backgrounds actively seek to volunteer their expertise for the betterment of their communities, but experts in emerging fields may be more reclusive or out of the loop.
Consider setting up a recruitment tool that both attracts and vets the right community members, such as a bug bounty program that pays out modest sums for finding software deficiencies that you’ve carefully planted. Expanding the circle of those deputized to assess development opportunities introduces a higher threshold of scrutiny and increases the chance that a community only moves forward with the best opportunities for its character, workforce, and environment.
Project-Specific Updates
Nine out of ten economic development professionals would agree that the earlier scenario of a marathon council meeting with fraught public input represents the least desirable result of a project announcement. While controversy can’t always be avoided, comprehensive updates on projects with the potential to stir local interest should prove helpful in keeping passions in check. Though posting on social media, sharing a press release, and landing media coverage may seem sufficient, additional efforts can only amplify the essential message that will keep the public abreast of how and why a project will affect their community.
For example, visually captivating “Under Construction” banners can lead passers-by to important details via QR code, while creative video PSAs (in the style of a social media reveal, perhaps) can get development news to break containment and reach more community members. Communication methods that prove particularly successful can then be repeated for future projects, creating predictability and expectation around a forthcoming approach from development leaders.
A Clear Advantage
The long-term objective of transparency in economic development is transparency for its own sake. It’s not that municipalities and economic developers that continue business as usual are putting projects and relationships with the public at risk, although that may be the case. It’s that, by playing within the boundaries of a low-information environment preferred by private interests, communities miss an opportunity to shape a better (read: more transparent) system in which everyone from the site selector to the local activist has the full knowledge they need to make clear-cut decisions about their roles in local development.
