Worth the Wait
Let’s face it, we Americans live in a quick fix, instant society. The concept of “waiting” is a thing of the past. We have become accustomed to “instant” everything. We consume instant beverages and eat drive-through meals. Our banking is done via the internet, ATM’s and drive-through-windows. We earn instant college degrees through online schools and search for jobs through monster.com.
Gone are the days we wait to make personal phone calls from home, now we take our phones with us. If we don’t have time to really talk, we can send text messages – why bother to really “verbally” communicate with someone else – that is just too time consuming.
We can find information on just about any topic from aardvarks to zebras, within seconds, through search engines such as Google and Ask.com. Anything that takes more than a few seconds to receive seems ancient and “old-fashioned.”
Yet in this instantaneous world of “get-it-now,” there are still times when waiting is necessary and valuable, especially in the world of economic development. Unfortunately in the world of business building, there are no drive-through services, where you look at a menu board and say, “I’ll take one new call center, an intermodal rail service, one distribution site for a big box store, and an automotive plant. Oh, and I would like that with a Starbucks and Olive Garden Restaurant on the side.”
Recently, GREDA and the City of Galesburg announced that CenterPoint Properties of Chicago and Mercantile Companies, Inc. of New York have entered into a development agreement to help cultivate Logistic Park Galesburg. CenterPoint is one of the largest owners, managers and developers of industrial real estate in America, with 22 business parks, managing 40 million square feet of land and an additional 3,300 acres of land for future development.
This is exciting news for Galesburg as the 350 acre logistics park will be developed, bringing much needed jobs and tax dollars to the community. A similar CenterPoint project is CenterPoint Intermodel Center – Elwood, a state-of-the-art industrial park featuring a 770 acre intermodal BNSF Logistics Park. This redevelopment of the former Joliet Arsenal is expected to create 8,000 new jobs and eventually increase tax revenue by as much as $27 million per year.
So how did GREDA and the City of Galesburg succeed in securing such an impressive developer? It was a time consuming, relationship building process that began over four years ago. You can bet it wasn’t a business deal made on a cell phone in a matter of minutes. Representatives from GREDA and the city spent hundreds of hours meeting with key players, providing information and valuable data, while building a business partnership based on integrity and trust.
Similar time intensive relationship building is crucial on a global level. More and more foreign countries are diversifying their investments and looking to other countries to develop their businesses.
If you don’t believe all the media hype about a global economy, think about the impact China’s stock market had on our own stock exchange just a few months ago. Jim Jubak, of MSN Money recently wrote that there is a global logistics crisis. The Chinese use sophisticated technologies to eliminate a lot of the stops and transfers that make the shipping of goods so pricey. According to Jubak, the United States has a major edge on China in inland infrastructure – roads, railroads, etc. It is this inland infrastructure that makes Galesburg an attractive asset to such countries.
Distributions centers in the United States makes good sense for a country that sorts goods, loads them on pallets and then delivers them to superstores owned by Wal-Mart. One such distribution center owned by a Chinese aerospace company opened just this year in Indianapolis. After several years of extensive contacts and visits to China, the efforts culminated in a sister city relationship with Zhejiang Province, leading to the Chinese development. The Chinese aerospace distribution center has created jobs and brought tax dollars to this Indiana city.
GREDA and the City of Galesburg began exploring potential relationships with China in November 2002. Four years later, after numerous visits to over 13 cities in China, meetings with over 125 business, government and education officials, and over 60 individuals representing these groups visited Galesburg, a “Sister City Agreement” was formally signed with Ma’anshan City just three weeks ago. Hopefully this new relationship with our sister city will lead to something similar to Indianapolis. Only time will tell.
In this fast-paced, instantaneous world, the value of time consuming relationship building remains an important component in the world of economic development.
©GREDA
