Site selectors tour the area

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. » When it comes to economic development, relationships matter.

That’s part of the reason the Saratoga County Prosperity Partnership strengthened its relationships with eight site selectors who visited the region earlier this week.

Dean Barber and Tim Feemster traveled from Dallas to tour the area. Feemster specializes in supply chains, while Barber’s business is called Barber Business Advisors.

“It’s important in economic development for the economic developer to have a relationship with the site location advisers and companies because they are on the frontline of determining where and when and how these companies are going to locate; not so much relocate, but

expand and grow. They have to know people. They have to know locations,” Marty Vanags, the partnership’s president, said. “They have to understand what we have. We make it easier for them by building up this relationship, giving them information and showing them the buildings and the sites and the resources that we have.”

The group spent Monday touring SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s nanotechnology facilities as well as Grande Industrial Park — home of Ball Metal Container, QUAD/Graphics, Peroxychem, Agrochem and Slack Chemical — and the Northway Exit 16 Corridor, site of the Target Distribution Center and Ace Hardware Distribution Center and to the GlobalFoundries Fab 8 semiconductor manufacturing facility.

“The key here is for us to understand what the opportunities that exist in these markets are because ... our what we call desktop research typically is not going to find some of the correlations or some of the important nuances of what goes on here, and that’s why we come to the market so we can see it,” said Feemster.

Feemster explained why an area like Saratoga County is attractive to businesses.

“There’s a tourist element to this community. A big one. We saw the downtown. It’s a very modern downtown compared to lots of cities its size. It has lots of amenities. Bike trails and all of those kinds of things that millennials like, so they can live, work and play in the same place. There’s half-an-hour away an airport where you can connect to basically anywhere in the world, and there’s highways — highway infrastructure going north, south, east and west — and you’re close to Canada,” said Feemster. “They have rail service as well. I’m a supply chain guy, so that’s the kind of stuff I look at. We saw the Target facility. We saw the Ace Hardware facility, and business parks that they have available to also build new facilities. Those are the things we want to look at, because our customers are always going to ask us, well, ‘Why do we want to go there? What’s the big deal?’ And the big deal is [Saratoga County] has infrastructure in highways, they got infrastructure in airports, they got infrastructure train service down to the New York and over to Boston.”

Barber and Feemster’s role is to find strengthens and weaknesses in areas where companies may want to expand. Clients typically come to companies like Barber and Feemster’s with a geographic location in mind, but in the end it’s the client’s decision on where to relocate or expand as Barber explains. The site selectors merely advise them.

Vanags travels the country to pitch Saratoga County on a regular basis, but he said it’s crucial to actually bring in site selectors to show off the county.

“Our goal is to get them familiar with our community . ... These guys, if they get a project and someone says ‘We want to be in the Northeast,’ there’s no big database that they can go to that says where are all the sites and who are all the people that can help me pick the sites in the Northeast,” said Vanags. “Hopefully they’ll say, ‘Hey, I know that Marty [Vanags] guy’ and these are the communities that they are going to start looking at first, and say, ‘All right, does this fit the criteria that the company I’m working for needs?’”

Feemster called it a twoway street.

“[Marty] is learning from us, and we’re learning from him,” said Feemster. “We want to do this because it allows us to support our clients better.”