SPECIAL FE ATURES
Meeting Economic Development Competition
BY JOHN CRUTCHFIELD Greater Killeen Chamber of Commerce President/CEO
Capital investment is the key to economic development. Communities desire it because it provides the revenue to create a higher standard of living. Investors learned long ago that they bring value to a community. They expect incentives to be available - maybe not in all cases, but in most of them. The question is not if a community is going to provide incentives, but to whom and how? The challenge in negotiating incentives
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Greater Killeen BUSINESS QUARTERLY
is in remaining objective so as to avoid “giving away the farm�. There is another challenge. That is keeping the process confidential. The need for both transparency and confidentiality sets up a conflict in objectives.
T H E N E E D F O R T R A N S PA R E N C Y Most economic development organizations, including ours, are non-profit and public in nature. We try hard to communicate who we are, what we do, the services we have to offer and how we provide those services. We believe that transparency is a good thing, especially in a free society. To create transparency, we created our website, www. killeenedc.com. There you can find information about who we are and how we do business. You can learn much about KEDC and the economic development process.