BizPROGRESS TREO Chairman’s Circle members from left – Michael M. Crow, Fletcher McCusker, Sandra Watson, Suzanne L. Miles, Sharon Bronson, James K. Beckmann, Ann Weaver Hart, Paul Bonavia, Joe Snell, Wendell Long, Lisa Lovallo, Stephen G. Eggen, Judy Rich, Daniel Alcombright, Mara Aspinall, Karen Mlawsky and Jim Click.
Horizons Development By Eric Swedlund
that intentionally,” Hiremath said. “A lot of their time was geared to trying to appease these municipalities that contributed a certain amount of money and justify to them their contributions.” Snell said that in order to be effective, regionalism must be truly embraced, not simply given lip service. “We have got to walk that walk and have it embedded into everything we do, using all of our resources to solve the issues and being unified in a goal. That will produce success,” he said. “As a regional community, as a metropolitan community, we need to adopt and embrace a brand new approach regarding economic development,’’ Snell added. “We need to be working with the intent of how we can rather than why we cannot.” The past fiscal year saw TREO’s efforts bring in 2,207 direct new jobs, working on 15 projects that have a combined total economic impact of
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$376.7 million. In addition to bringing in new jobs, TREO assisted existing companies – like Bombardier, Schletter and Bruker Nano – to expand. “That is up considerably, the highest point since we went into the recession,’’ Snell said of the numbers. “This region has experienced some significant wins.’’ Most recently TREO worked to secure four major companies – Accelr8 Technology Corporation (bioscience), Aris Integration (building and construction), American Tire Distributors (transportation and logistics) and Integrated Technologies Group (aerospace & defense). “We just need to point to Accelr8 as an example of how this region came together to solve an issue and ask a question of how we can,” Snell said. “We didn’t have the specific real estate fit, we didn’t have the wet lab space that fit this company,’’ he said. “The
first thing maybe in years past would have been to say ‘Well, it doesn’t fit, we don’t have it.’ Instead, government, the private sector, the academic sector, everybody got creative to come up with a solution and we ended up winning the prize.” Securing more economic prizes for the region will depend on maintaining a positive trajectory and being aggressive. “When something like Accelr8 happens, we want to shout as loud as we can, to as many people as we can, not only that Tucson won the prize, but why that company chose us,’’ Snell said. “Companies are influenced greatly by what they read. Everybody likes to pick a winner.” He said folks in business circles start talking when they read about a company like Accelr8 picking up and moving continued on page 72 >>> Winter 2013
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