Yesterday, we held our October Business on the Border Luncheon where Wayne Savage and Pat Hynes presented on the upcoming Leonard R. Sugerman Public Forum and International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) events which will be taking place October 20th to the 22nd at the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum in Las Cruces. MVEDA will be sponsoring the opening reception for all registered attendees of ISPCS. As economic developers we work very hard and spend time and resources to get in front of industry decision makers and encourage business attraction to our region. The fact that ISPCS is taking place in our own back yard with industry leaders attending creates a very powerful marketing tool for MVEDA and the region as a whole.
To recap lead generation activity over the past month, MVEDA generated fifteen new leads compared with ten the last month, thereby showing a very healthy pipeline of projects and interest. Although alternative energy companies continue to make up over 1/3 of all our leads in the past two months, the overall percentage has dropped slightly and we have seen an increase in the percentage of lead generation within the aerospace and food processing sectors. We currently have 25 new leads in the pipeline for this fiscal year totaling 2,512 potential jobs and over 1 million square feet of potential real estate needs.
As announced last week, Frontier Airlines stated that they would be closing their Las Cruces reservation center towards the end of this year. MVEDA has already begun to market the facility as a plug-n-play call center to the site selector community and have currently received two inquiries.
In September, MVEDA attended the Industrial Asset Management Council (IAMC) conference in Minneapolis. This is the premier event for site consultants. MVEDA co-hosted a site consultant dinner put on by the New Mexico Partnership which received strong attendance.
For the month of October, MVEDA has a very busy marketing and travel schedule consisting of:
- Oct. 12-16: Prospect mission to Washington D.C. to meet primarily with defense related firms and site consultants
- Oct. 20-22: Leonard R. Sugerman Public Forum and ISPCS
- Oct. 26-29: Prospect mission in Los Angeles and attendance at the Solar Power International Show.
Finally, I am happy to say that on September 22, 2009, the County Commission voted unanimously on the passage of the Local Economic Development Act (LEDA) in Dona Ana County.
