Southwestern Illinois Leadership Council seeks more  property details for prospective customers

by Randy Pierce • In an effort to promote economic development in the region, the Southwestern Illinois Leadership Council is seeking information about available property suitable for projects that will help provide growth, financial stability, job opportunities and increased real estate tax revenue in this area.

Kyle Anderson, executive director of the Leadership Council of Southwestern Illinois, a not-for-profit 501(c)6 member-based economic development corporation with its main office in Glen Carbon, met with the Madison County Board Grants Committee earlier this month and shared the ideas he has connected with a newly-implemented marketing effort concerning the region.

“We’re going to ask counties, cities, anybody who will listen, to input their properties they have for sale for development into this (SWILC) web site. If they don’t want to do it, give it to us and we’ll do it,” Anderson explained.

“We want to try to get as many properties on this site as possible,” he continued, regarding prospective economic development. “One of the advantages we have is: St. Louis keeps saying, ‘We don’t have big sites anymore.’ We do, so send them our way.”

Anderson said his approach included sending out a letter to all municipal leaders and speaking at a meeting of the Southwestern Illinois Council of Mayors a couple weeks ago along with offering to provide assistance with what the leadership council is seeking.

In conjunction with uploading all of the information about the sites where such information has been gathered, Anderson said, “Then we’re going to push this out,” targeting conferences and other events where big companies send representatives who are trying to figure out where they are going to go next, “We’re going to do a geo-targeting.”

All of this is happening as part of the leadership council’s “Envision Southwestern Illinois” campaign, implemented a few months ago to call attention to this part of the state as an attractive place to locate a manufacturing facility, production plant or similar and even a bit smaller projects.

Among the positive aspects of the region in terms of such development, according to Anderson, is what he referred to as “multimodal transportation” referencing highways, river traffic and railroads, as he added, “We have that by the boatload or barge load, so we really highlight that.”

A logo developed for the Envision Southwestern Illinois promotion features the Gateway Arch with one of its legs anchored in a star on this state’s side of the Mississippi River.

“The reason why we’re doing that,” Anderson told the grants committee, “is when someone’s looking at, when a company’s looking at the St. Louis area, they should be looking at us as well and we’ve done a very good job of saying why we are a viable option to them.”

“People think we’re just cornfields,” he went on, “but we’re much more than that so that’s why we have the tagline ‘gateway to growth.’”

Anderson further stated, “I get tired of when I travel, everyone saying. ‘I see, Illinois, oh, you’re from Chicago.’ No, I talk fast but I’m not from Chicago and so Envision Southwestern Illinois puts us on the map in Illinois but where we are actually.

“We want to market our area and try to draw as many eyes as possible to our region. We talk about the workforce, the quality of life we have here, we highlight our academic partners as well,” Anderson noted.

Late last year, he had provided additional insight into what became Envision Southwestern Illinois by explaining “The way it works right now,” Anderson explained, “let’s say a company finds a site (physical location) that works.”

Demographics that exist for cities and villages do not adequately capture what the region as a whole may be able to offer those companies or corporations exploring places to locate as Anderson noted, “All they see is that city, not the fact that we are a 650,000 population area, that we are 20 minutes away from some of the finest cultural institutions, you know, the art museum, etc., everything that St. Louis has to offer.”

The leadership council, he continued, “wants to brand ourselves all together as one collective whole and sell this to other companies so we are searchable and we want to put us on the map.”