Keep this on your radar. Large green manufacturer is in play for this site.
Both Pinnell and Stitt said today that there's about a half dozen thousand plus employers scouting Tulsa/NE Oklahoma and most of these are possibly making announcements in the next 60-90 days if Oklahoma will be picked as the winner. They didn't give much detail to the industry or type of employers though.
There's a lot going on behind the scenes for sure. It's promising. It's been really hard seeing what's passed us over but it has really, really gotten us a lot of attention nationally being in the top two in so many other searches.
Oklahoma used to not even get a look in the initial phases of site selection, so to be a finalist in so many searches, particularly it being pretty much only Tulsa/NE OK too these employers have circled and not OKC is a pretty big deal. We'll eventually start landing a few of these and we could really be on the verge of a big tipping point growth wise.
Our growth already has ticked up to over 1% per year and if we land 1-2 of these we could easily see growth rates in the 2-3% per year range MSA wide over the next decade. Could easily hit the 20-30% range from last census to next which would put us into the fastest growing MSAs. We're solidly moving up each year but one or two of these projects would really be a game changer for NE Oklahoma. Tulsa has gotten much closer to closing the percentage growth rate with OKC and other metros and we could easily see these types of project push up closer to Austin/NWA/Research Triangle type growth rates. That's good and bad I guess if it happens.
