AMD Wake Up Call

“This is not the formal committment (letter), but what we can say is we are doing Fab 4X,” AMD spokesman Travis Bullard said.

So now that the AMD facility appears that it IS going to happen, are we ready in Warren and Washington Counties?

From what we learned in our visit to Hillsboro, Oregon, (the Silicon Forest) two years ago, the answer to this question is no right now but the good news is that we can be. This announcement by AMD is hopefully a wake up call that we need to make genuine progress to create a regional water and sewer system. The single most important step that Hillsboro took to capture the attention and the investment of the semi-conductor industry and its support system of companies was to create a regional water system that was safe, efficient, abundant and redundant. We have the potential to make this happen and now we need the will to make it a reality.

In addition, we need to regionalize our economic development efforts to reach out to those support companies that might now be interested in our area. Again in Hillsboro, they have one regional economic development agency that is the single point of contact and the one professional ombudsman that works with companies considering locating in that region. It is that one regional economic development organization that pulls the team together so that local elected officials, business leaders, government agencies, and educational leaders work collaboratively to recruit new investment and to "sell" their area.

Unfortunately, we're still competing with one another to sell water to other communities. We're still competing with one another to attract new investment. This must change and now is the time for us to come together.