Tooele-area leaders preview 'Grow Tooele' site to centralize business recruitment information

Tooele County staff on Aug. 21 demonstrated a beta economic-development website called Grow Tooele intended to centralize site, workforce and incentive information for businesses considering the valley. The demonstration took place at the Tooele County Council of Governments meeting in the council chambers at the Tooele County Courthouse.

County staff said the site is intended as a single, informational portal where prospects can "come and start the process" and then be routed to the specific jurisdiction for detailed questions. County staff member Andy said, "We need to have more jobs staying in the valley, and so we need to do a better job in recruiting." Britney, a Tooele County staff member who walked the meeting through the site, said the site "talks about the location, what we can offer" and noted it links to demographic and employer data and to property listings via LoopNet.

Officials said the site is a beta version and not yet broadly published. Britney (Tooele County staff) said some links were not live during the demonstration and asked jurisdictions to send updated contact information if they want a local contact listed. She described the incentives section as informational: "This is saying these are types of incentives that walks through federal incentives, Utah incentives, where they can find these and information on them, and then local incentives. These are possibilities of local incentives that could be. It's not saying that this would happen." Andy (Tooele County staff) said the county is hosting the site and invited edits so the site can "be very us together as a as a whole."

During discussion, several elected officials told staff to include forward-looking indicators and projections to help prospects evaluate growth and workforce availability. Mayor Wade (Tooele City) said businesses will want to know whether population and workforce trends are upward or downward; an unidentified council member urged adding projections after meeting comments that local development could add thousands of housing units in coming years. County staff acknowledged those requests and said they will add future-growth information in later updates.

Presenters described the site as pulling regularly updated state data so county- and city-level demographics and employment figures refresh automatically when state sources update. The site demonstration also included links to technical-education and workforce programs and to business-resource contacts at the state level.

Staff requested that each jurisdiction send a single contact for the site so prospective businesses can be routed to the appropriate city or town economic-development staff. They also asked the COG members for feedback on additional content the site should include before general publication.

The presentation concluded without formal action; staff said the site remains in beta while they incorporate edits and finalize links.