Because of our deep experience in managing economic development programs, GLDPartners has been asked by Merced County (California) to take on the management of its economic development program.
Merced County is about 2,000 square miles and has a population of over 270,000 located in California’s abundant Central Valley. Located just 80 miles directly east of the Silicon Valley and bisected by two critical north-south highways and rail lines (I-5/CA99 and UP/BNSF), there is easy access to the Port of Oakland and the Bay Area’s international airports. Merced County is very well-positioned to win investment in some key manufacturing sectors as its location provides easy access to global R&D centers, with a series of available high quality industrial sites and very low operational and development cost structure.
Merced County has historically been a very important agribusiness center and that prominence is shown today as a powerful agribusiness center with large quantity production of almonds, tomatoes, beef, dairy products, including large-scale cheese and milk products manufacturing. Though still a very powerful agriculture center, over the past twenty years Merced County has developed a diversified economic base including a range of manufactured products including food production, boat manufacturing and industrial machinery manufacturing. An interesting fact: the County is home to the Hilmar Cheese Company which produces more cheese at their Merced facility than any other single cheese manufacturing site in the world.
Merced County has an unusually strong community structure with leaders that have a intense pro-business perspective, yielding an aggressive economic development system that strategically integrates capital investments, business incentives, in a low-bureaucracy environment. The County has strong educational pillars including the newest and fastest growing University of California campus (UC Merced) and a very high performing community college (Merced College) that is quite active in business training and skills development.
Working with the County’s Department of Community and Economic Development, GLDPartners will support the its Director Mark Hendrickson’s vision for developing the County’s economy. The work will include creating new investment in the targeted supply chain sectors (industrial machinery, automotive, specialty chemicals, commercial space systems, food production), investment prospect handling, working with the six incorporated cities within the County (Merced, Atwater, Los Banos, Livingston, Gustine and Dos Palos) and supporting investment in the unincorporated areas of the County. A prime focus will be to portray a well-prepared business-oriented California County as a highly competitive investment location, and supporting that with a new marketing system is being developed to aggressively illustrate the product. This will include a new website, complete with a full range of searchable data and GIS mapping.
GLDPartners is also helping Merced County to redevelop the former Castle Air Force Base in Atwater into a $1B technology product manufacturing complex that will house 8M square feet of high-tech manufacturing. Also an active commercial airport with a 11,800 foot runway, the Mid-California International Investment Hub is already home to Google’s autonomous vehicle testing facility and a range of other business tenants. Over the next few months, we and the County will be introducing a new automotive technology testing & development complex within the project. This complex will support a range of research partners and autotech companies in the autonomous vehicle and connected car areas. Already there are a range of project partners including UC Berkeley, Stanford, USC, Carnegie-Mellon, Faraday Future among others.
