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reasons and because it was not near a major airport. Mr. Sheehy said when he received a call from a client, he immediately began to work to take communities off the list and winnow down selections. Mr. Sheehy described a recent site selection process he went through and said one needed many choices because so few sites were suitable. That was related to land availability. He praised the Oregon land use system but said that now there was no land left inside the boundaries. He said he could never have too many choices as a site selector. If there was only one choice, there were no negotiations, and if something went wrong with the site, the client would not stick around. Speaking to the issue of labor, Mr. Sheehy said that heavy, labor-intensive manufacturing was going out of the country. It was not coming to Eugene. The higher paying knowledge-based jobs were the desired ones, and Eugene had the elements to attract them with the University. He said the companies most likely to want to come to Eugene were likely to be those the community wanted. Mr. Sheehy emphasized the importance of the community being located on I-5. He said access to the airport was also crucial. Adequate capacity in the sewer, water, and storm systems was also necessary to attracting companies. Impact .fees should be reasonable. Mr. Sheehy stressed the importance of speed to companies. Companies also want certainty. They want to know what the regulations were and they did not want them to change as that created schedule and community image problems. Employee recruitment, screening, and training were important to companies. He commended the job that Lane Community College did in working with Sony on employee training. He said the community should keep doing such training and keep it focused. Mr. Sheehy said Oregon needed to be careful about the image it projected. People outside the state considered it a great place to live, environmentally sensitive, and a hard place to do business in. He said university communities were generally no growth communities; their residents did not want them to change. It was hard to develop in such communities. Mr. Sheehy agreed with Mr. Roberts' remarks about incentives. He said that incentives create partnerships between a community and a company. He said that partnership could be more important to a company than the money. He said in some cases, incentives merely level the playing field and allowed the community to be competitive in the industries it most desired, such as the knowledge-based sector. Mr. Sheehy said the community should look at corporate headquarters in the same way it looked at the traded sector. Such headquarters brought money into the community and created new jobs. Mr. Sheehy said Eugene had an anti-business reputation that it needed to overcome if it was to be serious about creating jobs. Companies that make knowledge-based products can go anywhere MINUTES--Mayor's Committee on Economic Development March 8, 2004 Page 12