North of the Border
	Jan/Feb 2007

Evanston, Wyoming

Evanston, Wyoming, is about a seven hour drive from Denver. More importantly, it’s about an hour and ten minute drive from the Salt Lake City Airport. That’s one of the many factors that makes Evanston, population 12,000, attractive to small businesses.

The city, whose slogan is “Fresh Air, Freedom, and Fun,” is trying to diversify its economy by encouraging small businesses to expand or relocate to Union Center Business Park. The park is located on land the Union Pacific Corporation donated to the city in the 1990s. The donation was part of Union Pacific’s long history of doing business with the city, located in the Bear River Valley.

“In 1868 the railroad came through, so we were a railroad community,” explains Jim Davis, Evanston city clerk. Soon after the railroad arrived, the city built the Wyoming State Hospital, a mental health facility. For decades the city was dependent on those two industries, until the oil and gas boom of the 1980s.

Now Evanston is trying to attract manufacturing companies. One of the selling points is its location. “It’s not like we’re out in the middle of nowhere,” Davis says. “We’re on the Union Pacific line. We’re also about a day’s drive to Oakland.”

The city is using a grant program to entice new businesses to the area. The grants are through the Wyoming Business Council’s Business Ready Community (BRC) Grant and Loan program. The program provides financing to Wyoming cities to build infrastructure and improve business parks, to help the cities attract business and promote economic development. The grants help defray construction costs, and the amounts vary depending on the number of jobs a company creates.

“What Evanston is trying to do is diversify our economy and not be so dependent on the rise and fall of the oil and gas markets,” Davis says. “Now we’re getting some tools we can use to entice companies to take a look at us and possibly locate here.”

One of the first companies to benefit from the BRC grant is Everett Graphics, an Oakland, California-based company that makes boxes with print, such as software cartons, cosmetic boxes, and chocolate boxes. Clients include PowerBar and Williams-Sonoma.
Whit Everett, president of his family’s 60-year-old business, says the company has 50 employees and an 80,000 square foot manufacturing plant in Oakland, California. Two years ago they wanted to expand to 120,000 square feet, but found that a building of that size would cost about $20 million to buy. “We’re not in the real estate business,” he says. “If we invested $20 million in a manufacturing facility and our business goes south, is the building marketable? We decided no, so that’s not where we should put our money.”

At the same time, he didn’t want to leave California, where his family has lived for generations. Also, many client companies had headquarters in the area, and they liked to check the printing of their packages. “When their package sits on a store shelf, it’s like a magazine cover,” he says. “It’s a big deal for marketing.”
He began talking to friends and also did some of his own research. A Forbes magazine article listed the best places to locate a small business. Evanston was one of the cities in the article. “I had never been there, never heard of it,” he says. “I went on the website and it looked pretty cool.”

The website offers a great deal of information for small businesses thinking about relocating. The Economic Development section offers charts, graphs, and other information about labor costs, transportation, and other details. For example, Evanston is the eighth most populated city in Wyoming. The city grew by 5.5 percent from 1990 to 2000, and is projected to continue to grow at a similar rate over the next few years. Half the workforce completed some college. Hourly wages are comparable to those in Utah.

So Everett called the city and then visited. He was greeted by about ten city representatives who were eager to answer questions. The level of service and hospitality were great, Everett says, but what really helped was the grant that covered about 90 percent of the construction costs of the building. Under the terms of the grant, Everett Graphics leases 62,500 square feet for six years, for what he calls “good terms.” At the end of the six years, the company can buy the building for less than what it would have cost if he’d tried to build a manufacturing facility without the city’s help.

The good terms are contingent on the number of people Everett Graphics keeps employed in Evanston. So far the company has 20 people on its payroll at the Union Center location – including five employees who moved from California – and hopes to expand to about 40 workers by the end of 2007. The average salary of the workers is about $27,000.

Davis says the deal helps the city too. “All the money we receive from the lease payments will go into a separate fund for future economic development,” he says. “So the money we attain will not go back into what municipal governments call the ‘general fund’ that’s used for anything. This is earmarked.”

Evanston is an 11 to 13 hour drive to Phoenix, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. Everett says the central location made Evanston more attractive than the second choice, which was Boise, Idaho. “We can service Denver, Salt Lake City, Portland, Seattle, Las Vegas,” he says. “These are a short drive in trucks.”

The Oakland location of Everett Graphics still has 50 employees. The Evanston location was up and running by July, just over a year after the company was awarded the $3 million in BRC grant funding. Everett, who visits Evanston once a month, hopes to expand the Wyoming location to 120,000 square feet. “Our product takes a fair amount of space,” he says.

The city is currently talking to another manufacturing company that might open a facility at Union Center. “What’s exciting for us is it has the potential to be a business that would buy product from Everett,” Davis says.

He adds that the city hopes to attract more companies. The Wyoming Business Council shares leads with cities that want to attract businesses. Evanston doesn’t respond to every proposal. “It’s within reason,” Davis says. “If they need a site that requires 300,000 square feet and a workforce of 1,000 workers, we can’t even mess with that. We don’t have the workforce and we don’t have a building that size.” The ideal business would need a facility for about 40 to 50 employees, and hope to expand as the population of Evanston expands.

An unexpected effect of the BRC grants is that Union Center might soon become full. The other companies leasing space include the 50-employee Carbon Fiber Technology, which manufacturers carbon fiber used in golf club shafts and other items. There’s also Union Tank Car Company, which repairs railway cars. The industrial/light industrial/office park is about one mile from Interstate 80, and adjacent to rail.

“We’re running out of room in Union Center,” Davis says. But there’s still plenty of room for more businesses to locate in Evanston. “Our city limit is ten square miles, so we have other places.”

Everett points to another unintended consequence of the grant program. “The people there in Evanston have been so great,” he says. “I met people who are going to be my friends for the rest of my life.”