Episode 10 | LIVE from the #AmericanSouth Site Selection Summit | Interviews with Dr. Pete Fullerton, Darin Buelow, and Ron Bertasi

Welcome to the SEDC Meet the Consultants 2023 coming to you from Atlanta, Georgia. Hi, I'm Ray Methvin and I have happily hijacked the SEDC podcast for the next couple days. We're going to spend a few minutes talking to the different people that make the SEDC such a wonderful organization. Stay tuned, folks. ♪♪♪ Hi, folks. I'm joined by the illustrious and infamous Pete Fullerton. He just with the Kansas City Aviation Department, a longtime SEDC member. Pete, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Ray. I appreciate the opportunity to visit. Yeah, well, tell us what's going on in your world. Well, we just, as you noted, I'm with the Kansas City Aviation Department, involved in commercial properties, development, and basically revenue generation for the Kansas City airport system. We just came off of two months ago a large building project. We completed a $1.5 billion new terminal. One of the projects that I was involved with was the concessions, food and beverage, news and gift stores that are in this new terminal. It's been a great satisfying project to be involved with and seeing the benefits now that we've been open for two months. Wow, $1.5 billion. Yeah, on time on budget. The folks that were very involved in the development of that building did a magnificent job in being able to do the on-time on on budget. It was started construction four years ago, so before COVID, so through the COVID project didn't miss a beat. We were lucky and good relative to the purchasing of a lot of glass and steel and was able to get that through the system without any delays. What kind of effects are you seeing already or do you expect to see on aviation air travel into the Kansas City area? We've seen new traffic come in already. We have a lot of, we are at pre-pandemic levels as far as traffic. One of the things that is great about having a new facility that's laid out for customer experience that people expect in an airport is seeing those numbers of the traffic, the amount of customers coming through and the passengers purchasing the dollars. Seeing that increase like we expected, but you're never 100% sure. One industry metric that is out there is a sales per-in-plane passenger. In our previous terminals, we were at last year $6 per-in-plane passenger as far as spend on concessions. The first month we were at $13. Wow. So that proved out that if you have a concessions program that is attractive, gives good product and good service that our customers would spend. Wow, excellent, excellent. Let's shift gears a little bit. You are an old hand here at SEDC. Tell me a little bit about your involvement with SEDC over the years. Yeah, I'm not sure this is going to come off real crisp and concise, but yeah, SEDC has been extraordinarily impactful to my life. Let alone the conversation about what it's done for me professionally. You know, go back in time. I recall that I got on the SEDC board back in 1995 and the conference was at Myrtle Beach. And I remember a friend of mine in the economic development business and myself, we were planning on going to that conference and playing golf. We were not planning on going to any sessions. We were going to use his excuse to play golf. And as soon as we get to Myrtle Beach, he gets a call. His wife's uncle had passed away. So he got on a plane and went back. So I go to the conference. I didn't have a golf and partner anymore, so I went to the meetings. I go to the state caucus. Everybody at the state caucus had served on the board before and they looked at me and says, you're it. And the irony is, is from that pain of an uncle passing away, seven years later, I'm chairman of the board of the organization. So actually realized a little bit ago that this fall will be the 20th anniversary of being chairman of SEDC. So yeah, it's been an interesting bridge to cross going from the YP to the OF. Yep. Explain that for us. Going from being the young professional of the Old Fart. Oops. Yep. You heard it first here at SEDC from Pete Fullerton. I think that goes back to your influence. Let's ask two or three really important questions. Piercing questions. Dogs or cats? I'm more of a dog person now. I had a cats when we were growing up, but my son has a dog now that's just a wonderful partner. And so I'm probably more a dog person now. Bourbon or Scotch? I've done both. In current world, Bourbon. Okay. What's Scotch? Okay. Now, here's a question we ask everyone. I've got a feeling I know the answer, but I'll ask it anyway. Your favorite airport in the south. Oh, well, it has to be MCI, Kansas City International Airport. I mean, I spent a little bit of time. I mean, the month of February, as we're building up, we opened on February 28th. My little Garmin step tracker, I actually walked 135 miles. Wow. The balance of February. That was walking in the construction zone, checking out how the different pieces were coming together, getting people moved in, and also conducting a number of tours. So, yeah, I'm pretty familiar with the new place, and that will be, that's the faves, that's for sure. Cool. Let's flip the question. Your most dreaded airport in the US. Oh, here. And why? Too big. Too big. Folks, you heard it first. Because you know, I can't say Atlanta because that would get me running out of this building. Folks, that's Pete Fornton. Pete with the Kansas City Aviation Department. Pete, thank you for being an SEDC member. Thank you for sitting down with us. Have a great meet the consultants. Thank you. Welcome back. We're with Darren Vullo of Deloitte Consulting. Darren, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Rang. We really appreciate and we're excited about you being here at Meet the Consultants. I'm going to ask you one question. For the attendees here and for all our SEDC members, what's one big takeaway we should have, what should we take away from your point of view? Well, Ray, I think it's the lack of great sites that have this intersection of suitability from a physical perspective, heavy infrastructure from a utility perspective and available talent markets. Those three ingredients are becoming extremely difficult to find. If communities have one or two of those ingredients and trying to work on the third, they've really got something to sell. Interesting. What do you see? What trends do you see on the horizon that we should be paying attention to? Well, I think we're going to continue to see significant investment in manufacturing as driven by the Chips and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Everyone, of course, is aware of semiconductor projects and electric vehicle manufacturing projects for batteries, but on the horizon are the next wave of investment projects stimulated by these bills. The suppliers to the semiconductor companies that need to serve those fabs that will be coming out of the ground in the years to come. And then as well, solar, wind, and hydrogen projects. By hydrogen, I mean hydrogen fuel cells, hydrolyzers, electrolyzers. All of those companies need manufacturing. They need it in the US and they need to do it quickly. Okay. Darren, thank you so much for spending a couple of minutes with us now. I have two or three important questions. We'll start easy. Dogs or cats? Dogs. Bourbon or Scotch? Bourbon. Favorite airport to come in and out of in the south? In the south. Good qualifier. I would say Miami. Interesting. Let's flip that. Least favorite or most dreaded airport in the US? The old LaGuardia. Old LaGuardia. Love it. Easy to miss. Darren Vilo, thank you again for spending some time with us. Thank you for being here at Meet the Consultants. You give us all a lot of knowledge and insight. We appreciate it. Thanks, Ray. My pleasure. And we're here with Ron Berthese, CEO of GIS WebTec. Ron, thank you for joining us at the SEDC Podcast. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me, Ray. Ron, although all of our SEDC members are very familiar with us, tell us about GIS WebTec. Sure. So we provide the latest and most advanced technology for online site selection. So our app is public facing. It sits on the website of an economic developer. It's designed primarily for businesses and site selectors who come to the websites of economic developers. It provides real-time access to the entire Esri demographic data set, workforce data, infrastructure information, analytical tools and reports, etc. So lots of useful features and data, all designed to help communities tell their story, to help businesses make location decisions. It's really cool. I've seen the application. It's really something. I love it. What's on the horizon? Do you have anything that you're about to unveil or that you can teach us a little bit? Yeah, actually we have quite a lot. So we've grown rapidly since we started six years ago. And this year we launched the development of three new apps. Just for context, that's three more than we've developed since we did our first app. Wow. So we did our first app, replaced it with an advanced but similar app last year and now we're launching three completely new apps. One will be out in a couple of months. We're excited about it. It's going to enable a specific set of functionality around proposals for economic developers. Excuse me. And then we've got two more that are a little farther out on the horizon. One will be focused on talent attraction, which is a frontier area in economic development. Many economic developers have concluded that they simply are going to have difficulty meeting their workforce challenges with traditional upskilling. Of course that has its place. It's necessary. It's the right thing to do in most communities. But many economic developers are concluding that that's not enough. They're going to actually have to recruit, attract the talent they need for the targeted industries they're trying to recruit. So we're working with some clients on developing an app specifically for talent attraction. And then the third app, I won't get into a lot of detail. It has to do with artificial intelligence and how that will be used inside selection as well. It's a big topic at this conference and really in the news pretty regularly now. In fact, there's a Wall Street Journal article just today on artificial intelligence and how it doesn't have to do with site selection, but how it's affecting many industries. Right. It's at the federal level. A lot of discussion about that. Well, Ron, JS Webtech has been a long time really strong supporter of SCDC. How did you get involved with SCDC? It's a great question, right? And it gets back to our earliest days. We started our residence in 2016, launched our first app in 2017. Really didn't begin to market heavily until 2017. And one of our first clients said to us, you guys need to go to SCDC. And so we said, well, what's SCDC? And took a look, made a lot of sense. We've been coming to the annual conference every year since. This year we're sponsoring it at a higher level, a corporate sponsor throughout the year. And it's our first time at Meet the Consultants, but so far it's been a great time. Good event. What do you think here at Meet the Consultants that really excites? Well, we're getting a lot more discussion with site selectors, which is always a good thing in our business. We work with site selectors regularly. But at most conferences we go to the people who stop by our table and talk to us are economic developers. That's terrific. That's our core audience. Of course, we're excited about that. But at this conference, just this morning, in the first few hours of the conference, I've had half a dozen discussions where site selectors came over to talk to us. That's exciting for us because it's always good to know what's going on in their world. We always want them to understand our technology. But also, we actually are now starting to get interest in licensing our technology by site selectors. Which is pretty exciting for us as well. Interesting. Ron, thank you so much for spending a few minutes with us. A couple of questions for you. Really important questions now. Dogs or cats? Dogs. Bourbon or Scotch? Bourbon. Favorite airport in the south to go in and out of? Not Atlanta where I live. My favorite in the south. Mmm. Probably West Palm Beach. Cool. Okay. Let's flip it. Most dreaded airport in the US. Well, until last week of what I said LaGuardia, I had been to LaGuardia in several years and I was there last week and they've completely redone of this. I'm actually a very nice airport now, which was a shock. Newark. Newark has the worst on time record and it's also kind of dumpy. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good choice. That's a good choice. Ron Bartese, thank you again so much. We appreciate you spending some time. Welcome to SDDC. Meet the consultants. And it's good to see you. Thanks Ray. Alright. ♪♪♪