Water — 10 million available gallons of it a day — is still the strongest selling point for the city of El Dorado in its attempt, through artificial intelligence, to find the right company to locate in the city's industrial area.
And while the perfect taker hasn't come along after a year of the partnership between the city, El Dorado Inc. and Kansas Global Trade Services, the principals continue to sift through data on what companies would make an industrial fit.
"We're still moving forward with our strategy," El Dorado city manager David Dillner said. "We haven't been able to land that project yet, but we've been getting a significant amount of interest both from the state and general companies that have been the target of our campaigns."
Dillner and El Dorado Inc assistant executive director Sarah Hoefgen said the target hasn't changed much, though the formula has shifted its focus on some North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes. Those codes classify businesses for collection and analysis of statistical data, offering a sharper image of the U.S. business economy.
Food, manufacturing, chemicals, and metal-machinery-plastics production continue to be the most viable types of companies El Dorado is seeking.
"With these economic development projects, you may not land but one over a period of a couple of years," Dillner said. "So we're not looking at it necessarily as a failure as much as we're getting good feedback and we think eventually we'll catch the fish we're trying to bait in."
That bait includes success stories in El Dorado, including an automotive aftermarket supplier celebrating its 50th anniversary.
BG Products' roots in El Dorado go back to 2006, when it purchased a 40,000 square-foot warehouse. A year later, the company with headquarters along the Arkansas River near downtown Wichita purchased a second El Dorado warehouse featuring 50,000 square feet.
Moving a tool and equipment division to El Dorado in 2009 increased BG Products' workforce in the city to about 35. But a 2010 project to build a new manufacturing facility — more than 120,000 square feet and in excess of $32 million — firmed up the company's status in El Dorado.
Expansion of its distribution center to 140,000 square feet, completed in 2019, is the latest piece. The bigger facility eliminated bottlenecks created when the smaller site couldn't hold all products coming from manufacturing facilities in Wichita and Derby.
The company is the largest private employer in El Dorado, according to the latest employers list in the WBJ.
BG Products' story, Dillner said, is one the city is using to show prospective companies that El Dorado can help to create success stories.
"Every community wants to have a large employer because No. 1, there's a capital investment that follows that type of company, but it increases opportunities for residential opportunities as people decide they may locate in your town, shop in your town and those kinds of things," Dillner said.
"Probably more pragmatically, we've been using that as a case study to these potential projects, that we can put together fairly significant projects. That you don't have to be a big city the size of Wichita or Kansas City to be able to manage the capacity of this size of a project. Like the engineering capacity, the construction capacity, just the logistics of these large projects."
BG Products' 2011 project, financed with industrial revenue bonds that included a 10-year tax abatement, won't create property tax for El Dorado until 2022. But, as Dillner points out, the company's significant contribution to a new football stadium that's home to the high school and community college teams is an example of supporting El Dorado before tax payments.
"Just having that brand in your community," Dillner said. "They've contributed in other ways. Having a partnership with a company like that is tremendous."
