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Quad Cities Chamber launches Grow Quad Cities, shifts to broader economic-development strategy
Summary
Quad Cities Chamber CEO Peter Tokar told the council the region will separate traditional Chamber functions from a new regional economic-development arm, Grow Quad Cities (incorporated last week), to pursue business attraction, workforce pipelines and quality-of-place projects; a site-readiness study of 32 sites by Hickey Global was also presented.
Peter Tokar, CEO of the Quad Cities Chamber, told the Rock Island City Council the Chamber has incorporated a new regional economic-development organization, Grow Quad Cities, and is shifting from a single focus on industrial recruitment toward a broader portfolio that includes business development, talent/workforce development and quality-of-place investment.
“We're officially incorporated as Grow Quad Cities as of last week,” Tokar said, describing a twin-track approach that would leave the Chamber to handle traditional, internal chamber activities while the new external organization pursues regional economic development and business attraction.
Tokar said the Chamber is proposing a new service-level agreement that would restart and begin expanded services with the new fiscal year on 07/01; the proposed agreement is intended to align the Chamber’s outbound marketing and attraction work with the specific economic-development priorities of member cities.
On workforce, Tokar described a regional approach in partnership with the Quad Cities Community Foundation, United Way and Visit Quad Cities. He said the Chamber and partners are completing a workforce study to identify high-demand, livable-wage jobs and to develop pipelines through K–12 partnerships, apprenticeships and higher-education programs. A council member asked specifically about place-based workforce programming for Rock Island’s West End; Tokar said Chamber staff (including Chris Case and business-intelligence director Bill Polley) have met with West End revitalization stakeholders and Illinois workforce partners for follow-up discussions.
The Chamber presented recent activity figures: the presenter cited $123,000,000 in total economic impact for successful projects in the past year and said five successful projects were retention wins; the speaker also referred to a three-year regional total of about $1,227,000,000 and said Rock Island County’s modeled benefit from those projects was about $70,000,000. The Chamber described marketing and outreach work (out-of-market ads, familiarization tours, participation in SelectUSA and trade shows), logging 235 out-of-market conversations and multiple familiarization (FAM) and RFI responses.
On site readiness, the Chamber said it hired site consultants Hickey Global to analyze 32 regional sites and create tiered site-characterization levels intended to clarify what each site needs to reach higher readiness for industrial and large-scale development.
The presentation concluded with a summary of business-retention and expansion work. The meeting closed with a procedural motion to adjourn; the transcript records a second but does not include a roll-call vote or tally.
