Last month we showed you how California shaped up for manufacturing investments in the first three quarters of 2013. We just got the fourth quarter numbers and we have updated our chart below to indicate how it looks for the entire year. Basically we got 1.5 percent of the nation’s new or expanded facilities, accounting for 1.2 investments per one million people in California.
The numbers don’t look good but believe it or not, it is a small improvement from last year. Our economy will depend on big improvements in the coming years and we’ll have to learn what will drive more manufacturing to our state. In the wake of California-based Tesla’s announcement to grow 6,500 manufacturing jobs outside of the Golden State, we’ve learned we can’t take any manufacturing for granted — even an electric vehicle producer.
We know that California’s economic development agency Go BIZ did all they could to get Tesla to build their large facility here. Go BIZ constantly talks to us about what they can do to help manufacturers compete. For reasons we’ll likely never know, Tesla opted to go elsewhere.
This data and the Tesla announcement provide a teachable moment. We can’t win them all, we just need to win our fair share. CMTA and GoBiz can’t do this alone. We need a virtual tsunami of manufacturing champions at the state level to help Go BIZ deliver competitive packages to manufacturers looking to make long term investments.
