Rome, Georgia Extends Water to Enterprise Corner. The Sewer Line Waits for a Tenant.
Rome, Georgia bid out a $3.47 million water main to a 200-acre heavy-industrial park. No sewer line behind it. The $4.5 million sewer extension, funded in the same SPLOST program, waits for a tenant. That sequencing puts Enterprise Corner in a specific competitive lane: dry-process fabrication, assembly, and grid-component manufacturing where water deliverability is the binding utility screen and process wastewater is irrelevant. The piece maps which manufacturing categories Rome can now credibly pitch, which stay out of reach, and what a peer city needs to spend to reach equivalent positioning.
Rome, Georgia Extends Water to Enterprise Corner. The Sewer Line Waits for a Tenant.
Rome, Georgia bid out a $3.47 million water main to a 200-acre heavy-industrial park. No sewer line behind it. The $4.5 million sewer extension, funded in the same SPLOST program, waits for a tenant. That sequencing puts Enterprise Corner in a specific competitive lane: dry-process fabrication, assembly, and grid-component manufacturing where water deliverability is the binding utility screen and process wastewater is irrelevant. The piece maps which manufacturing categories Rome can now credibly pitch, which stay out of reach, and what a peer city needs to spend to reach equivalent positioning.
The Self-Diagnostic
The Site Selectors Guild's March 2026 Pulse Check found 61% of site selectors naming utility and infrastructure capacity as the top elimination factor. Top reason a site gets cut before anyone visits it.
Elimination happens on paper. A site selector building a short list from 300 candidates to 8 is not calling your office to ask follow-up questions. They are scanning the fields you submitted and cutting every row with a blank cell or an undated claim. You know your sites. But what you know and what you can attach to an RFI response are rarely the same thing.
Most of the time, the gap is authorization, not ignorance. You can describe the substation capacity in a meeting. But the utility has not produced a letter with a number, a date, and a validity period. You can talk about wastewater headroom. But the POTW has not issued a determination you can attach to a response packet. The answer exists somewhere in the utility's system. It has not been reduced to a document you can submit.
Two questions worth answering before Monday. For each site in your active inventory: what is the first RFI field you cannot fill with a dated, sourced document? And who controls that answer, not in your office, but at the utility, public works, the community college, the redevelopment authority? They may not know you need it yet.