The 2026 SSG/DCI Pulse Check confirms what experienced directors already suspect. The top three elimination factors in site selection are utility/infrastructure capacity (61%), available suitable site (53%), and workforce availability (51%). State and local incentives eliminate at 2%.
Look at who controls each of those. The utility controls power capacity. The POTW controls discharge acceptance. The landowner controls site access and remediation status. The community college controls program commitments. The EDO controls incentives, which barely register as a first-cut filter. Every answer that actually determines whether a city survives screening belongs to a counterparty.
RFI response windows run one to two weeks. Sometimes 48 hours for initial site identification. That timeline does not accommodate discovering which answers require a utility load study, which need a POTW pretreatment determination, which demand a council vote. Those answer categories have to be mapped and pre-cleared before the RFI exists.
Tier-3 cities hold a real advantage here. Direct relationships with every counterparty in town. A director who has already pre-cleared answer classes with the utility engineer, the POTW superintendent, and the community college dean can produce an authorized, bounded, forwardable response while a larger metro is still routing the request through its approval chain. The advantage is speed to a formal answer, and it compounds with preparation. Informality alone produces nothing a site selector can put in a file.
The features that follow this piece take it dimension by dimension.
What eliminates → who controls it
- Utility/infrastructure capacity (61%) → serving utility, POTW operator
- Available suitable site (53%) → landowner, planning/zoning authority, environmental consultant
- Workforce availability (51%) → community college, apprenticeship sponsor, workforce board
- State/local incentives (2%) → the EDO
Source: 2026 SSG/DCI Pulse Check, n=49 Guild members, 82% industrial specialists
Three answer classes to pre-map with each counterparty
- Public — includable in a generic site packet without counterparty sign-off
- NDA-ready — shareable with a qualified prospect under confidentiality
- Project-specific — requires a completed application, study deposit, engineering review, or board vote
The preparation job: know which fields from each counterparty fall into which class before the RFI arrives. Response windows are too compressed to discover the hierarchy in real time.