South Dakota's Governor's Office of Economic Development tells its own communities, in writing, not to respond to certain requests for information. That is unusual guidance for a state agency to publish, and it is the right guidance. The arithmetic behind it is not complicated.
Responding to every RFI spends the scarcest thing a small ED office has — staff hours from people with enough institutional knowledge to assemble a credible package — on submissions that will not survive the first screen. The 2026 Guild/DCI pulse survey of 49 site selectors found utility and infrastructure capacity was the top elimination factor at 61%, followed by a suitable site at 53% and workforce at 51%. Incentives were cited by 2%. If your city cannot answer the infrastructure question, the rest of the response is weight you carried for nothing.
GOED's published RFI response guidance puts it directly:
"If you don't have a workable solution for the key drivers in the project, you should not be submitting an RFI response."
In a review of public-facing RFI guidance from ten states, South Dakota was the only one that said this to communities in so many words. Colorado's OEDIT applies a completeness screen after submission, forwarding only responses that satisfy client needs. That is filtering on the state's end. The instruction to the community — don't submit in the first place — appears in the public record only from South Dakota.
Practitioners describe the same problem from the receiving end. Ron Crum, then CSRS practice leader and a Guild member, said in a 2019 Guild podcast that one of the most frustrating parts of a search is receiving submissions "that are not on target." Cushman & Wakefield's Ann Petersen advised communities not to "waste your time on fruitless pursuits." A May 2025 Guild panel told communities to market from real strengths rather than wishful thinking.
The stronger version of the argument — that a communicated decline is remembered, that it buys standing on the next project — is mine, not theirs. None of the sourced material says a selector or state contact rewards the no-bid. What the record supports is narrower: off-target submissions annoy the people reading them, and honest self-assessment is valued when it appears. The step from there to "the decline is a credibility investment" is short. It is still a step, and I'm marking it as one.
Applying the Standard to a Specific Project
South Dakota's standard is operational: a critical driver is absent and there is no workable alternative. The director holding an RFI has to apply that to a specific project profile, usually in a week or less.
Two tests. Can you name the institution that closes the gap? Can that institution act inside the project's calendar? A gap survives only if both answers are yes.
A composite makes it concrete. Your city receives a project notification through your state's distribution network for a food-processing facility. The RFI specifies 50 acres minimum contiguous, 5 MW electric service, municipal water at 500,000 GPD, industrial wastewater discharge capacity for high-BOD effluent, and 200 production workers within 90 days of opening. Site selection closes in four months. Operations in 18.
Your best industrial site is 38 acres, with an adjacent 20-acre parcel under separate private ownership. Your electric utility can deliver 3 MW to the substation serving that corridor. The upgrade path requires a capacity study, easement acquisition, and 14 months of construction. Your water system handles the volume without difficulty. Your POTW has hydraulic headroom but has never accepted high-BOD industrial discharge and would need to evaluate pretreatment requirements, a process controlled by the treatment authority rather than your office.
Site acreage. You control 38 acres and you don't control 20. If you cannot demonstrate site control or a binding option on the adjacent parcel within the response window, the gap does not close in the submission. A willing seller plus a documented acquisition path with a realistic closing date turns it into a conditional answer — weaker than a competitor offering 60 pad-ready acres under single ownership, but not automatically disqualifying. (The site teardown in Issue #4 covered gross acreage versus usable yield.)
Power. The project needs 5 MW. You have 3 MW today and a 14-month upgrade path. Site selection closes in four months, which means the selector needs confidence now that the power will be there at opening. A utility letter confirming the upgrade path, cost allocation, and energization date could carry this as a conditional pass. Without the letter you are claiming to bridge a gap that no institution has agreed to bridge. (The power teardown in Issue #2 established the difference between deliverable utility-backed capacity and proximity to infrastructure.)
Wastewater. You may have pipe and you may have hydraulic headroom. Neither answers whether the POTW can accept the specific waste stream this facility generates. High-BOD food-processing effluent requires treatment plant capacity and permit headroom for the additional loading, or an on-site pretreatment system the company designs and operates under a permit the control authority issues. If your POTW has never evaluated this and cannot produce even a preliminary determination inside the response window, you are filling a critical field with "we think so" when the selector needs "the control authority confirms." (The wastewater teardown in Issue #1 mapped the full proof sequence.)
Workforce. Two hundred production workers in 90 days in a tier-3 labor market is a real question. My read, from covering food-processing searches, is that workforce is less likely than infrastructure to be the sole disqualifier at the RFI stage — an editorial assessment, not a documented selector standard. What the selector wants at this stage is the labor shed, prevailing wages for comparable occupations, and a training mobilization path. A community college letter, a workforce board authorization, a first-cohort calendar: those are the institutional commitments that bridge a workforce gap.
In this composite the no-bid turns on power and wastewater. If your utility cannot produce a letter confirming the upgrade path and your POTW cannot produce a preliminary discharge determination, you are submitting two critical fields backed by aspiration. That is the package Crum described as not on target, and it is the one South Dakota's guidance tells you to skip.
A gap is bridgeable when you can name the institution that closes it, the action required, the cost, and the calendar — and all of that fits inside the project timeline. A gap is disqualifying when any one of those is missing or sits with a party you cannot mobilize in time.
How to Communicate the Decline
No state agency reviewed here publishes a script for the no-bid communication. What follows is my recommendation, consistent with the documented preference for transparency and fit.
The communication goes to your state project contact, the person named in the RFI distribution. Keep it short. Three elements.
The specific gap. Name the dimension and the shortfall. "Our best available site is 38 contiguous acres against a 50-acre requirement, and the adjacent parcel is not under our control." Or: "Our serving utility cannot confirm 5 MW delivery on the project's timeline without a capacity study that has not been initiated." The state contact can use that. A vague "we don't think this is a fit" gives them nothing.
What you do have. One or two sentences on the attributes that are strong. "We can deliver 500,000 GPD municipal water, our labor shed supports the workforce requirement, and we have a 38-acre pad-ready site with full utility access at current capacity." This is a reminder of your asset profile for the next project that comes through the same channel.
The ask. "We'd welcome future opportunities where our site and infrastructure profile is a closer match." That keeps the channel open without overstating what you can deliver today.
Send it inside the first third of the response window. A decline received on the deadline is indistinguishable from a team that ran out of time.
If your city manager or board chair wants to know why you declined, the same three elements work as the internal explanation. "We lacked confirmed power capacity at the required level and could not obtain a utility commitment within the response window" holds up in a way that "it wasn't a good fit" does not.
What to Record
After you send the decline, write down the decision. This is a record of one call, retrievable by you or your successor when the same question comes back. Fifteen minutes.
Five items:
- Project profile. Sector, acreage, power, water/wastewater, workforce, rail, and timeline as stated in the RFI.
- Disqualifying dimension(s). Which specific requirement you could not meet.
- Controlling institution. Who owns the gap — the utility, the POTW, the property owner, the railroad.
- Why mitigation failed. Cost, authority, or calendar. "The serving utility cannot confirm 5 MW without a capacity study; study timeline exceeds the response window by roughly six months."
- What you can answer. The dimensions where your city met or could have met the requirement.
Store it where your team stores project files. Date it.
The point of writing it down is diagnostic. Three declines in a row because the utility cannot confirm capacity above 3 MW is a conversation to have with the utility about an upgrade study, on your calendar rather than a project's. That conversation, and the tracking that would support it, is a separate discipline. This piece covers the single decision: recognizing the mismatch, saying so clearly, and recording why.
- How RFIs reach you: South Dakota, Colorado, and Oklahoma send project notices through broad statewide networks, meaning receipt does not indicate the state has pre-screened your city as a fit — a distinction covered in GOED's published guidance and worth understanding before your next response decision.
- Colorado's post-submission filter: OEDIT's 2024 process presentation describes forwarding only complete applications that satisfy client needs, which means a weak submission from your city may never reach the prospect but still consumes your staff time.
- Missouri's Lasso transition: All business-attraction responses in Missouri must use the Lasso platform beginning July 1, 2026, with mock RFIs and practice-submission feedback built into the rollout — a structure that could formalize the kind of self-assessment discipline described here.
- Virginia's use of past losses: VEDP's site-readiness application asks communities to report prior RFI eliminations and the infrastructure constraints behind them, treating documented no-bids as evidence supporting future site investment rather than as failures to explain away.