The board meeting in which this transformation happened reportedly featured 7 individuals with backgrounds in local banking, dentistry, residential real estate, auto repair and "other fields" all aggressively diagnosing why the project was lost.
“I’ll tell you exactly what happened,” said Board Member Steve Reynosa, who discovered the term Megawatt approximately 40 minutes earlier. “We didn’t move fast enough, and honestly, our branding feels dated.”
Sources confirmed Reynosa had previously opposed nearly every industrial infrastructure investment proposed over the last five years.
The board spent the next two hours analyzing the failed project using a sophisticated methodology known internally as “guessing.”
Popular theories included:
The incentives package “wasn’t aggressive enough”
The website lacked urgency
Nobody followed up after the trade show
The company “probably wanted a more business-friendly environment”
And “we should really be posting more on LinkedIn”
Meanwhile, Economic Development Director Carla Benson attempted several times to explain that the winning site offered:
Free land in the established business park
Dual-feed power
Permitting certainty
Rail service
2 million gallons of excess water capacity
And a labor shed approximately four times larger
At one point, another member suggested the community may have lost the project because “people today want authenticity,” before recommending the immediate purchase of more stock photography for the website.
The meeting reached peak strategic intensity when the board collectively agreed the community needed to become “more proactive,” though nobody could fully define what that meant beyond attending additional conferences and possibly redesigning the homepage banner.
By the conclusion of the meeting, the board had successfully identified 19 different reasons the project was lost, none of which involved the community’s lack of shovel-ready sites, infrastructure investment, or repeated resistance to industrial development over the last decade.
At press time, the board was reportedly preparing to launch a task force focused on transformational economic competitiveness, tentatively scheduled to begin meeting immediately after football season.
