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If you want to know why California is losing businesses to other states, you can find the answer here.
Need financing for a new factory? Meet Ron Smith of Bank of New Mexico. Want the new building up in four months, guaranteed? That's contractor Stephen Elliott's specialty. Looking for temporary housing? No sweat.
Water permits? Road access? City development chief Art Corsie will work it out. State worker training funds? Call New Mexico's governor, Bruce King. He just happens to own the ranch next door.
Lots of places try to lure California companies, many of them with considerable success. But person for person, acre for acre, hardly any place is as successful as Rio Rancho, an unlikely stretch of scrubland above the Rio Grande near Albuquerque.
This embryonic city of 40,000 has succeeded in part by offering the usual potent combination of cheap land, cheap labor and virtually no taxes.
But it also offers something more: an attitude that businesses love. Local officials will walk on coals, practically, to get companies to move here.
Rio Rancho's success is rich in irony. Its founders did jail time in the 1970s for violating federal law by aggressively hawking barren Rio Rancho lots to far-off working stiffs by mail. And the city is thriving in part thanks to the problems of California, which itself once embodied a similar vision, complete with real estate speculators and nationwide land promotions.
And just as Californians, when they got numerous enough, organized to slow down development and impose more requirements on business, so New Mexicans-a few, anyway-are stirring to do likewise here.
But make no mistake; for now, at least, development is winning. The biggest catch was Intel Corp., which is building a $1-billion factory adjacent to its existing facility here. The new place will cost $200 million less than a comparable facility in California.
Down the road is a cluster of less celebrated refugees: Topform Data, late of Orange County; U.S. Cotton, a recent arrival from San Jose; and California Aero Dynamics, a vendor of aircraft components that has facilities in Sun Valley and South-Central Los Angeles.
Why do they come? There's lots of open space for brand-new buildings, property taxes can be waived entirely, and average manufacturing wages are...