Micron has yet to put a shovel in the ground at White Pine Commerce Park in Clay, where they plan to build a new megafab facility. However, the company is building its presence in Central New York by visiting schools, sponsoring local events, and hosting town halls.
WAER’s Katie Zilcosky spoke with Micron’s Chief People Officer April Arnzen about what she’s learned from the 4 town halls they’ve hosted so far and how the company hopes to create a new development playbook for American businesses.
KZ: Have you learned anything from sort of the questions or just the people in general, when you've been at these town halls about what you guys need to do to further prepare ahead of breaking ground in 2024?
AA: There seems to be an issue with traffic that people are pretty passionate about. I've heard that in I think every town hall, which is, by the way, a very legitimate concern. This project will absolutely be a catalyst to address some of those infrastructure issues like traffic, like road expansion, highway expansion, that type of thing.
But more broadly, I think the striking thing for me is this community is very engaged in in these conversations. People are showing up and filling these auditoriums, and I have realized this really can be a turning point moment for Micron and for Central New York.
We've got the opportunity to build an incredible story, and really an American model of how the partnership should work; How the public sector should partner with the private sector and with the education ecosystem and small businesses and faith leaders and community organizations. I mean, no company does this. And we've got the opportunity to rewrite the playbook on how American businesses can really build and be successful in our modern day world.
KZ: You mentioned creating a model for other American businesses. Is that something with this project that you guys are thinking about? Creating a new standard for how economic development can work?
AA: I think we have no choice but to rethink the model here. This investment is so massive. This scale is incredible. 50,000 Micron direct and indirect jobs--supplier jobs, community jobs. That is an incredible scale. So I do think we have to rewrite the playbook. No one has done this before. And certainly, we have the opportunity to do this right now.
KZ: Getting everyone together is really great, but really hard. How are you guys taking in all of the voices, parsing through and balancing both your needs as a company and community needs or desires?
AA: It is very hard. There are a lot of voices. But this is why we've had to start so early. Starting with the first week of the announcement, we were on the ground, talking and meeting with as many people as we could, as I had mentioned, small business owners, faith leaders, of course, education and training. We've been partnering with them since day one. Community organizations, you know, the town halls that we referenced earlier, we are out there talking to as many people as we can and listening and learning and taking inputs and building out our roadmap and our strategies based on those inputs.
But that will transition. It has to transition into a more sustainable process. So, what we are doing is we are standing up a community advisory committee, and it will be comprised of local community leaders. We will have ongoing conversations with this advisory committee so that we can gather the inputs in a concise and efficient manner.
Sometimes you can get so much input you don't know what to do with, but they will help guide us and give us advice and input as we design our strategies moving forward. But we didn't want to start there. We ourselves wanted to go and engage with as many people in the community as we can, and we've done exactly that.
You can listen to more of this conversation with April Arnzen here.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and time.
