Adams County economic development proponents are looking ambitiously at the potential for turning the quiet farm town of Ritzville, located about an hour’s drive southwest of Spokane at the junction of Interstate 90 and U.S. 395, into a bustling hub for distribution activity.

In a study commissioned by some of those proponents, an East Coast company that specializes in location consulting has ranked Ritzville, which has a population of less than 2,000, as one of the most affordable places for a business to establish a low-cost distribution warehouse.

The Boyd Co., of Princeton, N.J., released the report earlier this year and puts Ritzville and Kent, Wash., as the only two locations in the state ranking among the 25 most favorable cities in the U.S. for a business to operate a low-cost distribution warehouse. Ritzville, which is the county seat of Adams County, ranked the lowest among cities west of the Mississippi River, the report says.

“From our perspective, when you look at a map and see Ritzville, what you see is a hub with spokes that reach in many directions,” says Stephen McFadden, Adams County’s economic development director. The report cites Ritzville’s access to the freeway, U.S. 395, and rail lines as being among several reasons for its favorable ranking.

The $75,000 study was paid for by Adams County, the Adams County Development Council, the Port of Othello, and the cities of Lind, Othello, and Ritzville. Adams County officials, including Ritzville city leaders and business owners, want to turn around a decades-long trend of vanishing jobs and a shrinking population. In the last 20 years, McFadden says, Ritzville’s population declined from 1,900 residents to its current 1,690.

“The question for us is, ‘How do we create new jobs?’ ’’ McFadden says. 

The Boyd Co. study and report is one element of a multifaceted professional services agreement between that company and the Adams County Development Council, he says. The report, titled “Distribution Warehousing Costs in Port and Intermodal-Proximate Cities,” was commissioned to examine Ritzville as a potential hub for such facilities, he says.

The report compares the costs of establishing and operating a hypothetical 500,000-square-foot facility with 150 employees.

McFadden says, “Our new economic development efforts include identifying new industry sectors—not currently present here—that could be successfully recruited to Adams County.”

Boyd believes Ritzville could greatly benefit from a pending free-trade agreement between Asian nations and the U.S. and the continued economic growth of China.

“For many companies, improving the bottom line on the cost side of the ledger is far easier than on the revenue side in today’s slow-to-recover economy,” the report says. “Ritzville is poised to benefit from growing trade with China and southeastern Asia fueled by that region’s booming middle class and its growing appetite for American branded consumer products and U.S. agriculture.”

More than 60 percent of the world’s 1.7 billion millennials live in Asia, the study says.

“Companies no longer view Asia as an outpost market but rather one that they need to make dedicated supply chain investments in order to better serve, especially with the enactment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade accord expected later this year,” the report says.

The analysis that Boyd Co. performed for the Grant County clients includes all major geographically-variable factors critical to the corporate site selection process such as labor, real estate, construction, taxes, utilities, and shipping, the report says.

Chesterfield, Va., had the lowest estimated total operating cost of $11.2 million per year for a distribution facility equivalent of that size, with Ritzville right behind it at $11.35 million. The report cited the BNSF Railway Co. line there and Ritzville’s proximity to Seattle as other key factors to why a distribution warehouse would be cheaper than at other locations.

The report assigned a weighted hourly wage of $14.16 to employees at the hypothetical Ritzville facility. The report assigned varying hourly wages to each city based on market factors and location. Roughly $5.4 million would be spent on labor annually, it estimated. Combined with electricity, amortization, property, sales tax, and shipping costs, the authors arrived at the annual cost of $11.35 million to operate the facility,

The cities named in the study have real estate markets The Boyd Co. considers to be “well-positioned” to attract distribution warehousing investment in 2015. The cities that were surveyed are consistent with corporate site selection trends that favor locations with strong links to global marketplace by way of rail terminals and deep-water container port facilities, says the report. 

On its website, Boyd touts itself as “one of the nation’s most experienced and trusted corporate site selection firms.” Boyd provides independent location counsel to leading Fortune 500 and up-coming corporations worldwide, the website says.

McFadden was hired to the position of economic development director for Adams County in June of last year after the previous director retired. He is a former president of the Ritzville Area Chamber of Commerce and owned the Ritzville Adams County Journal from 2004 to 2014. 

He said the next step for Adams County is to begin putting Ritzville “on the map.” His office is in Othello, which is about 50 miles southwest of Ritzville, but he lives in Ritzville.

“We’ve not been an aggressive economic development machine,” McFadden says of Ritzville, and to some extent Adams County as a whole. “We are surrounded by counties like Spokane, Grant, and Yakima, for instance, who have been heavily involved in business development for 25 to 30 years now. “

He said hundreds of cars drive by Ritzville everyday on I-90, but very few passersby have any idea that Ritzville has a historic downtown.

“There are buildings here that were constructed in the late 1800s,” McFadden says. Sadly, he says, historic downtown is only 50 percent occupied with businesses. “We’re going to have to turn it around,” he says.

Adams County has commissioned another study to be completed by Boyd to determine whether a food-and-beverage company seeking a warehouse distribution site would be a compatible fit for Ritzville. The food and agriculture company, J.R. Simplot C0., has a distribution warehouse in Othello, says McFadden. A similar company could prove valuable for Ritzville, he says.

McFadden spent most of his life moving from one city to the next as a result of his father’s career moves. He says he has a love and appreciation for small communities like Ritzville.

“You have the ability to have access to the mayor and the school superintendent, and that gives you the ability to effect change,” he says. He says he is hopeful Ritzville can turn the hypothetical warehouse in the Boyd report into a reality.