Speaking to the Town Council last Thursday evening, Fountain Hills Economic Development Director Scott Cooper painted a pretty positive picture of the economic landscape of Fountain Hills.

In his talk, Cooper outlined the opening of Fountain Hills Dialysis and the return of Bealls Outlet as two indicators of businesses seeing a potentially bright future in town. Cooper went on to discuss how, combining those new openings with a couple other big projects in the works, as well as businesses like Broker’s Alliance and Prevco Subsea bringing more jobs to town, opportunities to find work in Fountain Hills are on the rise.

According to cooper, more than 7,700 residents still head out of town to make their living with about 2,900 coming from out of town to hold down jobs. The goal of workforce development planning is to bring the former number down while increasing the latter. A bit more telling, perhaps, is the fact that only about 1,300 residents actually work in their hometown.

In order to draw more work to The Hills, Cooper is working with the Arizona Commerce Authority and the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, as well as taking part in a promotional campaign to draw more residents, employees and business owners to our town.

We see all of this as a good start to creating some forward momentum for the community. Combined with the Vision Fountain Hills initiatives and efforts being made by the Fountain Hills Unified School District to draw and retain more students, it appears that multiple sectors have added walking the walk to talking the talk.

It has been said that making Fountain Hills a more robust community with opportunities for all walks of life would require a community effort and, as of late, that’s exactly the effort we are seeing.