Business View Magazine | February 2019

318 ect without having to raise taxes on its residents. “We went into this project with the rule that we would provide one dollar of public money for every two dollars of private investment,”he explains.“So, we funded the stadium; we funded the confer- ence center in the hotel as an incentive for them to locate here.We built out the infrastructure and we worked out a way for all of the development to generate revenue to pay the bonds back for the public side of it. So, it’s a self-supporting project.” Glover hopes that the Riverfront Project will also help spur even more expansion into the City’s downtown,while concomitantly, helping to at- tract more young people to the area.“You don’t very often have two cities as close as Augusta and North Augusta are,”he notes.“When downtowns were in vogue in the early 1900s up till the ‘60s and ‘70s,Augusta’s downtown was so close to ours, it really was a de facto downtown for our city. So, we do have a downtown, but it is very small, and it is something that we’re working to build up. Now that downtowns are becoming popular again,we didn’t have the bones to work with to rebuild. So, we don’t have a lot of opportunities for infill devel- opment and we’re having to find opportunities for new development in our downtown.” “When I came out of college, in economic develop- ment, you chased after the industry and the work- force came because the industry was there,”Glover continues.“With the Millennials, they graduate col- lege and go to a place they want to live and then they worry about finding a job. So, now, the para-