Business View Magazine | January 2020

258 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JANUARY 2020 work on Main Street at Disneyland are trained at The Walt Disney Company’s Circle D Ranch in Norco, and the City has been featured in multiple television shows and commercials thanks to an aggressive effort to attract productions here. A true patriotic spirit is also evident in Norco, where the stripes on downtown’s Sixth Street are painted red, white, and blue, and banners of heroic veterans hang from light standards. That boulevard leads the way to the Veterans Memorial Plaza at the Ingalls Event Center, a scenic, spiritual venue whose impressive scale is more likely to be associated with cities 10 times Norco’s population. A recent addition to the Norco community is SilverLakes, a 150-acre, multi-use sports park, which includes 28 youth soccer fields, equestrian facilities and 100 acres of special event areas. Managed through a public-private partnership, the park is designed to function as a venue for regional, state, and national horse shows, soccer tournaments, and a variety of community, corporate, and cultural events. Since opening four years ago, SilverLakes now attracts more than 1.5 million people to Norco annually, with that figure ultimately expected to double, now that a full calendar of festivals and concerts featuring Grammy Award-winning artists is being presented. And since both event centers draw people from all over the state, the country, and even internationally, City Manager Andy Okoro reports that one of Norco’s economic development strategies is to capitalize on that inflow of visitors by developing more hospitality-based businesses. “Over the last several years, we’ve focused our attention on building hotels here,” he states, citing Tru by Hilton, WoodSpring Suites, Holiday Inn Express, and other prominent brands. “Several projects have been approved for development to make sure the City financially benefits from visitors touring Norco.” According to Okoro, Norco’s four major SilverLakes Sports Park