Wall Street Journal covers Quincy growth

QUINCY — Quincy is back in the news.

An article appeared in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday. In "One Tiny Town Becomes Internet-Age Power Point," Reporter Jim Carlton outlined inflating house prices in Quincy as Microsoft Corp., Yahoo! Inc. and Intuit Inc. build data centers in town.

"But while the new arrivals have brought prosperity, locals are beginning to wonder how to handle what may be too much of a good thing," Carlton writes. "Quincy is a town of 5,300 people and two traffic lights that, until now, has typically seen only one to four new homes built a year. Now, developers have filed plans for upwards of 1,000 new homes and a strip mall that would include a hotel and the town's first movie theater. Land prices have as much as quintupled over the past year and apartment rents have jumped as much as 50 percent."

The article goes on to describe the history behind the economic growth and the town's stretched infrastructure.

Carlton works out of the San Francisco office of the Wall Street Journal as an environmental and technology reporter. The office covers technology, including data centers, Google, Microsoft and Intuit.

"I just noticed here was three high-tech titans all going to a small town in central Washington and thought what kind of impact is that going to have?" Carlton said in a telephone interview. "I thought it would be an interesting story just to go up to Quincy and see what happens when three of the biggest computer companies in the world end up as your neighbors."

Carlton called Lisa Karstetter, executive manager of the Quincy Valley Chamber of Commerce, and the Grant County Economic Development Council to ask about growth, who alerted him to the "pretty major" developments going on in Quincy.

"That's when the editor said, 'You need to get up there,'" Carlton said.

He visited the town, driving from Spokane to spend several days, dine at local restaurants and talk with Quincy residents.

"I love getting out and talking to the people," he said. "It's really interesting to see a town about to change in a big way before it changed. Which is what I really wanted to see in Quincy."

For Carlton, the story ties into several larger trends.

"One is the explosive growth of the Internet is forcing companies like Google and Yahoo! to deploy more data centers to keep up with the demand," he said.

With the rising cost of power, more companies are seeking a cheaper source of power, and looking along the Columbia River Basin, Carlton said.

"Then there's another issue is rural America, what's happening to these small farming towns, how do they continue existing given that farming's been pretty tough for a lot of years?" he said. "There's a lot of big things all coming together in Quincy."

Carlton "absolutely" expects to follow the Quincy story, and find answers to such questions as the total number of people the centers would employ.

"The biggest concern is these centers are highly automated," he said. "Does a town like Quincy get ahead of itself and anticipate a lot more growth than it's really going to get? Is this really going to be the panacea as far as diversifying the economy? And the other thing is power. There's a finite amount of cheap power that Quincy's got from the Grant County Public Utility District."

Quincy City Administrator Tim Snead joked he was disappointed not to be quoted in the story, but he had read it.

"Now we're really on the map, because they had a map of Washington and where Quincy's at in the state," Snead said. "I thought it was great."

Snead expects Quincy to see more progress as a result of the article, and said he feels the town is prepared to handle the issues the article addresses.

In June 2006, an article appeared in the journal about companies like Microsoft and Yahoo! turning to Eastern Washington as they looked to secure low-cost energy.