Virginia Williams recalls growing up in Sacramento, Calif., the capital of a monumental state, and feeling a bit embarrassed when telling strangers where she is from. “I never said I’m from Sacramento. I said I’m from San Francisco.”
Greater Sacramento admittedly remains a second-tier economic mecca behind San Francisco--just 88 miles to the southwest--but that’s emphatically changing, she believes. Williams, senior vice president for consultancy firm US Northwest, said she’s proud to help represent the region through the influential Greater Sacramento Economic Council (GSEC) especially after recent jobs and economic growth following tough years of Covid.
GSEC recently sponsored three reporters, including Fierce, on a tour of region to visit tech giants like Micron and Solidigm. Fierce also was granted an exclusive tour of the highly secure Defense Microelectronics Activity facility. Cameras, smartphones and smartwatches were prohibited inside.
Growth after 2014, then Covid stall. Now, newfound success, amid sloppiness
When Barry Broome arrived in Sacramento 2014 to serve as CEO and president of GSEC, the area had one of the worst economies in the US by nearly any measure. He described taking successful turnaround experience in Phoenix and applying it to Sacramento, mainly by getting commitments from 55 CEOs from the area to work together, swearing off infighting, to promote the region and face its common problems together.
The decline ptior to 2014 stemmed from the BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) process begun in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton that closed and reduced military bases in the US, cutting 10,000 jobs at nearby McClelland Air Force Base, Barry said. “We got clobbered by BRAC,” he said. Then the recession of 2008 hit, hurting communities around the nation, and Covid added a double punch in 2000.
Today, Broome is convinced the main problem the Sacramento region faces--even amid its impressive growth-- is too much governmental regulation, primarily imposed by the state of California around environmental and housing regulations that put limits on residential and commercial developers and newly arriving businesses.
“Governor Newsom’s inability to focus on any turnaround is hurting us. President Trump doesn’t like Sacramento but Newsom doesn’t even know where we are,” Broome said. (He made this comment obviously fully aware that Gov. Newsom's office is near the capitol building in downtown Sacramento, also the base for 9,000 political lobbyists as well as 120 elected members of the State Assembly and Senate .)
An Ohio native, Broome admits he is blunt and doesn’t think Trump’s tariffs will hurt the region as much as cuts to funding for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He termed such grants cuts “silent economic killers” that will manifest themselves in three to five years.
Even so, Sacramento is outperforming both California and the US in economic terms, Broome said, with a boost from semiconductor and other tech firms, many of them foreign entities. GSEC represents six counties and 16 cities and towns, stretching northeast from the San Francisco region to the eastern border of California—a vast area filled with rivers and lakes and rolling mountains interspersed with farms and modern housing developments and shopping centers plopped around older, quaint towns.
With more than 1.2 million jobs and 2.4 million residents, GSEC calls the six-county region the fastest growing semiconductor market in California, boosted by nine such companies including AMD, Samsung, Qualcomm, Bosch, Intel, Solidigm, Blaize, Kioxia and Western Digital. World-renowned UC Davis provides a common engineering and technology research and education base with many graduates joining the Sacramento region’s workforce. Sierra College has established a nationally recognized mechatronics program, adding workforce development for nearby employers.
Asked if he’s more a pessimist or an optimist about the future, Broome said he considers himself neither, and instead a “pragmatist…somebody who does the right things” to adapt to economic trends. Tougher still, he believes downturns help governments learn and grow. “It’s valuable for government to run out of money.”
California at large, he added, has suffered from “so much wealth in recent decades that its economic muscle is sloppy.”
A newish mayor and MLB optimism
At a dinner with reporters, Broome introduced Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty, barely in office a full year, who had just polished off a state of the city address earlier in the day heavy on optimism. McCarty’s eyes sparkled as he talked about the chance the Sacramento region has to capture a Major League Baseball expansion team, should the league move forward with plans to position two new teams, one west of the Mississippi and the other to the east. (The Athletics currently play in West Sacramento and expect to remain a couple more seasons before heading off to Las Vegas. The franchise started in Philadelphia in 1901, moved to Kansas City, Mo., in 1955 and then Oakland, Calif., in 1968. The team moved to West Sacramento in 2005 and plans to be in Las Vegas full-time in 2028.)
Mayors everywhere salivate over winning pro sports teams if the taxing bodies don’t have to give away the store, but McCarty also knows big-time sports can attract young families to a region, bolstering the widely held perception that jobs may be everything in economic development, but not all things all on their own. If nothing else, the Sacramento region can boast it is friendly to families with good schools, housing that is far more affordable than San Francisco, availability of mountains and waterway recreation nearby and, lately, a strong push to continue a long tradition of high tech jobs at companies like Micron, Solidigm and, recently, a $1.9 billion commitment by Bosch to make Silicon Carbide (SiC) chips, by expanding a former TSI fab in Roseville that will permanently employ 700 workers. (SiC is a semiconductor base material made of pure silicon and pure carbide, considered ideal for applications requiring energy efficiency like electric vehicles.)
Water and electricity concerns, but also politics, AI and uncertainty
Several GSEC members, mayors and county officials we met on the three-day tour of the region agreed that most employers like Bosch want strong assurances that water and electricity will be plentiful for demanding manufacturing and fab and chip testing and packaging sites.
With nearby lakes and streams, “we’re well-positioned” to support water needs of arriving businesses, said Bonnie Gore, a supervisor for Placer County. What originally drove her to move to the region from San Francisco when she was 25 was better housing prices. “No way was I going to buy a house in San Francisco then,” she said.
In addition to lower housing costs, the area has recognized the need for better training for high tech jobs, including at Sierra College, which offers two-year degrees and has set up a nationally-recognized mechatronics program. Mechatronics engineering itself is a recognition of the many dependencies in the high tech world, where mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer systems are often integrated to support robotics and automation.
For many government and economic council leaders in every city, college programs like mechatronics are a hedge against the uncertainties of the future job force and the impact AI will have on jobs and, well, everything. Taking a job in high tech today will inevitably change, all acknowledge.
“It’s hard to take a job you don’t know will be there in four years,” said Mark Friedman, founder and chairman of Fulcrum and also the board chair of the economic council. Fulcrum, an architectural and development firm with broad reach, has helped turn downtown Sacramento into a dynamic pedestrian friendly area with its partnership in the development of the Golden1 Center, home of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings.
The Sacramento region's story shows how complex economic development processes can be for any community, where a combination of regional land planning, transportation, education and other mega forces (including state and national politics) come into play. Tech's role is a part of that mix, and obviously a big part GSEC and regional leaders have leveraged well. .
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