The Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada, Northern Nevada's primary economic development organization for more than 40 years, has a new name. 

But its mission — recruiting top-tier tech companies such as Tesla, Google and Apple, largely through a strategy built on tax incentives — hasn't changed.

"This is not a change in direction," said Taylor Adams, president and CEO of the organization, now called Northern NV Now, a name meant to be action-oriented and forward-thinking. "It is a clearer way to say who we have become."

Data centers have become a more prominent part of that recruitment portfolio, even as a growing body of research finds that the tax abatements used to attract them aren't the deciding factor in whether a company locates in a state at all.

Building a new regional economy

When Mike Kazmierski took over EDAWN in 2011, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the region had "no real brand," he said, beyond a fading identity as a gaming and distribution hub. Unemployment was in double digits and job creation had nearly stalled.

The region's economic identity problem predated Kazmierski's arrival by decades. In 1982, the region lost a bid for a Hewlett-Packard plant after the company concluded it was too dominated by gaming culture and lacked serious backing from local government — a rejection that helped spur the creation of EDAWN the following year. 

Mortgage rates hovered near 16 percent, unemployment topped 10 percent and Atlantic City's newly opened casinos were siphoning gaming business the region had long relied on.

"We knew we had to move in a new direction," Kazmierski said. 

EDAWN's answer was advanced manufacturing, a sector the region had barely touched, but one with the infrastructure, labor and cost advantages to compete, particularly against neighboring California. 

"If you grow in Reno, your cost of doing business is 40 percent less than what it would cost you to do it in Northern California," Kazmierski said of the pitch his team made to prospective companies. "And oh, by the way, we can get you up and running within a year. It'll take you five years in Northern California."

That strategy had already landed more than 40 manufacturing companies before Tesla came looking for a Gigafactory site in 2014. That deal, in Kazmierski's telling, "catapulted" the region into serious manufacturing and technology recruitment, backed by a 10-year tax abatement that has since expired. Google, Apple, Panasonic and data center company Switch followed.

Tax abatements, Kazmierski said, were "certainly a part of the process," but he characterized them as a baseline cost of competing for deals, not the reason companies ultimately chose Reno.

"Incentives are the icing on the cake," he said, "but you need a cake, too." 

A new name, a familiar strategy

Adams said the new name is clearer — it signals the region the organization serves and what it actually does, without the confusion that "authority" or the less-used "Western Nevada" invited.

The organization's actual priorities are laid out in its FY25-29 strategic plan, written during Adams' first year as CEO in 2023. The plan highlights advanced manufacturing and technology recruitment as top goals, an emphasis Adams said is only growing. 

The organization is also in the process of updating the plan itself, he said, to account for the rise of artificial intelligence — a technology that barely registered when the plan was written.

Data centers are part of that picture too, at least on paper, although Adams said, "I don't know that that's something we actively recruit," and put data center deals at roughly 10 percent to 15 percent of last year's closed deals.

That framing sits at odds with the strategic plan, which explicitly lists data centers as a targeted industry and sets a goal of $500 million in annual capital investment. That capital investment, Adams said, still depends heavily on incentives. 

Pursuing tax abatements remains part of the strategy, "and proudly so," he said. Nevada's abatements waive a portion of a tax "that doesn't yet exist," rather than forgiving one outright, a tool he said Nevada needs to compete with more aggressive incentive-driven states such as Arizona, Utah and Texas. 

The abatement backlash

That defense of incentives runs up against a growing body of research suggesting data center subsidies may not be needed at all.

Amanda Kass, research director at Good Jobs First, a watchdog group that tracks economic development subsidies nationally, said the data center industry has changed dramatically since most state abatement programs, including Nevada's, were first created. Today, "hyperscale" data centers carry far larger tax exemptions than the smaller facilities incentive programs were originally built around.

"Data centers locate where they are not because of the subsidies, but because of access to power, to fiber, to land, to water, for quick permitting processes," Kass said, pointing to a study in Georgia estimating 70 percent of the incentivized projects would have located there without any subsidy at all.

More reading: Have data center tax breaks helped Nevada's economy? Here's what we found.

For Kass, the deeper issue isn't the incentive, but the fact that few governments ever ask a basic question before approving one: Is the subsidy actually needed for the project to move forward? 

"That kind of critical first step isn't happening," she said. Few states require companies to prove a subsidy is actually necessary before approving one, she said, calling it public money that "could go into other areas of the budget."

Adams said the organization does evaluate whether an abatement is necessary as a matter of internal practice, but that consideration has little bearing on whether one is actually granted, as Nevada's abatements kick in automatically when a project meets certain requirements. 

"If you hit the criteria, it's very difficult to deny the company the abatement … because of the way the [law] is written," he said.