Employment Lands Inventory and Application Update
CAI inventoried potential employment lands sites within Clark County based on comprehensive analysis of site development readiness, capacity, and current use and ownership. Rather than a static report, this inventory is a dynamic application, hosted on CAI’s in-house platform CAILive, with interactive, shareable site details, key demographic and economic indicators, and up-to-the-minute site notes from partners. All properties listed in the 2019 launch of the tool were purchased for development within just a few years.
CAI partnered with the Columbia River Economic Development Council (CREDC) and stakeholder groups across Clark County to evaluate, document, and enhance the county’s inventory of employment lands and to develop a dynamic, publicly accessible online application to support business attraction, expansion, and retention efforts.
The original 2019 project identified vacant and potentially developable sites (or aggregations of parcels) capable of supporting long-term employment uses. CAI applied a structured methodology, building on earlier employment lands analysis to assess and grade sites based on development readiness criteria including utility and transportation infrastructure, brownfields presence, land use constraints, and market readiness. The work was informed by extensive engagement with stakeholders representing every jurisdiction in the county, as well as real estate professionals and regional leaders, ensuring site evaluations reflected both technical analysis and local market expertise.
In 2025, CAI updated the Employment Lands inventory and enhanced the associated online application built on CAI’s mapping platform. The update improved data accuracy, refreshed site information, and expanded the application’s functionality. Key enhancements included upgraded filtering and search features, enabling users to query sites by tier, size, and multiple attributes to better match site characteristics with the needs of targeted industries. The resulting tool provides CREDC and its partners with an intuitive, powerful resource for exploring employment lands and their surrounding community context, strengthening the region’s economic development strategy with current, actionable data.
The final product is a dynamic tool that CREDC, as the economic development organization in Clark County, can use to support countywide business location, expansion, and retention efforts. This analysis identified factors for development feasibility in a robust evaluation of employment land supply in Clark County. (2025)