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What does $100 million buy?

What can you buy with $100 million? For starters, there is a house with a price tag just over $100 million in Beverly Hills that has 12 bedrooms, 15 bathrooms, is on 4.5 acres, and has a tennis court and guest house. There is also a home in South Beach, Miami, with a $100 million price tag that has 10 bedrooms, all hand-painted and uniquely designed and a courtyard with a 24-karat gold-lined pool. You could also buy Vincent Van Gogh’s piece, “Portrait de L’Artiste sans Barbe (Portrait of the Artist without Beard) for just under that $100 million mark. You could own an airbus A320neo airplane so you and 150-180 of your closest friends could more easily travel together. Maybe they can pitch in for fuel.

You could own not one, not two, but 22 Lamborghini Veneno cars, since they only cost $4.5 million each. That would even leave you a little bit to purchase insurance and build a garage. You could also purchase approximately 1.3 million Louisville Slugger baseball bats. That would be enough for more than 1,700 per player in the Major League. Lastly, this one is of particular interest to me, you could buy more than 1.5 million pairs of shoes. At $65 on average per pair, that’s over 4,200 pair a day for an entire year. Unless you were buying the $50,000 diamond encrusted custom Nike shoes. Then those numbers would change a bit.

I hope you can see from the list above that $100 million is a lot of cash. It is difficult to even comprehend. For me, once I put it into shoe talk, I was able to more easily understand just how much money $100 million is. I don’t have that kind of money, but the good news is, that is the kind of money you can expect to see invested into the Alpena area over the next two years.

More than $100 million is expected to be invested here for developments, additions, improvements, and renovations. You might already be seeing some of the changes with the numerous renovations (have you driven US-23 South lately?) going on across town. The numbers from those renovations aren’t even all figured into that grand total, so the actual investment is likely going to be much higher by the end of 2019.

The $100 million number came from an impromptu meeting where several people with legitimate knowledge — meaning, it wasn’t just some rumor-mill chatter on Facebook — were discussing what we could expect for economic development in the next few years. When we started putting projects and numbers down on paper, the total quickly tallied over $100 million. That really is an incredible amount of investment.

What does this mean to the community? It means we continue to improve, grow, develop, and gain momentum. It means that the work we have all been grinding out over the last decade or so is gaining in success. It means that projects that have been in the works for several years are now coming into the, “brick and mortar” phase. That’s the phase everyone appreciates most because it is visible.

It means that you will see more professionals moving to the area, and in increase in availability of professional job opportunities. It means our contractors will be busier than ever — as if they aren’t already swamped with work. It means more opportunities for your children and grandchildren to move back, and more opportunities for those who live here already.

This kind of investment means people are watching this region and seeing it as a place they want to be. It means that a lot of different people are looking to invest in the area and are taking steps to make that a reality. It also means we need to continue to invest in workforce development to make sure the future needs can be filled.

This excites me. There are communities around the State looking to this region and wondering how we are making this happen. There are people driving into town and asking us where we found all the contractors to do the work they drove past. We have some massive things happening in the community. Be proud and look forward for what’s yet to come.

Jackie Krawczak is president/CEO of the Alpena Area Chamber of Commerce. Her column runs bi-weekly on Thursdays. Follow Jackie on Twitter @jkrawczak.

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