With these kind of studies it s easy to pull them out of context. I think what we should be doing is learning from it where are we doing well and where are we doing things efficiently. Our job growth rate, salary wage rate are not growing as fast as some others in the country. Tuscaloosa and Birmingham together were listed at 12th in last year s rankings for the 50 best places to develop a business by Inc. magazine. The best ranking Tuscaloosa had in those areas was 244 in the number of tech clusters.
Technology plays a big factor in the rankings.
Tuscaloosa was not included with the four major cities in Alabama Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville and Montgomery. However, the city s affiliation with a university was a factor in its place in the rankings, an element Aycock said other cities in the rankings shared with Tuscaloosa. And we re one of the top 50 smallest metro areas in the nation.