You might not have paid close attention, but late last summer, economic development organizations all over the country scrambled over several weeks to put together proposals for one of the largest and most prominent business attraction opportunities to date. In September, Amazon announced it was seeking proposals for a second headquarters of equal size and stature to its first in Seattle’s South Lake Union. Eight to 10 million square feet of office space. Fifty thousand employees. A multi-billion dollar investment.

Some cities in the Rust Belt, languishing under deindustrialization, took this as an opportunity to reinvent. More prosperous challengers, like Atlanta and Boston, saw it as a way to further expand on the economic gains of the past decade. Seattle––being Seattle––freaked out.

And in Spokane, a group of organizations led by Greater Spokane, Inc. developed, by all accounts, a decent proposal with flashy renderings, but little chance of further consideration.

And that’s fine.

Indeed, while a veritable flood of new technology jobs may sound tantalizing, we’re probably better off without them––and not just because of the potential downsides an employer like Amazon would bring. There are other, smaller steps that our city could take for a better value.

We can expand our business retention and expansion efforts. Homegrown businesses are the bedrock of a local economy. By targeting Spokane firms today with permitting assistance, energy audits, and basic services, we can help them grow into tomorrow’s industry players.

We can focus on talent attraction. Increasingly, companies follow employees––not the other way around. What are we doing to keep local students in the area once they graduate? What are we doing to recruit top-tier young professionals to the region?

We can continue to target our nascent health sciences cluster for further growth. With two new medical schools recently welcoming their first students, it’s hard to ignore Spokane’s health sector. Let’s ensure these schools have all the resources they need to support research, spin-outs and health technology.

We can collaborate on a regional basis to advance our economic goals. We put our best foot forward when we work together. Let’s ensure our economic development organizations have actionable metrics and performance-based contracts. Then let’s work together to execute them.

Finally, eschewing Amazon allows us to better focus on addressing other major social concerns––issues like housing affordability, stagnant wages and healthcare costs. Beyond the obvious ethical questions associated with giving public subsidy to one of the largest and most powerful publicly-traded companies, doing so can degrade our ability to provide these essential services. By casting off these types of large, expensive business attraction projects, we’d be refusing to play ball––and protecting vital public assets for, well, the public.

So the next major Spokane company doesn’t have to be Amazon. And that company is probably already here. We just have to work together to help it grow and thrive.

Anthony Gill is an economic development professional and Spokane native. He is the founder of Spokane Rising, an urbanist blog focused on ways to make our city a better place to live.