I don’t know of a single state that doesn’t try to highlight and support rural areas for economic development, but the truth is that a lot of new jobs are created in urban and suburban areas. Location Neutral Employee (LONE) incentive is Colorado’s interesting effort to leverage urban area successes to spur rural job creation. Even before the pandemic made “remote workers” a popular buzzword, this program was rolled out in 2019 and found its first project in early 2020. The idea is to provide enhanced incentives to a project locating in Colorado for every remote rural employee they bring on board outside the county where the project makes its primary investment. As always, the devil is in the details, so here they are:
https://choosecolorado.com/doing-business/incentives/location-neutral-employment-program/.
If you want to find out a little more about the first project to use the program, here is a story about Pax8 and its expansion in Grand Junction: https://www.westernslopenow.com/news/local-news/colorados-first-lone-incentive-recipient-pax8-is-hiring/