Simmons said he believes the majority of the 15 board members are "quite positive about the proposal that the state issued, and the ongoing negotiations in trying to arrive at a contract with EDCU."

Board member Bill Boyle, editor and publisher of the San Juan Record in Monticello, said his concerns about making sure it's not only the Wasatch Front that gets new businesses, "have been very seriously considered and addressed."

Boyle said he wasn't worried that only one company bid for the contract, citing the federal government's controversial award of contracts in Iraq to Halliburton, a company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Both Halliburton and EDCU are the only ones able to do the jobs the government needed done. "There's only one company that can do the job. It's Halliburton on the federal level and on the state level, it's EDCU," he said.

The board member spending the most time on the contract is attorney Jerry Oldroyd, who said last week it was still being tweaked "to make certain there is proper accountability and time frames are properly met for performance."

Oldroyd said the board wants to "be certain it creates a good balance, something that EDCU can work with and yet, at the same time, we have enough controls that we can be certain we're properly spending the state's money."

Roybal, who said he has deliberately stayed out of the contract negotiations, said the reason they're taking so much time is that the governor's office wants to ensure all the issues are addressed.

"We wanted to be as open as possible," Roybal said. "It's taken a little bit longer."

The state's economic development efforts have not suffered, he said, despite the lack of a recruiting contract. EDCU has been willing to work on behalf of the state without compensation since the beginning of the year, Roybal said.

"When we made the decision to restructure, they've been sort of informally managing any new recruiting projects that have come into the state," he said. "They have done quite a bit pro bono for the state of Utah, which I think most people have not recognized."

EDCU won't be compensated for any of the work done before the contract is signed, Roybal said, describing their assistance as "a good faith effort to assist the governor in the hopes that things may eventually work out in terms of a formal relationship with the state."

The president and chief executive officer of EDCU, Jeff Edwards, was more blunt about the arrangement.

"We were asked to handle the state's recruiting," Edwards said. "We agreed to do that on a pro bono basis because we felt like there needed to be no loss of continuity with all of those projects the state was handling."