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Facebook is out. Google Fiber is in.

West Jordan city officials haven't completely given up on luring the largest of the social media giants to their city, but it is very difficult to imagine a new deal that would be big enough to beat the offer Facebook has from a city in New Mexico but modest enough to satisfy local officials who have a say in the process.

Meanwhile, the project that made sense to the titan of search engines as a straightforward business venture, with no tax abatements, is taking off in Salt Lake City.

While the administration of then-Mayor Ralph Becker lobbied hard for Salt Lake City to become one of Google Fiber's early roll-outs, and helped arrange for the company to gain quick access to necessary rights-of-way, no tax giveaways were involved. The brains at Google were willing to be convinced that a city with so much growth and so many well-educated, tech-oriented people was a good place to start laying down millions of dollars worth of glass.

Google Fiber had a grand opening Wednesday for its Trolly Square outlet, the place where people can go to sign up for fiber-optic cable internet and television service to their homes and businesses. The service is now available to a neighborhood in the center of the city, with more to come.

The Google example is the best model for municipal deal-making because, rather than offer massive tax kickbacks, it shows a city's own faith in its allure as a good place for cutting-edge industries to do business, to the clear mutual advantage of all.

By providing super-fast connections, and creating a much more competitive marketplace for those services, Google's promise to improve the standard of living in Salt Lake City is much firmer than Facebook's offer to boost the economy of West Jordan sometime down the road.

It is understandable that West Jordan's leaders allowed their heads to be turned by the prospect of the social media mammoth building a large data center on what is now mostly unused land on the city's west side. Even if they didn't make back the $260 million or so in tax abatements and other lures, just having Facebook on its exit sign raised the promise of other tech giants, and wannabes, moving to the area.

But it was just as understandable that County Mayor Ben McAdams, the County Counsel and the Utah State Board of Education were all wary of the amount of revenue that would be lost, especially by the area's already cash-starved public schools, as well as of the secret nature of how the deal was put together.

Maybe the Facebook deal is dead for good. Maybe a better, smaller deal can be struck that can earn the necessary buy-in from all concerned. Either way, the system that required the broad, and public, vetting of the arrangement clearly worked.