
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 6, 1992                   TAG: 9203060160
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: GEORGE KEGLEY BUSINESS EDITOR
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

STATE HELP GONE; INDUSTRY KEEPS COMING

The Roanoke Valley Economic Development Partnership is generating most of its own business leads because the state has cut its industrial advertising budget from $1 million to zero.

Len Boone, president of the regional development group, told its annual meeting Thursday that since 1990 almost three out of four company prospects have been produced locally.

While Virginia has wiped out its advertising budget, North and South Carolina and other states are spending more than $500,000 on ads each year and the partnership is using mre than half of its $589,000 budget for marketing, Boone said.

While state prospects have declined, he said, the partnership has doubled the inquiries it received in 1990 and again last year. In 1991, the partnership filled more than 1,000 requests for information. It now is working with 19 corporate prospects.

Although slowed by the recession, the partnership is "headed in the right direction," Boone said. Because of the experience of Beth Doughty, acting executive director, and her staff, he said, the organization is taking its time "to be sure we find the right person" to succeed Mark Heath, former executive director who left in December for a similar post in Charlotte.

Successful economic development is a marathon, he said; it takes eight or more years to build awareness of a locality, and then there's the search process.

In the past three years, Boone said, the partnership has worked with companies that have proposed making more than $320 million in new investment and creating more than 3,000 potential jobs.

Some companies, such as Grove Worldwide in Salem, haven't moved and Arkay Packaging and Allied Signal dropped their plans, but the partnership "won out against competing communities" - it was the economy that changed their plans, he said.

Boone said more has been achieved in business recruitment in the past three years than in any other three-year period in the past two decades.

Investment by local governments and investors in the partnership's seven-county area "will continually pay off . . . but it won't move an inch without us all behind it."

by CNB