Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 20, 1993 TAG: 9306210325
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
If a regional approach to creat jobs hasn't been important in the past, it will in the future, say many who have studied the relationship between governments and the economy.
The reason, they say, is simple: The boundaries of local governments don't make much sense anymore.
Once they did, former Gov. Gerald Baliles says. Most Virginia counties, he notes, were laid out based on Colonial commuting patterns, so that the county seat was no farther away than a day's ride on horseback. Then, each county contained its own discrete economy.
Now, metropolitan growth sprawls across county and city lines. This isn't just a simple city-county thing, either. The economic blob we think of as Roanoke spills out into Botetourt, into Bedford, into Franklin, even across Christiansburg Mountain into the New River Valley.
That's hardly a new phenomenon, or one unique to Virginia. "Most places in the United States suffer from a fragmentation of local government," says Michael Gallis, an urban consultant who teaches at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.
But it's becoming a more pronounced problem, according to a growing chorus of urban policy analysts.
In the new global marketplace, national borders are being erased with the stroke of a diplomat's pen and the downlink of a satellite's beam. In the free-trading, free-for-all future, nations won't matter, states won't matter. They're anachronisms, Gallis contends.
Instead, the dominant economic unit may be one that the Greeks were familiar with - the city-state, in which metro regions trade with and compete against each other, regardless of which country they're in.
In this new economic world, even cities must chart their own foreign policy:
Nashville, Tenn., convinced that its economic success depends on becoming an international gateway, confounds federal regulators by offering to buy its own overseas route - and lend it to any airline willing to fly from Europe to Music City.
Memphis - having used its location, its Federal Express headquarters and its concentration of trucking companies to market itself nationally as "America's distribution center"- is positioning itself to take advantage of the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement. Memphis leaders already have made four trips to Mexico and Canada to sell businesses there on the advantages of shipping products through the Tennessee city.
Spartanburg, S.C., set out to make itself a magnet for German investment, an effort that's paid off in both deutsche marks and dollars. More than 185 foreign companies have located in the Greenville-Spartanburg area, creating about 41,000 jobs. The crown jewel is the new BMW car plant, expected to create 2,000 more jobs by the mid-1990s.
What does this mean for the Roanoke Valley and Western Virginia?
Plenty.
For small and mid-sized cities to create jobs in the global marketplace, Gallis says, it's not enough for cities to be mere regional centers, the way Roanoke historically has been the shopping, financial and medical hub of Western Virginia. "The key," he says, "is to understand your role in the global economy. What are you going after?"
More to the point, says John Accordino, an urban policy analyst at Virginia Commonwealth University, smaller communities must specialize, by nurturing a network of inter-related companies - much the way the Greensboro-High Point-Martinsville corridor rose as the nation's furniture capital and the way that Austin, Texas; Silicon Valley; and Boston's Route 128 have emerged as worldwide computer capitals.
"The regions that are able to develop these industrial complexes, with related industries and suppliers and labor pools, will be the ones best able to compete in the global economy," Accordino says.
The key word is region.
"The whole world is approaching economic development on a regional basis," says William Heiss, another urban policy analyst at VCU. If the Richmond region wants to compete, "it has to compete as a region - the city and 10 to 12 surrounding counties. To attract foreign firms here, they're going to have to look at the region, not an individual county or city."
From the vantage point of Germany or Japan, he says, the green signs demarcating American localities don't mean much - foreign investors are taking a broader view, looking at a region's labor pool, its markets, its transportation links, its overall quality of life. "No one really cares which jurisdiction the firm locates in," Heiss says, "as long as they locate in the region."
No one that is, except the politicians - who have to balance each jurisdiction's books.
A regional approach to economic development may be more critical to Virginia localities than those in some neighboring states, Gallis says.
Once, 75 percent of the foreign trade in the United States was funneled through New York's harbor. Now, Gallis says, foreign trade is becoming decentralized, fanning out to a growing number of cities with international airports.
Gallis sees the rise of "22 gateway cities" that are beginning to function as "independent economic units" in a global market. Among those near the East Coast: Washington, Charlotte and Atlanta.
Around each of these gateway cities, he says, smaller cities will prosper as "satellites," exploiting cheaper land and labor costs and their proximity to an international airport. The prime example, he says, is the way Spartanburg has played up ties to Charlotte to attract foreign investment.
The problem for Virginia, Gallis says, is that, except for the Northern Virginia suburbs outside Washington, the state is not closely tied to any of the emerging international gateways. Most of Virginia - especially geographically out-of-the-way Western Virginia - is a "flyover state," he says.
The key for the Roanoke Valley and Western Virginia, he says, is to figure out what their place in the global market should be, and then start forging closer ties to an international air gateway - be it Washington or Charlotte or both.
"Your economic future is going to be linked to these economic areas," he says. However, he warns, "the fragmentation you have locally will only be an impediment, because places with long-term planning will be better off than places that are always fighting."
by CNB