Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 19, 1993 TAG: 9306230256
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Norfolk Southern Corp., the hometown railroad that had merged with a Washington rival and moved its headquarters to Norfolk, was thinking about opening a national customer service center, the caller said.
Wouldn't the Roanoke Valley, still a regional headquarters for the company, be perfect for the new operation? Its chief competition: Atlanta, the railroad's operations center.
Fitzpatrick's mind reeled, recalling the time a decade ago when he and other emerging community leaders had crafted a presentation to persuade railroad executives to consider Roanoke for its new headquarters.
The pitch was never thrown. Key Roanoke business leaders blocked the move, saying they were worried about embarrassing Roanoke railroad executives as they worked to merge their company with Southern Railway Co. Besides, the reasoning went, corporate politics were working against Roanoke, which had been home to Norfolk and Western Railway Co. for a century.
Fitzpatrick, reeling himself back, jumped into action. As Dominion Bankshares Corp.'s vice president for economic development and a Roanoke city councilman, he often could be found deep in efforts to recruit industry to the region.
This time was no exception: The pitch would be made. He started making calls.
Far from the street corners and shopping malls, in government offices and executive suites around Western Virginia, there's a small group of folks trying to create jobs for you, your neighbors, your children.
They talk about how hard you work. They tout your "quality of life," citing the school systems, comparatively low tax rates, the mountains, the cultural attractions.
Using your tax money and funding from businesses, they publish brochures full of pristine pictures and bar charts intended to make the case for doing business in and around the Roanoke Valley.
These people do "economic development" - a bureaucratic term implying regional marketing, recruitment of new businesses and continuing service to existing ones. Words like "infrastructure" and "incentive" pepper their language;
a/6 saturday secrecy and confidentiality cloak their work.
Increasingly, development specialists across the country - and Western Virginia's are no exception - are chasing fewer prospects even as the stakes increase. Recession and its twin, "downsizing," make the quest for new jobs and tax revenue more important than ever, prompting localities to offer deals they wouldn't have considered two years ago.
But economic developers marketing the Roanoke Valley also are grappling with a volatile mixture of politics, pride, personality and poor infrastructure. They complain of obstructionism by rival localities, faulty communication and an overloaded regional sewer system that threatens their ability to attract new industry - and jobs.
Bruised by battles with neighboring states, local economic developers also say Virginia's fiscal conservatism - its refusal to grant tax breaks to new industry - and its system of local government hamper their ability to compete with neighboring states.
Gov. Douglas Wilder is criticized for cutting the state's economic development budgets and for apparent disinterest in courting new business. His counterparts in North Carolina and South Carolina are hailed for their hands-on roles in big-ticket deals.
How does the development game really work in the Roanoke Valley? Who cooperates, who doesn't, and who is looking to make things work better? And are the Carolinas really the Mid-Atlantic business mecca touted by some?
Stalking the railroad
The Roanoke Valley Economic Development Partnership, headed by Beth Doughty, knew a good opportunity when it saw one. Could the railroad be persuaded to bring 400 jobs to the Roanoke Valley, augmenting its already large work force here?
For nearly a year and a half, as the recession deepened and many would-be industrial prospects hunkered down, Doughty and her staff tallied the benefits of doing business in the valley. Real estate was less expensive than in Atlanta, they concluded. Labor was less expensive; taxes were lower; the quality of life arguably better.
Last summer, Fitzpatrick and Rob Glenn, a Roanoke Gas Co. executive who is chairman of the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority, paid a visit to William Bales. As vice president for coal and ore traffic, Bales is Norfolk Southern's senior officer in Roanoke and the logical pipeline to the top brass in Norfolk.
Could the Roanoke Valley, Glenn and Fitzpatrick asked, make a pitch for the national customer service center?
It was a propitious time for Roanoke to make the request. David Goode, a Roanoke native, was then Norfolk Southern's president and only weeks before had been named chairman-elect of the $4.6 billion company.
Bales liked the idea, and took the matter up with Goode, who had been asked by then-Chairman Arnold McKinnon "to be point man on this." Goode also received at least one other internal memorandum on the matter from a Roanoke-based executive, who asked not to be identified.
The door swung open to make the pitch.
On July 21, Doughty, Fitzpatrick, Glenn and Mark Kilduff, the state's director of industrial development, met with several NS officials at the partnership offices in downtown Roanoke.
The mission: Sell the railroad on the benefits of doing business in I don't think Norfolk Southern was expecting us to be as aggressive as we were," Doughty says. "They said, `Here's what we're looking for. If you have something that fits it, go ahead.' Beth Doughty the valley, and gather enough detailed information to begin designing a development proposal.
"Early on, we were told this was likely to go to Atlanta," Fitzpatrick says. "Never were we operating under any misguided impressions that we were in first place."
"I don't think Norfolk Southern was expecting us to be as aggressive as we were," Doughty says. "They said, `Here's what we're looking for. If you have something that fits it, go ahead.' "
The center, intended to be a 24-hour information clearinghouse for railroad customers around the world, would have to be located in a suburban, campus-like setting, the valley representatives were told.
It became clear that only two sites in the Roanoke Valley could fit the bill: Roanoke's 140-acre tract next to its Centre for Industry and Technology; and Valleypointe, a private industrial park in Roanoke County north of the airport.
County Administrator Elmer Hodge now says the county could have offered up its new Valley Tech Park in west county or the Tweeds building on U.S. 460 East. But he declined to push the issue, concluding that it was more important for the valley to appear unified - in this case, behind the city's proposal - than to revert to a bidding war.
"Roanoke County did not make a proposal and they told the partnership to go with the best proposal from the city," one city participant says. "The problem is, that Hodge now says the county could have offered up its new Valley Tech Park in west county or the Tweeds building on U.S. 460 East. But he declined to push the issue, concluding that it was more important for the valley to appear unified - in this case, behind the city's proposal - than to revert to a bidding war. sounds like Roanoke County didn't want to play ball. They did want to play ball."
Roanoke's economic development chief remembers it differently:
"We were the only ones who said we were interested," Brian Wishneff says. "The county passed on it and Salem didn't think [it] had a site. I don't know why the county chose not to do it."
The differing versions of the story illustrate the parallel tracks and nuanced story-telling that so often characterize behind-the-scenes deals in the multijurisdictional Roanoke Valley.
Still, it was Wishneff and Fitzpatrick who shaped the proposal they carried onto the Dominion Bankshares jet Aug. 28. Joined by Roanoke Mayor David Bowers, they flew to Atlanta to present NS planners an incentive package and site drawings.
Precise details remain locked in city files, but several sources say the deal envisioned Roanoke's using its Redevelopment and Housing Authority to build the customer service center for NS. The authority, a quasi-governmental agency, would lease the building to NS, at the same time freeing it from city real estate taxes.
Because as many as 200 railroad employees would need to be moved from Atlanta if the center were established here - estimated by NS to cost as much as $35,000 per employee - Roanoke's proposal proffered a relocation expense incentive.
The city would underwrite the relocation costs, totaling $7 million. Revenue from the lease payments would be funneled toward defraying the relocation expenses, in effect a long-term zero-sum game.
Then came the deal breaker: NS officials said the company prefers to own buildings it occupies. With the "build/lease option" killed, the Roanoke package suffered a serious blow. The city could offer only standard incentives - site grading, environmental testing, and road and utility extensions.
For months, no one heard a word.
In late September, news broke that a North Carolina bank, First Union Corp., would be acquiring Roanoke-based Dominion Bankshares, throwing as many as 1,400 out of work. The pressure to land the NS jobs intensified.
Doughty, Fitzpatrick and Len Boone, a real estate executive and then-president of the partnership, visited Salem and Roanoke County to see if they would help devise a yet-undefined regional incentive package to entice the railroad.
The benefits, Salem and the county were told, would be more jobs for the valley, sales tax revenues from new residents and other "soft" benefits. Both localities agreed the project could prove important to the valley, and they agreed to consider it.
The 11th-hour attempt to regionalize the project is symptomatic of city behavior, says a county official who asked not to be identified: "If the city can do it all themselves and get all the credit for it, then it's a city project. If they get in over their head and it gets too expensive, it becomes a valley project."
"This was neither a city nor a county project," Roanoke County Supervisor Ed Kohinke wrote in a letter to a reporter earlier this year. "We met secretly in a series of meetings with members of both the partnership and the city council, with no more than two members of either governing body present to stay within the law.
"The upshot of ours and other meetings: We were all behind it, we all wanted to do something, and it was now a matter of . . . putting together a package."
Still, no one heard a word.
On Oct. 27, County Administrator Hodge wrote Goode, saying We were the only ones who said we were interested. The county passed on it and Salem didn't think [it] had a site. I don't know why the county chose not to do it. Brian Wishneff the county was pleased the company was considering the valley for its new project and was willing to help make it possible. Nowhere did Hodge suggest an alternate site in the county.
"The city was waiting for NS to come back and say, `Here's what we need to make the deal work,' and they never did," one close to the deal says.
December passed into January. Goode addressed the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce's annual meeting, saying Roanoke had "done an excellent job courting us" but that the decision would be "determined by hard business facts."
Meanwhile, Roanoke Del. Victor Thomas worked his General Assembly colleagues for $3 million in state training funds earmarked for an NS customer service center in Roanoke. He succeeded, but it proved too little, too late.
On the same day that Thomas got approval for the state money, NS announced it would establish the center in its existing downtown Atlanta office building - not a new, suburban, campus-like complex. There would be no relocations, no new buildings.
The game was over, with Atlanta the victor.
Turning a negative positive
As the NS deal appeared to be unraveling last fall, so did Dominion Bankshares, the Roanoke Valley's flagship bank.
Rumors and press accounts that the troubled bank would be acquired were confirmed Sept. 21, when Chairman Warner Dalhouse announced the bank would become part of the growing First Union empire. Jobs would be lost, he said.
But others would be created, First Union executives said, once the company established regional operations in Roanoke. And if the Charlotte, N.C.-based company emerged successful in its bid for First American Metro Corp. in Washington, Roanoke's job prospects could only brighten.
City and county officials scrambled, requesting meetings with Dalhouse to assess the effect on their jurisdictions. Plans to form separate city and county delegations to Charlotte never materialized; a letter from Hodge to Dalhouse received no reply.
A key question: Did the Roanoke Valley have a lock on the promised jobs?
The answer came in subsequent meetings with Dalhouse, who told city officials they would have to compete with other regional First Union cities - Raleigh and Charlotte; Atlanta and Augusta, Ga.; Jacksonville, Fla.
Benjamin Jenkins III, president and chief operating officer of First Union National Bank of Virginia, recalls that the more he and his bosses in Charlotte studied Roanoke and its labor market, the more they were convinced the jobs should be located here.
The next question: If the valley prevailed, who would get the jobs?
With two prominent Dominion buildings downtown and the real threat that the downtown work force would be cut in the acquisition, city officials were desperate to bring jobs downtown.
The county was home to Dominion's operations center and its bank-card center. With the First Union cuts most likely targeted at executive positions and the likelihood that the new jobs would be lower-paying customer service jobs, county officials felt certain they stood a good chance of landing the new workers, then rumored to be at least 400.
"We thought it made sense for us to be split" between the two localities, Jenkins says, "and we thought it made sense for the valley. So we approached the city and the county with, `What can you do for us?' "
On Jan. 15, Hodge received a call from Fitzpatrick, who said First Union wanted training funds as an incentive to bring jobs to the valley. The next day, Hodge says, he met with Jenkins, and a day later he called City Manager Bob Herbert to begin coordinating a package.
Could state training dollars be funneled to the bank through the city, the county, or both, local officials were asked? State training funds had been exhausted, bank and local officials were told. But the city and county, determined to stem the loss of jobs, crafted their own proposals.
The county would underwrite $150,000 in training funds for First Union, using a quasi-governmental training consortium, Hodge told Jenkins in a Feb. 24 letter. "We prefer not to ask for a specific allocation of jobs," he wrote, "but do request that you place some of them in your facilities in the county."
"When we met you indicated that half of the initial positions would be placed in the city and half the county," Hodge wrote. "In addition, we have agreed to provide these funds for this purpose over the next two fiscal years with the understanding that Roanoke city will provide at least that amount."
A week later, Jenkins and Dalhouse announced First Union's plans to bring 400 customer-service jobs to the valley - 200 in the city and 200 in the county. Another 100 jobs would be transferred from the county to downtown.
The city then announced its package. A program would be established to provide up to $2,000
Please understand. We didn't play the one against the other. Nor did we see one trying to outdo the other in a dysfunctional way. I can't give you any data that would suggest the city and county were adversaries. Ben Jenkins
training money per employee for any company that creates a minimum of 200 jobs downtown - a $400,000 incentive for the bank.
Make no mistake: First Union could have located all 400 jobs in Dominion's existing county facilities, Jenkins says. But the company made a strategic decision - not a political decision, he insists - to spread the jobs around the valley.
"Our company could have put some of the jobs in other places," Jenkins says. "Job-training incentives were part of the facts that made the hard business decision clearer to make."
Hodge now says he is relieved the new jobs will be shared. Placing all 400 jobs at the Plantation Road operations center in the county would be a blow to downtown, he believes, and exacerbate long-simmering "friction" between the localities.
"Please understand," Jenkins says, "we didn't play the one against the other. Nor did we see one trying to outdo the other in a dysfunctional way. I can't give you any data that would suggest the city and county were adversaries."
Give 'em what they need
For its beauty and comfortable lifestyle and comparatively low cost of doing business, the Roanoke Valley has one big strike against it: It doesn't have much "product" to sell a prospective industry.
"It's a major problem," agrees Len Boone, past president of the partnership. "We need a vehicle in our community to put together parcels of land" and install the infrastructure - graded sites with utilities and access roads already built.
Some blame the structure of local government in Virginia. Because a city like Roanoke cannot annex from a neighboring county, they say, it has little land for industrial development. The problem also is compounded by the mountains ringing the valley, an imposing impediment.
"We're about built out in the city," City Manager Herbert says. "The product is out there. The developable land is in Botetourt County, Bedford County and Franklin County," though extending utilities can be difficult in more rural settings.
Efforts between Roanoke and Roanoke County to jointly develop industrial properties have been unsuccessful, insiders say, usually breaking down over internal political considerations in one jurisdiction or a failure to reach agreement on revenue sharing.
Roanoke's Centre for Industry and Technology is all but full, now that New York-based Transkrit Corp. has broken ground for its new corporate headquarters and manufacturing facility. The 140-acre tract of rolling land eyed for the NS center lies untouched.
Roanoke has little to show industrial prospects. Wishneff, the city's economic development director, bridles at criticism that the city should press ahead with infrastructure improvements.
"It would be a mistake to extend the roads and do a grading because [prospects] can already see what's there," he says. "There are some fine lines here: On the other hand, you can't have 100 acres in the middle of nowhere with no roads in sight, no [utility] lines in sight and say, `Trust us.' "
Roanoke County's "product" isn't much better. County officials are just opening Valley Tech Park, a 160-acre site in west county that would have been home to an Allied-Signal Inc. plant had the recession not intervened.
Ned McElwaine, Botetourt County's assistant administrator, calls developed industrial sites "one of the strongest incentives an area can offer. If you don't have the sites, you can't get the prospects here to see what you can offer."
Ask Mark Heath, former head of the valley partnership and now president of the Carolinas Partnership, a marketing group for the Charlotte region:
"It starts with product. We could spend a trillion dollars a year down here, and if we don't have a place to put them, they're gone. They want to see the roads in place; they want to see the master plan; they want to see how it's going to look."
Prospects also need to know they can count on the Roanoke Valley to meet their needs once they're here - and that includes such arcane, but crucial, things as sewage.
The valley's waste-water treatment plant, located in the city, is so dramatically overloaded that it's been operating under a state "consent decree" for three years. Officials estimate it will cost $45 million to expand the facility, but they cannot agree on how the costs should be apportioned among the city, the county, Vinton, Salem and Botetourt County.
Over the past three years, Roanoke, Salem and Vinton have exceeded their usage limits. Roanoke and Botetourt counties have remained considerably below their allotments on the regional system, designed to handle 35 million gallons per day.
Failure to address the problem, valley economic development officials say, already is hampering their efforts to attract industrial investment. "We have to look at every single [prospective] project and see if we can hook them up," says Doughty, the valley partnership's executive director.
"That goes back to my whining about product. That's product. Here you can buy the car, but you can't buy any gas for it."
Doughty's not alone. Last month, the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce - which formed a task force that spent two years studying the issue - passed a resolution saying it considered expansion of the treatment plant the region's "most pressing infrastructure need."
The task force concluded "that if agreements are not reached during 1993 . . . the potential for economic growth will be severely limited and that a moratorium" on connections to the system will "harm the region's reputation as a quality location."
While the Roanoke Valley dithers over its paucity of product, neighboring regions are set to showcase themselves to almost anyone who'll take a look.
The New River Valley Alliance claims eight public industrial parks and several publicly held shell buildings within its four-county area. Others are scheduled to open in the coming months, giving Radford and the counties of Montgomery, Pulaski, Giles and Floyd a leg up on their Roanoke Valley competition.
The New River group also boasts dozens of private tracts and buildings in its inventory - including 21 in Montgomery County alone - as well as Virginia Tech's Corporate Research Center.
Established, publicly owned industrial parks, complete with utilities and roads, bolsters the alliance's ability to hook prospects, says Franklyn Moreno, the group's marketing director. "They want to see a facility or see the land . . . and know that a lot of things are developed."
The Mount Rogers Economic Development Partnership - a 3-year-old marketing group for the counties of Bland, Carroll, Grayson, Smyth, Washington and Wythe and the cities of Bristol and Galax - has three shell buildings and 11 public industrial parks spread among its member localities. Another two parks are under development.
The parks, Executive Director Jerry Brown says, indicate "that you as a community have made a sincere commitment to locate new industry. Very few companies - with the exception of very large, very unique companies . . . are looking for green-field sites. In many instances they're looking for existing buildings."
Blaming, hailing others
The Roanoke Valley's product vacuum isn't its only economic development shortcoming, insiders say. Fingers usually point to Richmond.
Refusal to grant more liberal tax incentives to prospects and budget cuts ordered by Wilder have conspired to shortchange regions around the state, they say, putting them at a distinct disadvantage with neighboring states.
North and South Carolina give tax breaks. Their governors, staking their terms in part on economic growth, are intimately involved with courting industrial prospects.
It's known as the "Carolinas Mystique." But, like so many mystiques, it's only partially true.
"There is a can-do spirit in North Carolina," says Heath, the former Roanoker and now president of the Carolinas Partnership. "If it's moral and legal, we'll find a way to do it. Down here, reining people in is the problem. In Virginia, lighting a fire under people is the problem."
North Carolina's fabled tax breaks are more precisely a $1,200 tax credit for each job created in one of the Tar Heel State's 30 most rural counties. The current administration is proposing expansion of the program to include another 20 counties - but not the key Carolina cities the Roanoke Valley considers its peers.
"North Carolina does not offer tax abatements," says Brown, head of the Mount Rogers partnership and former economic development vice president for the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce. "They can offer essentially the same things we can."
Brown reasons that aggressive tax-cutting ultimately negates a central premise of economic development - increasing the tax base - and creates an uncomfortable caste system within the business community.
"When you begin significantly favoring new business in tax burden versus existing business, that just isn't fair," says Lawrence Framme, Wilder's first secretary of economic development.
Framme's successor, Cathleen Magennis, calls the practice "cyclical denigration . . . you continue to cycle downwards" by giving tax breaks to new industry. Instead, she and others market Virginia's comparatively stable tax environment; its work force; its proximity to Washington, major ports and interstate highway corridors.
That's not to say Virginia won't cut a tax deal. When UAL Corp. sought a site for a United Airlines maintenance facility, Framme worked with Wilder and the General Assembly to design an incentive package amounting to a $230 million giveaway over 20 years. The Virginia bid was unsuccessful.
Other defenders of Virginia's no-break philosophy say such deals also dilute a company's investment in a community. "I don't think throwing money [at prospects] does any good at all," says Joe Yates, Salem's director of planning and economic development. "For one thing, giving the company all those incentives - when times get tough, they're out of here."
Other Roanoke Valley development officials understand the arguments. Trouble is, the market reacts otherwise, they say; and too often the bottom line is the bottom line.
"The state isn't focused," says one valley development official who asked not to be identified. "We're losing prospects to other states because Virginia is prohibited by its charter from offering incentives like other states."
For additional evidence of Richmond's indifference, valley development officials point to the Wilder administration's elimination of the state's industrial advertising budget during the recession.
"That's not a very brilliant approach," says Boone, former president of the valley partnership. "We're not even doing the basics; Wilder's dropped that ball."
Framme defends his decision in 1990 to eliminate the remaining $300,000 from the state industrial advertising budget. He and other officials decided the money would have had a negligible effect, particularly during a recession when few companies were moving. For two years, the ad budget sat at zero. The current budget, fiscal years 1992-94, allocated $1 million to industrial advertising for each of the two years.
Magennis and Framme say valley criticism of their efforts focuses too much on industrial recruitment and fails to account for responsibilities to support and oversee tourism, world trade and environmental and trade policy.
Wilder's budget hawkishness, Framme continues, will prove beneficial to long-term business recruitment. "This governor did more for economic development during this term than just about any other governor. When other governors were raising taxes in this environment, he wasn't."
And what about the fabled Carolinas?
"The way we approach it here," Heath says, "is the state is an asset to us, but we're not going to rely on the state for our livelihood. We don't sit back and wait on the state."
Heal thyself?
Len Boone's fingers are crossed.
He's encouraged by recent talk of an economic "vision" coming from the business community. He's hopeful Thomas Robertson, president of Carilion Health System and chairman of the Roanoke Valley Business Council, will fill a leadership void in the valley.
And he's especially heartened that most local politicians aren't in a snit over being excluded from Robertson's proposal to fashion a vision for the Roanoke and New River valleys.
Business leaders should be the glue holding the broader community together, lending money, support and leadership to particular efforts, Boone says. Local governments "cannot orchestrate it for the whole."
But it's not happening the way some would like it - not now, anyway. Boone and others see a community leadership void, now that Dominion has been swallowed by First Union and the railroad's focus has gone truly global.
Private-sector support for the valley's economic development partnership has flagged in recent years, a victim of recession and poor local marketing. Meanwhile, government support for the regional marketing group has been increased 50 percent, underscoring government's commitment to marketing the valley.
Where's the business community?
"Stop 10 people on the the street and ask them about the partnership and you'll get 10 different answers," Boone figures, "none of them right."
A confidential study of the partnership by Hollins College economics Professor Mary Houska blames flagging business support for the group on confusion over its role and weak support from outlying localities.
"Simply put," Houska says, "the people . . . report widely held `I see our problem as being too territorial. I look at it as, `Here in the valley.' Our borders are so small, our neighbors are so close - everybody gains. This valley gains from buying, selling and trading. `Mac' McCadden perceptions in the business community or among elected office holders that either the partnership has brought industry to some other area, but not theirs, or that the partnership doesn't seem to be doing much at all."
Even business leaders mirror their political counterparts, she says, reverting to parochialism over "the region as a whole."
"Many are quick to blame other governments for failures to cooperate, but they are slow to support an initiative originating elsewhere."
The partnership appears to be suffering an identity crisis. Some business leaders who support the partnership become miffed when new industries choose competing contractors or designers to help build a facility.
There's also the perception that valley localities fight over economic development prospects, undercutting one another whenever possible.
Relative newcomers to the valley's political ways - such as Roanoke Councilman Delvis "Mac" McCadden - see barriers in jurisdictional borders. "I see our problem as being too territorial," he says.
"I look at it as, `Here in the valley.' Our borders are so small, our neighbors are so close - everybody gains. This valley gains from buying, selling and trading."
Robertson agrees, saying business leaders should practice "enlightened self-interest" when deciding whether to devote their dollars to regional development and growth.
"It's a very selfish viewpoint," concedes Robertson, president of Carilion, Virginia's largest hospital corporation. "If the valley does not grow, then Carilion's growth will be limited. The same for First Union or Heironimus" department stores.
There seems to be a sense It's a very selfish viewpoint. If the valley does not grow, then Carilion's growth will be limited. The same for First Union or Heironimus" department stores. Tom Robertson among some business leaders, Robertson among them, that the valley's comfortable business environment is becoming more difficult, more susceptible to global economic convulsions.
First Union's takeover of Dominion, repeated cutbacks at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant and other business closures have served as "wake-up calls," Robertson and others say, for some regional business leaders too long accustomed to letting someone else take the leading role.
Robertson hopes his Business Council proposal can lead the region toward drafting a strategic economic development vision, dealing fatal blows to a persistent "inferiority complex" and localities working at cross purposes.
Robertson's not alone.
"If the political leaders get involved - unless they change their attitudes right now - [the visioning process] will crumble from within," Fuzzy Minnix, chairman of the Roanoke County supervisors, says, expressing support for Robertson's effort.
Minnix is looking for a few solutions of his own.
Take Guilford County, N.C. With the help of the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce, Greensboro, High Point and the county have devised the Guilford County Economic Development Council to coordinate regional economic development efforts.
Could it work here?
Minnix isn't sure, but he thinks political and business leaders owe it to their constituencies - and their children - to find out. "Why am I doing it?" he asks. "I'd like for my son to get a job and no longer wait tables."
by CNB