Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 4, 1993 TAG: 9307040111
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF DeBELL STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The seven candidates are "the cream of the crop," Gregory Wingfield says. As director of Forward Hampton Roads, a Tidewater economic development organization, Wingfield knows the consultants and has worked with many of them at one time or another.
They range from a one-man operation like Reston-based Growth Strategies Organization Inc. to the mega-firm PHH Fantus of Chicago. The others are The Breen Consortium, Spaulding & Associates, Luke Planning Inc., Partners for Livable Places and IBM Corp.
"They're like a `Who's Who' of economic development," Wingfield said. Clients of the consultants agree.
"I wouldn't swap him for all the money in the world as a facilitator," Mississippi economic development official Mike Juniker said of Rod Spaulding, president of Spaulding & Associates.
"I have seen him wade into some of the touchiest issues, some of the most bite-you-on-the-butt situations you ever saw, and come out smelling like a rose," Juniker said.
James W. Dunn, president of the Metropolitan Richmond Chamber of Commerce, said Henry Luke of Luke Planning "did a fine job for us" on a 1991 "community visioning" process involving Richmond and three neighboring counties.
"He has a unique ability to help a community look at itself and sort things out and decide what options it might want to consider."
Ross Boyle, president of Growth Strategies Inc., was praised for his thoroughness by Linda Downing of the Greater Des Moines (Iowa) Chamber of Commerce, which he is assisting with a long-range plan. "He's a very intelligent man," she said.
The economic development plan is the objective of an as-yet unnamed group representing chambers of commerce in nine Roanoke Valley and New River Valley localities. The group was organized by hospital executive Thomas Robertson, acting as chairman of the Roanoke Valley Business Council.
The notion developed in part through his own informal conversations with friends and business associates. Those same conversations yielded the names of consultants who help to bring such plans about, Robertson said. Ten were invited to apply, and seven responded.
"We may have missed some good people by doing it that way," Robertson said, "but I think we have a pretty strong group."
A decision on the consultant is expected by the middle of the month, according to Robertson. He said the professional services will cost from $15,000 to $100,000.
Probably the best known of the consultants is Chicago-based PHH Fantus, with clients all over the world. PHH Fantus was the intermediary in one of the biggest recent economic development stories: the decision of BMW to locate its first U.S. auto assembly plant in Greer, S.C.
It also was involved in the decisions of United Parcel Service and the American Cancer Society to move their headquarters to the Atlanta area from locations in Connecticut and New York, respectively.
PHH Fantus has been known primarily as a corporate relocation consultant since its founding in 1919. But it has been using its expertise to help communities formulate economic development programs since shortly after World War II, according to senior consultant Jim Lothian of the company's New Jersey office.
Lothian said he will be the man on the scene if PHH Fantus wins the job of helping to craft a regional economic development plan.
The Breen Consortium is headquartered in Richmond, though President Michael Breen is based in the Northern Virginia community of McLean. He is working with Arlington County on its traffic problems.
Breen described his 5-year-old company as "an international consultancy that provides assistance for business mobility and economic development analysis."
He has had clients in the former Soviet Union - his payment in one instance consisted of 14 Soviet Army motorcycles - and Croatia. The latter project ended abruptly when Serbian shelling forced Breen and a colleague to take shelter in a basement and eventually to flee the country. He jokes that his books still carry "uncollected receivables due to civil war."
Growth Strategies Organization Inc. consists primarily of Boyle, who works as an independent and hires assistance as needed. He was a partner in a Washington economic development firm until going on his own about nine years ago.
"I decided instead of managing others doing the work I'd rather do the work myself," he said.
Boyle is immediate past president of the American Economic Development Council and is the publisher of a newsletter called Economic & Demographic Trends.
Unlike most of the other consultants, he does not take individual business firms as clients. Instead, he works for "organizations representing geographic areas."
When a business or industry is looking to move, Boyle said, it typically chooses a region first and gets down to specific locations later. For that reason, he said, localities should plan and market themselves regionally even though they may end up competing to sell the newcomer on a specific site.
"You've got to get them into the net before you can fight over them," he said.
Rod Spaulding agrees. "We don't have the luxury of turf-ism anymore," he said, because localities have to work together in order to compete in the global economy.
Spaulding & Associates is based in Mount Pleasant, S.C., which is near Charleston. The company serves both public and private clients, primarily in the Southeast.
Spaulding said his approach to community planning involves heavy local participation, and places a premium on implementation so as to avoid "having a wonderful strategic plan that sits on a shelf somewhere."
"There are two parts to a strategic plan," he said. "The product and the process. The product is easy. The process is not."
Local involvement also is vital to the working technique of Henry Luke of Luke Planning. Indeed, all the consultants said the same.
"It only works if it's their vision, their strategic planning process," Luke said. As a consultant, he said, his job would be to help the community or other client assess its strengths and weaknesses, decide where it wanted to go and what it wanted to be, and figure out how to get there.
Luke developed his techniques during 20 years of consulting work as an employee of Reynolds, Smith & Hills, a large architecture, engineering and planning firm based in Jacksonville, Fla.
He said his "community vision" plan for Jacksonville, developed in 1983 and still considered something of a model, was the first such plan that he knows of in the country.
Though he still has ties with the company, Luke recently left Reynolds, Smith to become an independent consultant. He has had clients in Atlanta; Charlotte, N.C.; Orlando, Fla., and other cities in addition to Richmond.
IBM Corp. is known as a giant of the computer industry but has been in the consulting business for a long time, according to senior location manager Vern Davenport of the company's Norfolk office.
"It just gets kind of lost in the largeness of our company," he said. So lost, in fact, that IBM public relations people in Washington and New York had no knowledge of that facet of the company's operations.
It turns out that the various consulting activities were pulled together into the IBM Consulting Group about two years ago. The manager of consulting practices is based in White Plains, N.Y. But Davenport said the consulting activity in reality is centered "wherever the people are," because IBM's consultants are scattered throughout the company's workforce.
The economic development specialist, for example, is based in Boulder, Colo. Davenport, a specialist in health care, is based in Norfolk but is part of an IBM team that lately has been consulting on a "vision-building" project in San Antonio, Texas.
Robertson, chairman of the business council and president of Roanoke-based Carilion Health Systems, is a customer of Davenport's. It was their conversations about the idea of a regional economic development plan that led to IBM's inclusion on the list of potential consultants.
Such projects are a natural fit for IBM, Davenport said. "We have a presence in most of the larger areas of the country, so we're somewhat in tune with local business management and we have some idea of what's going on in the community."
Partners for Livable Places, alone among the group of potential consultants, is a nonprofit organization. Supported largely by grants, contributions, fees and contracts, it was founded in 1977 and is headquartered in Washington.
Partners has worked all over the country to help cities develop goals and plans for achieving them. Since 1991, the organization has had a program to help communities join together in producing "State of the Region" assessments and action plans designed to make them competitive in the global marketplace.
"The only way a city like Roanoke can hold its own in that arena is to think on a regional basis," Partners spokesman Daniel McCahan said.
Programs assisted by Partners for Livable Places typically emphasize the so-called "amenities": parks, museums, cultural activities, etc. The organization regards them as vital not only to quality of life but to successful economic development, and its programs strive to foster growth without endangering the amenities.
"Our defining words are `livability' and `quality of life,' " McCahan said. "The things many people look at as frills, we regard as essential."
by CNB