Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 1, 1994 TAG: 9405020123
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JEFF DEBELL STAFF WRITER NOTE: below
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Hickory, a city of some 30,000 people in North Carolina's western foothills, has taken to calling itself the country's center for the manufacture and development of fiber-optic and telecommunications cable.
Even allowing for a measure of boosterism, it's a tough claim to dispute.
Industry giants Siecor Corp. and Alcatel/NA Inc. have factories and corporate headquarters in the area. They have been a magnet for smaller manufacturers like DITEL Inc., Comm/Scope Inc. and dozens of other companies that support the high-tech cluster with supplies and services.
Kenneth Atkins can take some of the credit. As executive director of the Catawba County Economic Development Corp. for 12 years, he has helped bring new high-tech companies to the area and facilitate expansions at some of those already in place.
Vitality in the telecommunications industry has greatly diversified the area's manufacturing base, which for years was dominated by furniture and hosiery, and has helped put the economy into a state of rosy good health.
Atkins aims to keep it that way. Toward that end, he has embraced the gospel of the ``global connection.'' His connection is Charlotte.
``We used to try to sell ourselves by trashing Charlotte,'' Atkins said. ``We don't do that anymore. You think twice about trashing a place your future is intertwined with.''
Catawba County's telecommunications industry dates back to 1953, when a company called Superior Cable was started to supply copper wire to telephone companies. It was bought in 1980 by Siecor Optical Cables Inc. of Horseheads, N.Y.
Siecor planned a move into the emerging fiber-optics industry. It saw in Superior an adaptable technological base and a source of trained or trainable employees. It saw in Hickory an area well situated geographically and appealing as a place for its employees to live and work.
``It still has that family and small-town atmosphere,'' Siecor spokeswoman Lois Boynton said.
Siecor is in a race with AT&T to become the top fiber cable manufacturer in the country. Alcatel, another dominant cable manufacturer, moved to Hickory in 1983.
DITEL Inc., a maker of box enclosures, splice trays and other components used in the cable industry, moved to Hickory in 1985. With Siecor and Alcatel already there, company controller Anita McCombs-Gore said, DITEL knew it would be able to find employees with the technical capabilities it needed.
The other major players in the local telecommunications industry are Comm/Scope Inc., a supplier for the cable television industry; General Instrument's VideoCipher Division, a supplier of access control and encryption and decryption equipment for cable and satellite television; and Prodelin Corp., maker of antennas, cables and connectors for the telecommunications industry.
``Some of it just happens,'' Atkins said of the telecommunications buildup, ``but there's a certain amount of design, too. In some ways we were lucky and in some ways we made our own luck.''
A well-kept secret
An example of the latter was Hickory's decision to sell Siecor property at the local airport for office and meeting space, a hangar and its own fuel farm. That would mean multi-million-dollar savings to Siecor, which relies heavily on its corporate air fleet.
The decision didn't please the airport's fixed-base operator, who lost the fuel sales. But local authorities went ahead because they wanted Siecor and they wanted to cultivate the telecommunications industry.
Atkins is well aware that other communities, including the Roanoke and New River valleys, are targeting the telecommunications industry in their economic development programs. Despite the head start enjoyed by Hickory, he said, it's not too late for others to cash in if they sell themselves aggressively and smartly.
``It's an industry that's going to see a lot of growth,'' he said. ``We see huge opportunities in spin-offs like photo electronics and connectors. The whole industry that's going to happen as this technology filters down to the end user is incredible.''
Today, Atkins estimates, the industry's major employers provide between 3,000 and 3,500 jobs in Catawba County. High-tech locations and plant expansions assisted by the EDC represent a capital outlay of more than $200 million in Catawba County, he said.
For all its importance, telecommunications is not the major job source in the area. Furniture and hosiery manufacturing employee four times as many people. What's attractive about telecommunications is that it diversifies the economy - and it pays much better than labor-intensive traditional manufacturing.
According to its own records, the Catawba County Economic Development Corp. has been involved in projects bringing 9,058 jobs to the area since it was formed in 1977. Included are 46 new-industry projects and 64 expansions, with a total investment of more than $617 million.
Pushed by the economic activity, the Hickory Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) has reached nearly 300,000 in population - fourth largest in North Carolina.
Though the entire four-county MSA is sharing in the growth, most of the industrial activity is in Catawba County. It has a net daily in-migration of some 20,000 people, according to DeWitt Blackwell, director of planning and community development services for the Hickory-based Western Piedmont Council of Governments.
The commuters come to jobs both in the factories and in the flourishing retail and service industries that have been been fostered by the manufacturing activity. Unemployment is about 3 percent.
``This is the place if you want a job,'' Blackwell said. ``Hickory is a well-kept secret.''
In fact, there is some concern about the capacity of the MSA's labor pool to handle the growth.
A. Pope Shuford, president of Shuford Mills, mentioned the ``shortage of good labor'' in a recent magazine article about the area and said it ``could pinch us in a few years.''
The pinch is said to be particularly noticeable in service and retail, including food sales and preparation, because people take the higher paying factory jobs if they can get them. One food-service firm has resorted to hiring second-shift workers in Statesville, a city about half an hour away, and shuttling them to work by bus.
There are other growth-inspired problems, notably in roads and housing. Traffic congestion is obvious, especially at or near Interstate 40 interchanges and along the U.S. 70 commercial strip marked by a proliferation of malls and superstores like KMart and Wal-Mart.
It's not a popular situation, Blackwell said. ``People around here, if it takes 'em more than 15 minutes to get somewhere, they think they've been in a natural disaster.''
The county is playing catch-up. There will be 17 major road projects over the coming 10 years. That's more than in the past 30 years combined.
The problem in housing, especially in Hickory, is a shortage of low-cost dwellings and what Todd Hefner calls ``affordable'' mid-range houses - those in the range of $60,000 to $80,000.
Hefner is head of community development for the county's planning department.
He and others relate the housing problem to the influx of well-paid high-tech workers who can afford to pay more for homes. They say builders are responding to that market at the expense of others.
``What would you do if you were a contractor?'' Hefner asks, ``build one house for $100,000 or two for $60,000? You get the same profit with half the headaches.''
According to Jerry Pifer of the the Department of Housing and Urban Development office in Greensboro, the average value of a newly constructed house in Hickory during the 12 months ending last January was $210,000 - highest in North Carolina. The comparable figure for Charlotte was $162,600.
``Not all of the people who work in Hickory can afford to live here,'' Hefner said.
People are responding by buying houses in the counties, where they are less expensive. They're going into mobile homes; Blackwell said mobile home sales are closing at twice the rate of homes built on-site. And Hefner's department tries to help with down payment assistance and low-cost renovation loans to those who meet income standards.
``Even though housing is a problem,'' he said, ``Hickory is addressing it as positively as possible.''
The global connection
Despite Catawba's growth and attendant growing pains, Ken Atkins presses ahead with his economic development projects.
``The world is changing on us and it's changing very rapidly,'' he said. Typical is the emergence of the so-called global economy. Companies that can't compete will downsize or fail altogether, he said, and new jobs must be developed to replace them.
``I can't afford to wait until the unemployment rate goes up,'' he said.
Atkins subscribes to the ``global connection'' theories of Michael Gallis of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In the global economy, Gallis says, successful localities will market cooperatively and will link themselves to a high-profile city with an international airport.
Like the great seaports of old, Gallis says, today's airports are a country's gateways to the rest of the world - not only for travel and shipping, but as selling points to prospective industry.
Gallis advised Catawba County to cast its lot with Charlotte, which has an international airport and is just over an hour away by road. The county responded by joining the Carolinas Partnership, an economic development marketing coalition covering 13 Charlotte-area counties in North and South Carolina. And Atkins has retooled his marketing approach to reflect the regional approach espoused by Gallis.
Sometimes, it means not even mentioning Hickory when first talking with prospects, especially if Atkins is trying to woo foreign industry. He has discovered that American geography is not the strong suit of many foreign businessmen. At best, they may know of something called ``the Carolinas.''
``If these guys don't know where Charlotte is, they certainly don't know where Hickory is,'' Atkins said.
He begins his sales pitch/geography lesson with the Carolinas, moves to North Carolina and then to Charlotte. It is portrayed as the business hub of the thriving Carolina Piedmont and the site of Douglas International Airport, gateway to the world.
Or, if one is headed in the other direction, the gateway to Catawba County.
``The only way I'm gonna have a shot is to get them into Charlotte,'' Atkins said.
The pitch starts just yards off the tarmac. The airport provides Atkins and other area economic development officers free use of meeting rooms equipped with audio-visual equipment, computers and dining facilities.
``If I can get them to Charlotte, then I can get them to Hickory,'' Atkins said.
Since the new marketing program is only a few weeks old, he hasn't had time to get feedback from ``real live prospects.'' But he says there's reason to be optimistic.
In an 11th-hour bid to sell a Canadian manufacturer on a site in neighboring Burke County, economic development director Tom Johnson borrowed Atkins' tape to send along with other data and marketing material.
Johnson said he can't say for sure what role the tape played. But he does know that the Bauer Co. will be making automotive heat and sound insulation in a new 50,000 square-foot plant in Burke County.
by CNB