Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 29, 1994 TAG: 9406040001
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GREENVILLE, S.C. LENGTH: Long
If Greenville County can't capture a new company, it hopes Spartanburg, its next-door neighbor, will.
And if not Spartanburg, then nearby Anderson County, or Pickens or Cherokee.
The big picture for Upstate South Carolina is simple to understand. Upstate - an eight-county region bordering North Carolina and Georgia - has no major military installation and not much to sell to tourists, says Gerald K. Howard, vice president of economic development for the Greenville Chamber of Commerce, the state's largest chamber.
"Our entire economy depends on business and commerce," he said.
Paying attention to the big picture has paid off. Upstate South Carolina had more than $4.1 billion in economic investment in 1992. Forty-four percent of the jobs created in the state were in Upstate.
Geography is one of Upstate's advantages. So is the free worker training that South Carolina provides to new companies that come in or old ones that expand. And so is the enthusiasm and the way private industry and government work together.
"A lot of our success is where we are ... on Main Street U.S.A. off I-85," Howard said. "We used it and worked it to our advantage.
"We are and have always been a center of commerce and a manufacturing center," he said.
This region is midway between Charlotte and Atlanta on one of the Southeast's heaviest traveled interstates. It also is at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, an hour from Asheville, N.C., and four hours from the beaches and the port of Charleston.
Greenville is a lot like the Roanoke region, in fact. It used to be dependent upon one industry, textiles. For Roanoke, the railroad was once dominant.
Roanoke also has an interstate - 81 - a major transportation link.
A big difference is that Roanoke isn't surrounded by a population mass like the five-county Metropolitan Statistical Area - Anderson and Cherokee were added last January - of which Greenville is a part. Three of the Upstate counties, Oconee, Laurens and Union, are not in the Greenville MSA.
The MSA has a population of about 840,000 living in what is often described as the "Boom Belt." Luster was added to the name when BMW Manufacturing Corp. chose the region as the site to build its 3-series models and eventually a BMW with a more popular price tag.
The way South Carolina snared BMW illustrates all the reasons things are working here.
First, some of the German executives already in the Greenville area helped make contacts with BMW. Financial incentives for BMW total an estimated $130 million, with $78 million coming from the state and $52 million from local government.
The only "unique incentive" offered BMW, officials say, was that the Ports Authority, Spartanburg County and the state purchased the plant site for $36.6 million and are leasing it to BMW for $1 a year for 30 years, with an option to renew for 20 more years.
In addition to giving $5 million to buy the land, Spartanburg is leasing property to BMW for a communications center for $1 a year. The state and the county also committed $22.5 million for the plant's infrastructure needs, highway improvements and airport expansion. Tax incentives are estimated at $70.7 million over a 20-year period. The state's Special Schools division will also provide free training for BMW workers.
In return, the region estimates the first full year's production at the BMW facility to be worth $928.1 million in economic impact and create 10,000 new jobs directly and indirectly.
BMW, though, is in Spartanburg County. So why is a picture of the Sept. 30, 1992, groundbreaking prominently displayed on Gerald Howard's bookshelves at the Greenville chamber?
Because Greenville claims BMW as its own, too. The plant expects to draw workers from a 40-mile radius. Greenville Technical College will help train them.
Nursing to trucking
South Carolina's technical colleges are required to have "technical" as part of their names and worker training as their priority.
Greenville Technical has 8,400 students; 5,500 of them are in technical programs ranging from nursing to computer programming to welding, aircraft maintenance and truck driving. A class in driving 18-wheelers is one of the more popular, says Jerry Campbell, the college's vice president for institutional development.
Campbell says the school is kept up to date on the needs for industry because each area of the college has an advisory committee of 15 to 20 people who are working professionals. At any given time 700 or so local people serve on committees to look at programs and faculty and recommend changes.
"These committees keep us honest," Campbell says.
The college has been led to new curriculum by business, too. Fluor Daniel and CRS Sirrine, competing engineering firms, asked the college to begin classes in a particular software so they could stop stealing each other's trained workers.
The businesses gave the college $70,000 for the software to use in teaching; the college gave back a similar amount of credit for training.
"We've charged them big time since they used up their credit," Campbell says.
From June to October of last year, the college averaged billing 120 companies a month, he says. All total, it provided training for current or potential employees for 254 companies during that time.
More and more, the college serves as consultant and employment service for industry.
"We're finding also in the noncredit side that industry doesn't just want training, it wants the college to figure out what kind of training its employees need," Campbell says.
Greenville Tech did the same thing for BMW that it does for others. It got from BMW guidelines on the type of training its employees need, then advertised that the pre-employment training was being offered. People taking the training are not guaranteed jobs, but they are promised first consideration.
After completing training, potential workers are taken in groups by bus to the BMW plant where they learn about the company and job benefits. BMW then has a pool of workers from which to hire.
All training of this sort is offered at night to make it available for people with jobs, Campbell says.
Regular, friendly visits
Going hat in hand to the business community is standard practice here.
On May 12, the city of Greenville announced that a partnership of the city, the county and private industry will build a $50 million entertainment and sports arena in downtown.
"We've been trying for 20 years to get a new coliseum and the voters kept turning it down," Greenville Mayor William Workman said.
The week the arena was announced, Wofford College in Spartanburg was selected as the summer training camp site for the Carolina Panthers, an NFL expansion team.
Spartanburg had the inside track on getting the camp because Jerry Richardson, the Panthers' majority owner, has his Flagstar Co. headquarters in Spartanburg. Richardson is also a Wofford graduate.
But those advantages weren't enough, says Laura Corbin, communications manager with the Spartanburg Area Chamber of Commerce.
To get the training camp, the community had to raise $6 million to build weight rooms and other facilities for the players and to cover other expenses. Despite corporate gifts and money from the city and the chamber, the drive was $400,000 short two weeks before it ended.
"We put boxes in restaurants and ran ads asking people to make donations and raised more than $450,000 between April 14 and April 29," Corbin says.
Connections like Jerry Richardson are important here.
As Corbin points out, 30 years ago, when Spartanburg's leaders saw that fewer jobs would exist in the textile industry in the future, they looked for ways to increase the economic base.
Because most of the suppliers to the textile mills were German and Swiss, Spartanburg's leaders went to those companies and asked them to relocate near the mills."
Now there are 84 international companies from 14 countries in Spartanburg County alone. BMW is just the latest. Spartanburg County has 2,000 German residents, some who retired here.
A region needs to aggressively court close to home, economic development staffers say. For example, the Greenville chamber staff regularly visits the corporate offices of companies that have operations in the region and thanks them for being here.
Some corporate offices have relocated here because of those regular, friendly visits.
'Tired of being ho-hum'
Most people date the beginning of change in Greenville to Republican Joe Jordan's election to City Council in the late 1960s.
Jordan, a former policeman turned photographer, says he ran for office when City Council, in reaction to integration, closed the black swimming pool and said the white pool had a leak and couldn't be used.
Jordan says Greenville's old leadership was "shortsighted. They didn't want any federal ties, so they wouldn't accept federal money."
Jordan and other new faces joined the council and "things rocked on, from there," he says. The city got a new integrated pool. Community centers were built and an urban renewal project in the late 1970s brought the Hyatt Regency Hotel downtown.
"People were ready for something. They were tired of being ho-hum and letting nature take its course," says Jordan, who served on council until 1975.
Jordan says the region's growth has been good for his business. He said Greenville residents get excited about a BMW or a Michelin because "they will see fallout'' from it.
Jim Campbell, Greenville's city director of general services, says South Carolina's local government structure is "a mess," but areas know they have to cooperate.
"The idea that the city of Greenville can compete with the city of Spartanburg is detrimental to both. We need to be thinking as a region. Greenville will get some money from that BMW plant," he says.
"You build relationships where you can."
Take the Clemson connection, for example.
Greenville has Greenville Tech, Bob Jones University and Furman, but Clemson University, 40 miles away in Anderson County, is the closest school offering advanced degrees in engineering and other disciplines needed by business.
"I'll bet Anderson County thinks Clemson is its, but a lot of Greenville's educational strength comes from Clemson," Campbell says.
Greenville officials said that because most company's headquarters include their research and development department, an area must have access to a university like Clemson.
Surviving as a unit
Despite the region's fast growth, Greenville city has the usual urban problems.
The city's population dropped, from 61,000 to 59,000, while the urban ring grew.
Campbell says the city is drawing more needy people and more elderly, constituencies that need costly services. At the same time, the city's revenues are static.
And while its main downtown is lively with restaurants and boutiques, old West End nearby is in a state similar to Roanoke's City Market 15 years ago. There are plenty of empty storefronts and a few stalwarts like the Army and Navy store and a custom-furniture shop, their owners determined to hang on until renewal efforts take.
In May, the city broke ground for a new Farmer's Market in West End.
There's also work to be done in main downtown.
Next to Greenville's $42 million Peace Center for the arts, built by a public-private partnership, is the 350-room Poinsett Hotel, which has been closed since 1986.
The Poinsett was designed by the same architect who originally designed the Radisson Patrick Henry in Roanoke. And the group that restored the Patrick Henry, Affirmative Equities Co., is negotiating to redo the Poinsett.
William Carder, who manages the Radisson Patrick Henry and recently was a guest at a Greenville economic development junket, said plans for the Poinsett include residential housing.
Greenville has had a fair amount of success with downtown housing, especially with Hammond Square, a 50,000-square-foot, retail-office-apartment complex. The complex was developed around an older property in the late 1980s by investors who assured parking for business and residential tenants. They gave the city land to build a parking garage, then leased the garage back from the city.
Anne Maddrey manages Hammond Square. One of her relatives owns it.
Maddrey says the developers first built nine condominiums on the property and tried to sell them for $200,000 each.
"They went over like a lead balloon," Maddrey says.
The condos were divided into 17 apartments, which rent for $500 up to $800 a month and usually stay occupied, she says. Vacancies are advertised only by word of mouth.
Getting housing downtown was a priority, officials say.
Mayor Workman remembers when Greenville had laws against residential use of areas above retail stores.
A downtown has to have entertainment, residences and nightlife to survive, Workman says.
He said communities like Upstate South Carolina have a similar interdependency.
"We're one economic unit. No company is going to make an investment just to make a hero out of a local official. No one's going to wake up in Brussels and say, 'Let's go make Roanoke famous.','' he said.
"We do keep score by county, but we survive as a unit," Workman said.
"If you do not have economic prosperity, you don't have anything else. Our premise first is: Is it good for business? Everything else bounces off of this."
by CNB