THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 24, 1995 TAG: 9504220231
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Ted Evanoff
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
Hampton Roads never may know for certain why Motorola chose Richmond.
You hear Richmond's labor force and water supply were more adequate. Whatever the reason, Hampton Roads missed an opportunity. Though it happened in early April, it's worth listening to what Tidewater economic developers had to say about the deal.
The subject is Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector. The Phoenix business, with sales of $7 billion, picked up an option to buy 230 acres west of Richmond.
If Motorola goes the whole distance, it'll spend $3 billion and complete a semiconductor factory in phases over 10 years. The full plant would cover 2.5 million square feet and employ about 5,000 workers.
That's big, so big it can invigorate a city's economy, something Julius Denton knows full well. Denton, head of the Virginia Peninsula Economic Development Council, still managed to take Richmond's success in stride. ``We can try to get some spinoffs from Motorola,'' he said.
Denton had met Motorola's site selection team last May at a conference room in the Piedmont Aviation building at Norfolk International Airport.
Gregory Wingfield, head of Forward Hampton Roads, the economic development arm of the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce, attended along with representatives of several cities, including Virginia Beach and Chesapeake.
No one formally had said the company was Motorola, but Wingfield knew Geraldine Dearborn, a Virginia Beach real estate consultant who worked on Motorola's site search. Wingfield realized Motorola was combing the Eastern states for land.
Denton and Wingfield, in a joint presentation to Motorola's site team, touted Tidewater advantages such as open land and colleges. ``I thought we gave a good overview of our strengths,'' Wingfield said.
Tidewater's contingent emphasized the region's abundant and available skilled workers. It was a sound strategy. Shipyards and military bases were releasing thousands of trained people.
Only a year earlier, Moran Stahl & Boyer, a leading site relocation firm whose client list includes Motorola Inc., had cited Hampton Roads' skilled workforce. In a survey of the nation's 60 largest cities, Tidewater ranked 13th on the labor measure, well ahead of Richmond's 22nd place.
``At the time we went with our traditional strengths,'' Wingfield said. ``But what we presented as our strengths, they viewed at best as a wash. They weren't interested in an already trained workforce. They preferred to do their own training.''
While most semiconductor workers would be technicians schooled in community colleges, Motorola intends to fill about 35 percent of the positions with graduates fresh from college, Wingfield said.
The company didn't particularly want people skilled in a specific discipline. It wanted to reach people before they were trained and teach them its own methods.
That made important the plans to develop electronics manufacturing courses at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. ``The fact that they could lend a hand in creating their own curriculum was an important factor,'' Wingfield said.
Virginia now plans to spend $16 million to develop the manufacturing curriculum and another $5 million to train semiconductor workers in Richmond-area community colleges.
Hampton Roads' water situation didn't help either, even though arid Phoenix and Austin house much of Motorola's semiconductor manufacturing capacity. Motorola recycles its industrial water in the desert, but it wanted plenty of fresh water on the East Coast. Access to sufficient water is a public issue in Virginia Beach.
``When they're up and running the water demands will be millions of gallons a day,'' Wingfield said. ``I don't know if this was detrimental per se. But you have to remember, when a company is going through a site selection process and is considering dozens of sites, they're looking for reasons to eliminate you.''
Wingfield mentioned one other factor. Last summer, he left Tidewater and joined the Metropolitan Economic Development Council, Richmond's equal to Forward Hampton Roads. He immediately noted executives from some of the big companies in Richmond, home to 14 Fortune 500 corporations, were hobnobbing with Motorola officials.
``I think Motorola felt comfortable they had a lot of peers in Richmond,'' Wingfield said. ``They wanted to blend in and not stick out as the biggest company in town.'' by CNB