THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, June 19, 1995 TAG: 9506170247
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Ted Evanoff
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
Not far from where the freighters once docked on the Norfolk waterfront, David R. Goode strode to the podium. The place was a hotel conference room in downtown's rebuilt financial district. The occasion was the second meeting of the Urban Partnership, a coalition of Virginia cities intent on ensuring more state support for urban areas.
``We don't have what places like Charlotte, Jacksonville and San Antonio have - a regional identity, based on a strong urban core, that we can rally behind and market to the world.''
While a few thousand Tidewater residents have made similar remarks, Goode's speech made headlines last week. As chairman of Norfolk Southern Corp. of Norfolk, a railroad whose annual sales exceed $4 billion, he runs the only Fortune 500 company based in Hampton Roads.
Goode engaged in a popular Tidewater sport: chiding the local politicians for their perennial bickering. ``What we don't have is regional cohesion,'' he said.
What we also don't have is a unique situation. American cities all face challenges peculiar to their local economies.
Charlotte, envied as an economic powerhouse by other Southeastern cities, has a labor problem. When the site relocation firm Moran Stahl & Boyer compared the nation's 60 largest metropolitan areas in '93, Charlotte ranked a lowly 53rd on the availability of skilled workers. Hampton Roads placed 13th.
Jacksonville, proud of its new National Football League franchise, ranked near last on labor force quality. San Antonio was even lower. Hampton Roads was mid-range at 37. And when the number of college graduates in the area was measured, Hampton Roads placed ahead of the other three cities.
It's not that Tidewater is an undiscovered jewel. It's that, like any city, it has good and bad points. One of our bad points is complacency.
Politicians, and the movers and shakers who stand behind them, can indulge themselves, bicker over parochial issues secure in the knowledge there are about 120 U.S. Navy ships based in Norfolk as well as 100,000-plus military personnel pumping a $6 billion payroll into Hampton Roads.
Stability, though, isn't growth. What's happening in Tidewater is an erosion in the wage base. Norfolk's shiny finance district no longer contains even one major bank headquarters. That's not surprising.
Banks, seaports, Navy bases, even Goode's railroad, those were the engines of major job growth in another era.
What's materialized in the last decade are fine tourist attractions and restaurants, along with shopping centers, health clinics, businesses that serve other businesses. More than 130,000 new jobs have appeared on the Peninsula and the southside since 1984, pushing civilian employment in Hampton Roads to a record 620,000 jobs.
Wages are the problem. Despite the proliferation of new jobs, the average worker in Hampton Roads earned $444 a week last September, which was almost equal to the region's average wage in 1984 when adjusted for inflation.
Tidewater's stagnant wage base illustrates a problem common throughout the United States. The economy has shifted. The docks no longer teem with stevedores.
We're in a knowledge economy, built around small companies and high technology, but Hampton Roads is not developing the companies able to take advantage of the new era.
Look at 1994's last six months. The Virginia Center For Innovative Technology granted a dozen licenses to companies to develop commercial uses for technology invented in Virginia universities.
Virginia Beach and Norfolk are the state's largest cities. But not one of those 12 companies was based in Hampton Roads, said CIT licensing director Louis P. Berneman.
``You need three things to be successful in this game. You first have to have the technology. But what you really need is management expertise and capital,'' Berneman said. ``There's enough technology where you are, but there's not enough management expertise. Look at your focus. Is it the engineer who's going to be the entrepreneur? The defense contractors are not going to do it because they don't understand risk.''
So we have technology. We have engineers. We have ability. We don't seem to have expertise.
It's time we shook off our complacency and encouraged entrepreneurs. Otherwise, as Goode said, we'll ``just be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.'' by CNB