Hundreds attend joint city/county economic talk
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
June 14, 2011
By Tim Logan
An unusual thing happened Tuesday morning.
Officials from St. Louis City and St. Louis County stood before a room full of 300 local business leaders, and led a joint discussion on how the whole St. Louis region can grow its economy.
True, it doesn't sound like much, just another breakfast panel discussion. There were Power Point presentations, and a panel of outside experts. Questions from the audience. A Twitter hashtag.
But given the long, fractious history of city-county competition for jobs in St. Louis, the prospect of a truly regional approach to economic development drew a full house to an auditorium at Missouri Botanical Garden. And that house burst into spontaneous applause when Denny Coleman - the county's top economic official - said he hoped the Tuesday's talk was "the first of many" such events.
"We're glad you agree," he said, when the clapping died down.
The conversation itself featured executives from Chambers of Commerce in Kansas City, Nashville and Oklahoma City, talking about how they navigate the often technical, occasionally treacherous, byways of the economic development business.
All three agreed that, in a global economy, city lines and county lines don't matter, that regions need to compete as one if they hope to have any sort of relevance. And they need to make it easy on companies that want to move in to their regions.
"The customer today wants a one-stop shop model," said Robin Roberts Krieger, executive vice president of economic development for the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber. "If I'm interested in Nashville, I'm going to call Nashville. I don't know the names of all these suburbs."
And the last thing any company wants to see in a place it's thinking about expanding in is inter-municipal squabbling, said Janet Miller, chief economic development officer at the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. It's a big turn-off.
"To a company, fighting is nothing but risk," Miller said. "And risk is the enemy of economic development."
Of course, it's easy to talk about this. Cooperation sounds great, and yet states and cities dangle all sorts of incentives to get employers to decamp from one to another, especially in jobs-hungry times like these.
Bob Marcusse, president of the Kansas City Area Development Council, has watched border wars flare quite hot in his region lately, and referred to his organization as "Switzerland between Germany and France."
"There's simply not enough to go around right now, and when there's not enough to go around, competition heightens and elbows get sharp," he said. "I don't know that it's solvable."
But the first step to a solution is to get everyone in the same room, at least talking about collaboration. That was the point of Tuesday's event - which is the latest in a series of developments bubbling around collaboration between St. Louis City and County. Coleman and his counterpart Rodney Crim, president of the St. Louis Development Corp., said there are no concrete plans to combine efforts. But that they plan more conversations like this one in the future.
"There are more steps to come," Crim said. "But this was an excellent first step."
