REDI staff brings site selection consultant to Columbia

A site selection consultant brought in by Columbia Regional Economic Development Inc. says Columbia is poised to take advantage of the international boom in biotechnology, but the city needs to adjust some of its procedures to stay competitive.

“A community can determine their own success or failure by what they project; basically, Columbia projects a very positive image, so you’re off to a good start there,” said Marco Oliveri, a consultant with Location Management Services, whom REDI invited to Columbia Nov. 7 to assess the city’s ability to attract life sciences companies. Comparing Columbia with Orlando, Fla., Nashville, Tenn., and Columbus, Ohio, Oliveri noted: “You’ve got a great community that is poised very well for establishments of not only biotech and pharma[ceutical] but other manufacturing and distribution—and regional and national headquarters.”

Oliveri is a Tennessee-based veteran of economic development and marketing who spent much of his career in Florida. He is a former president and CEO of the Forward Sumner Economic Council, an economic development organization promoting Sumner County, northeast of Nashville.

Based in Mission Viejo, Calif., Location Management Services operates the Site Selection Network (SSN) and is one of the top site selection firms in the country, according to REDI president Bernie Andrews. Columbia is a member of SSN, a membership-based service available to trade associations, economic developers and real estate agents that helps link companies with sites that fit their needs. Oliveri’s visit followed a similar visit in October by William Hearn, director of site selection for CH2M Hill/Lockwood Greene, a site selection powerhouse based in Atlanta.

“The idea is almost like a reverse marketing trip,” said David Meyer, marketing director for REDI. “We’re getting them to look at the community, and, while we’re paying them to do overviews of our programs and that sort of thing, we’re also [helping them get] to know the community.”

The REDI initiative to bring in site selectors for visits is rather unusual in that the primary purpose is to give them firsthand knowledge of what Columbia and Boone County have to offer, Meyer said. REDI intends to bring in other consultants in the future for similar visits, probably once every quarter-year, with the next visit by a New Jersey firm tentatively planned for January 2007, Andrews said. Such visits cost between $2,000 and $3,000, and REDI plans to ask Jefferson City or other surrounding communities to join Columbia in displaying a regional presence and help defray costs.

“We need to get on the radar screen of the top at least half dozen or so of these site selection firms that do these life sciences and biotech projects,” Andrews said. “The idea is you can go meet with them all you want out in their office, wherever it is, but to just get [them] here and physically see Discovery Ridge, drive the community and see all that we have to offer, it’s completely different.”

The purpose of the visits is three-fold, said Andrews: to promote potential industrial sites, such as the new Discovery Ridge Research Park; to get an outside opinion about the region’s potential weaknesses; and to educate local business and university leaders about the site selection process and what factors are important to professional site selectors and their clients.

The immediate problem, Andrews said, is that no site selectors have brought prospects to visit Columbia in about five years, and only a handful have sent Columbia an initial query. “We never made it past filling out the questionnaire, just because we didn’t have the right size site with infrastructure or competitive programs,” Andrews said. “But now I think we’ve changed almost all of that. We’ve made advances in all of those areas, and so now I think we are competitive.”

But there is room for improvement.
One adjustment that Columbia needs to make in its Chapter 100 program of incentives, Oliveri said, is to speed things up. During his October visit, Hearn said the process was onerous and suggested that Columbia think of incentive programs aimed at attracting businesses not as ‘“corporate welfare” but as an investment in the community.

“The bottom line was that [our process] is too public and too long of a process,” Andrews said. “You need to be able to give [prospective companies] decisions much quicker than the four to six weeks that our process takes.”

Oliveri also said Columbia should consider replacing its clawback measures in the Chapter 100 process with an aggressive job attainment program. Clawbacks allow the community to recapture funds if the company doesn’t live up to expectations. Oliveri says that a job attainment program that sets timetables for the hiring of employees is less risky to companies. “They have to meet those employment levels for each 12-month period or so, and then is when they realize their tax credit,” he said.

Oliveri also said the community should take measures to retain graduates of its colleges and universities and encourage them to stay in the area; should carefully respect the need for confidentiality in dealing with companies unwilling to take a chance on losing proprietary technology through security leaks; and should trust its professional economic development staff to make good decisions in secret.

Another weakness, according to Hearn, is that Columbia’s workforce is not large enough to handle the largest projects. “Companies, for the larger projects, wouldn’t want to come in and employ more than 1 or 2 percent of the workforce, and he would consider us a mid-market where you wouldn’t be attracting some of the larger projects like that,” Andrews said. “That doesn’t concern me that much because we’re not in the competition for the large 1,500-employee projects like an automobile manufacturing plant or something like that.”

Above all, Hearn pointed out the glaring problem of access to the community, impeded mainly by a minimally functioning airport. “Many clients want to be in a location you can get to and back from within one day, and we are outside of that for the most part,” Andrews said. “The executives want to be able to get out, do a meeting and get back so that they’re back by evening.”