Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 12, 1994 TAG: 9407120093
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By STEPHEN FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
Its job, as spoken by then-newly hired marketing director Franklyn Moreno, was "to change the direction of the future for the New River Valley."
Four years later, the nonprofit corporation is in the midst of its second fund-raiser, and has $200,000 toward a September goal of $360,000 to fund the alliance for the next three years.
The Alliance's participants - Radford and the counties of Montgomery, Floyd, Giles and Pulaski - will collectively match that figure, giving the agency $720,000 to carry it through the next three years.
Last year the Alliance brought in 17 companies to take a look at the valley - more than double its goal.
At the moment, "things are going real well," said Gary Weddle, president of the Alliance. "I don't know that I've ever seen it as busy as it was the last year. The job is getting easier and we're getting more effective."
"We have been fortunate," in generating prospects, said Executive Director Moreno, who has already entertained one visitor this fiscal year, which began July 1.
Those are visits, though.
Over the past four years, newly placed industries that received the Alliance's help have contributed about 800 new jobs to the valley. Though that number doubles with Virginia Tech economist Tom Johnson's "multiplier effect," a measure of the number of offshoot jobs created when a new base job is created, it falls far short of the Alliance's initial goal.
In 1990, it said it wanted to bring 5,000 jobs to the valley in four years.
Weddle said the gap reflects a mixture of raised optimism at the time and lowered strength of the economy since then. And it reflects on the Alliance's purpose.
"A lot of people don't quite understand what the Alliance's function is," Weddle said. "There's so many economic development organizations out there that people kind of tend to get confused."
He and Moreno repeatedly stress that the Alliance's job is primarily to bring customers to the valley's door. While they would like to see companies ultimately locate in the valley ,"we don't make the sale; that comes at the [local government] level," Moreno said.
As for the 5,000 jobs, "I think it was a lofty goal," Weddle said. "That was in 1990 when we had just left the decade of the '80s, which I would just love to bring back. The economy went south very quickly just after we began."
Just as the Alliance was getting going, news came of plans to close the Fairlawn AT&T plant. On top of that, the Radford Army Ammunition Plant has laid off almost half its work force over the past two years.
Jerry Fouse, with the Southwest regional office of the state's department of economic development, said the Alliance has been dealt some tough blows.
"We've come in second in a couple of close races," he said, alluding to narrowly missed opportunities with Blue Cross and Blue Shield in 1991 and Siecor Corp. last year. He said the losses shouldn't reflect negatively on the Alliance.
"The Alliance doesn't own anything, so they can't close the deal," Fouse said. They don't own the industrial sites; they don't possess the shell buildings. "They can help a community write a proposal, but they can't lay any incentives on the table."
Regardless, Fouse said the Alliance should only now be coming into its own.
"It takes a while for the organization to become effective in terms of its primary mission," said Fouse, based in Abingdon. "It takes about four to five years to really see the fruits of your labor.
Don Moore, director of the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development, said simply: "It is very difficult to predict how many visits you're going to have and how many locations you're going to have."
Still, in February, Weddle said the Alliance needed to do a better job at following up with businesses that expressed interest in locating in the valley, and called on the state to help out more.
He's pleased with results of the latter request. The Governor's Opportunity Fund, a pot of money the state uses as business incentives, has increased from $4.5 million to $8.5 million.
The state gave the Alliance $325,000 earlier this spring, which it in turn loaned to Pulaski County to entice Volvo GM Heavy Truck to expand at home.
"That part's certainly been answered," Weddle said. "We have an administration in place that believes very strongly in economic development. It's exactly what we needed."
However, "I still feel we've got to do a better job of follow-up." When a company makes a visit, Weddle said, it is generally assumed that the area is one of about five that the company is considering. The Alliance wants to push even harder then.
To that end, Moreno said, he's putting together a Top 10 list of prospects. "Without naming any names, [we're] trying to put a marketing press on," and at least get companies back for a second visit, he said.
For now, the Alliance needs money to enable it to do its job. That includes things like paying staff and overhead, networking and marketing, traveling to trade shows - all the sorts of things an economic development group does to promote economic development, Moreno said.
It conducts the drive every three years, instead of annually, Moreno said, "so we don't spend all the time collecting money."
by CNB