Cities can be open for business with industrial parks

A guy walks into a bar and says, “Hey did you hear they're going to build an industrial park by the interstate?”

“Oh, yeah?” replies his buddy. “What kind of rides are they going to have?”

My pal James Hettinger wrote the book on industrial parks.

Well, maybe not the book, though some in the economic-development trade have claimed it as such.

Sometime during the 30 years he was president of Battle Creek Unlimited - the economic development agency for the Michigan community that's home to Kellogg Co. - Hettinger and Stanley D. Tooley put together “Small Town, Giant Corporation: Japanese Manufacturing Investment and Community Economic Development in the United States” (University Press of America).

It tells how, in the 1980s, Battle Creek decision-makers went about enticing a major employer to move to an area previously best known for producing Corn Flakes and Pop-Tarts.

That employer, one of Japan's largest manufacturers of automotive and other parts and systems - from spark plugs and powertrains to bar code readers and robots - was Nippondenso, today known as Denso.

But Battle Creek folk didn't stop there, as the book relates. Such a big operation would need suppliers and services itself, to feed and nurture the giant. So additional industry-related companies were approached.

Hettinger and other economic-development, city and state officials traveled to Japan - a lot. They met, they talked, they listened, they schmoozed.

They made deals.

And then they went back to Battle Creek and built a home for this growing network of businesses - Fort Custer Industrial Park.

Today, Fort Custer sits right off Interstate 94, about equidistant between Chicago and Detroit. More than 90 companies have operations there, 22 of them are foreign-owned - 16 from Japan, four from Germany and one each from Austria and Denmark.

Fort Custer boasts an optical Ethernet fiber ring for high-speed telecom and broadband. It also is a U.S. Customs Port of Entry and an official foreign trade zone.

Ninety-four hundred people work there.

It also, not surprisingly, has quite a few Japanese restaurants serving lunch and dinner nearby.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm definitely not saying southwest Michigan has anything over Eastern Iowa. Nor am I suggesting businesses should consider the charms of lake-effect snow over amber waves of corn.

Or a state with 10.3 percent-and-climbing unemployment, last I checked, contrasted to one with 6 percent.

The point is industrial parks - business parks with infrastructure for manufacturing - can be an indicator of economic viability. A neon sign out front that says, We're open for business.

As the 2012 presidential campaign heats up and more would-be commanders-in-chief pass through the Corridor - pressing sincere handshakes and sampling burgers at the Hamburg Inn No. 2 in Iowa City - we'll hear even more about jobs.

“I would like to be the best paycheck president in American history,” Newt Gingrich declared in May to the Le Mars Daily Sentinel. “I'd like to create so many jobs that we'd have 40 million of those 47 million off of food stamps.”

“The No. 1 thing I hear around this country, I talk to people about what it would take to provide more jobs, they say, get the government off my back,” Tim Pawlenty commented to Fox News this past spring.

But can the government - at the federal or state level - really create jobs? And at what cost?

According to a study by Kenneth Thomas, a University of Missouri-St. Louis political scientist, and cited by “Bloomberg BusinessWeek” in April, state and local governments are paying out $70 billion in annual subsidies to business.

Short of a Great Depression-era Works Progress Administration, don't they end up merely luring one company away from some other state or community?

Yep, says Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who stumped for that very job by denouncing “corporate welfare.” But, he now adds, what choice do we have but to play the same high-cost game?

“When other states come in and they offer significant ways for people to have lower costs, you either compete with it and win, or you lose,” he said to “Bloomberg BusinessWeek.”

(Disclosure: I know the governor. Well, I knew his wife. I wasn't invited to the wedding. I suspect we disagreed on some issues, such as “corporate welfare.” Not that I'm still brooding about it after all these years ….)

So what do we do to show we're open for business, that economic development means we are able and ready to retain and attract business in the Corridor - as awake, vibrant communities and as a region?

We provide opportunities and make certain a fresh welcome mat is out front. We show we mean business.

We have to do it ourselves.