On Topic: The people who tend the garden

While hindsight is a wonderful thing, success almost always is in the planning.

Common sense gnashed its teeth in anguish when Borders executives a few years ago decided it was a wise idea to let Amazon.com handle the chain's online sales. Why, here, Mr. Fox, you just take the keys to our hen house ….

And while I personally find the Cy-Hawk trophy to be oddly charming, surely someone on the approval committee - from the Iowa Corn Growers Association, the University of Iowa or Iowa State University - must have hesitated. Unless one of the farmers depicted on the statue intends to dig into that basket in front of them, pluck out an ear of corn and hurl it, what in the heck does this thing have to do with football?

Economic development agencies, this week's Business 380 theme, are in the business of strategizing, thinking things through - when, of course, they aren't too busy with damage control. The job of these professionals is to retain and attract - a variation, in an economic sense, of law enforcement's “to serve and protect.”

Or look at it this way: In a perfect world, they have to keep tending the garden so that when a plant shuts down or a big corporation reveals - all previous nods and winks to the contrary - it'll relocate somewhere else, they still have vegetables to put on the table.

On July 15, for example, Whirlpool Corp. announced it would “lay off” - by which was meant “fire,” as the term “lay off” historically has indicated those employees will be called back eventually - 315 workers at its Amana refrigerator facility. It manufacturers French-door refrigerators and icemakers there.

On that same day, Roberts Dairy's processing plant in Iowa City, a little more than 30 miles to the east, declared it would stop production, after 77 years. The plant would become a distribution site, officials said.

The Teamsters Local calculated that would knock out 31 workers.

Now, 31 workers is a lot fewer than 315. But that's still 346 people out of work in a defined geographic area. People who are not buying cars, houses, new clothes or eating out beyond their neighborhood fast-food shop.

And what goes on anywhere along the Corridor affects the entire region. (I'll bet you've heard that before.)

By happenstance, two days after those announcements The Gazette's front page featured a story in which economic development folk said no matter what might be in their garden of possibilities, retail wasn't part of the intended crop.

“Recruiting retail is not something that we have put into our strategic goals for the near future,” Priority One President Dee Baird commented.

This recent retail-or-not-to-retail discussion started with Scott Olson of Skogman Commercial Real Estate and, yes, a Cedar Rapids City Council candidate. Retail, he noted, creates jobs and adds to the property tax base.

“There are a lot of people who don't qualify for the jobs that are being offered by our industrial expansions because the don't have the skill sets and have to go back for training,” Olson reasoned.

Cedar Rapids City Manager Jeff Pomeranz weighed in with a build-it-and-retailers-will-show-up philosophy.

“I think it's reasonable for cities or economic development organizations to work to attract retail, but that's not going to be the major focus for the city of Cedar Rapids,” Pomeranz said.

His thinking on building a solid economic base, he continued, is this: “Where we're creating jobs and housing opportunities, we're fiscally sound and we have the infrastructure. If you have all those elements together, retail will come.”

Another piece of this, as any decision-maker will appreciate, is an economic development organization can do only so much with X amount of resources, with X number of people and X number of hours in a day.

But it would seem part of an economic development strategy would need to include keeping an eye out for medium to large retailers as well as the big manufacturers and service providers. One eye, at least?

North Liberty Planning Director A. Dean Wheatley pointed out in his July 23 Business 380 letter to the editor that there's much to be said for the importance of “long-range planning to ensure … long-range success.”

In long-view scheme of things, we should plan for a wide variety in our garden, shouldn't we?