September 15, 2006

New Florida Panhandle Airport Gets FAA Approval

After years of planning, the relocation of the Panama City/Bay County International Airport was approved by the FAA on September 15. The new airport will be built in West Bay and represents one of the most significant economic development projects in the history of northwest Florida.

Dell Adding 1,000 New Jobs in Tennessee

Round-Rock, Tex.-based computer maker Dell announced recently it is adding 1,000 new customer contact jobs at its Tennessee facilities. The company already employs about 3,500 workers in the Volunteer State, the majority of those in Nashville.

MedImmune Begins $250M Expansion in Maryland

Gaithersburg, Md.-based MedImmune has begun its $250 million expansion in Frederick, Md. The new Frederick facilities will increase the company's manufacturing capacity of cell-cultures for use in drug development. About 200 jobs are expected to be created in the first expansion phase, which will be completed in 2009. For more information about the life sciences in the South, go to www.BioIndustrySouth.com.

MSN.com Names Top 10 Cities for Job Hunting

According to MSN Real Estate, eight of the top 10 cities for new jobs are located in the South. The list was topped by Washington, D.C. and only Phoenix and Las Vegas were markets outside the South that made the Web site's top 10 (see below).

MSN's Top 10 Cities for Job Hunting

1. Washington, D.C.
2. Phoenix
3. Las Vegas
4. Orlando
5. Bethesda, Md.
6. Richmond
7. Raleigh
8. Jacksonville
9. Oklahoma City
10. Virginia Beach

Pair of Alabama Markets Top Salary.com Ranking

Huntsville and Birmingham, Ala., top all markets in the U.S. regardless of size when it comes to good wages and low cost of living. According to Salary.com, the two Alabama markets ranked first and second respectively in its latest Salary Value Index. Following Huntsville and Birmingham were Knoxville (3rd), Pensacola (7th) and Tulsa (8th) in the South. Outside the South, Reading, York and Harrisburg, Pa., Peoria, Ill., and Las Vegas made up the rest of the top 10.

Dallas-Fort Worth Officials Say Attainment an Impossibility

Officials in Dallas-Fort Worth have conceded that meeting a mandatory 2010 federal deadline to reach attainment under the Clean Air Act is an impossibility. The admission is unusual in that no U.S. market has conceded the failure to reach attainment based on rules set by the Environmental Protection Agency. Models have shown that D/FW is only a third of the way to cutting pollution in the region to a level being demanded by the EPA by 2010. Estimates have been made that half of the cars and trucks that use the Dallas-Forth Worth metro's roads daily would have to be taken off the roads to meet the standard set for 2010.

CSX Developing Huge Logistics Hub in Central Florida

Jacksonville, Fla.-based CSX Corp., is purchasing almost 1,300 acres in Winter Haven, Fla., to develop an integrated logistics center that will include an intermodal terminal, automotive rail yard and millions of square feet of warehouse, distribution, industrial and office space. The logistics hub will be one of only a handful like it in the U.S. and the first of its kind in the Southeast.

Editorial

Austin's Comeback gets our Official Stamp of Approval

Some time in 1999, I made a call to the economic development group that is responsible for job generation in the greater Austin, Tex., area. Of course, I make more than 5,000 calls a year to individuals who are responsible for economic development in their state, multi-county region, county or town in the South and I have done that every year since 1991.

Yet, that one particular call I made in 1999 stood out. The person on the other end of the line representing the Austin-based economic development agency asked me, "Is this about economic development?" She went on to say, "We don't have to practice economic development here in Austin. It just comes."

Some time in 2002 and tens of thousands of lost jobs later, I thought about that statement made three years before. In the height of the recession, economic development officials in the capital of the South's largest state were staggered, picking up the pieces of an economic development program that admittedly wasn't being practiced.

Things are once again different in Austin, Tex. In late July, the Texas Workforce Commission reported that almost 27,000 new jobs were created in the Austin-Round Rock region in just the last year, or more about 12 percent of all new jobs created in Texas during the same time period. The 27,000-job total is an incredible number, larger than what many states in the South create in any given year. We congratulate officials in Austin, Round Rock, Georgetown, Bastrop and other cities in the region for such a remarkable comeback.

Let's just hope Austin's great comeback doesn't give the big head to economic development and elected officials in the Texas capital. After what occurred in the last recession, we don't think it will.

Mike Randle
mike@SB-D.com

Water Availability Issues Spring Up in Miami-Dade

Water is everywhere in Florida. Yet, in the summer quarter, Florida's Department of Community Affairs, the state's planning commission, struck down several building projects in Miami-Dade because the county has not shown that it can provide enough water for the new developments. One of the projects is a new stadium for the Florida Marlins in Hialeah and a new industrial park in the county.

Water or No Water, Florida Chalking up the Jobs

We wrote in the last issue of SB&D that because of the never-ending migration of people to the Sunshine State -- on average about 11,000 a month -- Florida economic development and elected officials must put job creation at the top of their agendas. They are doing just that. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in fiscal year 2006, there were 271,000 jobs created in Florida, a rate that more than doubles the national average.

Wow, Look at the Deals Coming from Louisiana and Mississippi

Typically, the summer quarter is not the best when it comes to economic development projects in any given year. But this year's fall quarter is a major election-year season, meaning some economic development projects might have been triggered in the summer before politics take center stage in November. Fall and spring are when the majority of deals come down in the South. But don't tell that to officials in Louisiana in Mississippi. In the summer of 2006, those two states may have enjoyed their best 90-day period in quite some time. In terms of the total sum of deals announced in Mississippi, we can't remember a better quarter than June 1 through August 31, 2006. The quality of projects announced this summer is incredibly high, as well, in the Magnolia State, including a semiconductor project and several significant aviation/aerospace deals. As for Louisiana, when was the last time you heard of a 1,000-plus-employee deal in that state? It happened in the summer as did a multi-billion dollar facility announcement. Are incentives for industry important in site selection? Well, we don't think it's a coincidence that increased incentives in Louisiana and Mississippi as a result of last year's hurricane season are helping drive deals in those two states.

Second Huge Deal Announced in Three Years -- this one in Orlando -- Certifies Florida as a Major Life Sciences Player

Eyes popped and tongues wagged when California-based Scripps Research Institute announced in 2003 that it had chosen Palm Beach County for a massive bioindustry project. The folks making that announcement, including Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, projected up to 50,000 new jobs -- directly and indirectly -- would be produced by landing the Scripps campus on what was called Mecca Farms, a site on the very edge of the Everglades. Because of environmental lawsuits targeted at the project and the obvious local political in-fighting that has gone on since the deal was announced, that massive project has not yet come to full fruition. However, Scripps is still kicking, albeit in a much smaller form in comparison to its original intent.

In the summer of 2006, another premier California-based non-profit, The Burnham Institute, announced plans to call Florida its home. The Burnham Institute has chosen a site located next to the Orlando International Airport for a 175,000-square-foot facility that will house 300 medical researchers. Burnham's facility in Orlando will reside in a new high tech corridor dubbed Innovation Way. It will be co-located with the recently announced $200 million University of Central Florida medical school and a just-announced University of Florida medical research lab. Combined, the developments instantly launch Orlando as an emerging medical and biotech hub.

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