Jobs Recruiter Takes Stock Turner Sees Need For Work Force Development
Spokane’s work force must be reshaped if the community is going to be successful in recruiting new companies here in the future, according to the community’s new economic development chief.
Fading fast, says Mark Turner, are the days when having a lot of people willing to work hard for so-so wages will be enough of an asset to drive meaningful economic development.
“We’d like very much as a community to provide family wage jobs, higher paying jobs,” says Turner, who as president of the Spokane Area Economic Development Council will do much to shape economic development philosophies here.
“But these are jobs that generally have been associated with higher levels of individual productivity,” he cautions. “And that requires not only a good work ethic, but a solid educational and skills background.
“One of the biggest challenges I think we have here is work force development.”
Historically, one of Spokane’s most appealing pitches to companies it seeks to lure here has been an available, affordable work force.
Company after company relocating here in the past 10 years has expressed its pleasure with the plentiful and productive work force. The “Spokane work ethic” is praised frequently.
But through it all, typical wages in Spokane have consistently remained below state and national averages, poverty has been persistent, and those factors have limited consumer buying power.
An “affordable” work force is another way of describing an underemployed and undertrained work force. But Turner, who has been on the job since Dec. 1, says if Spokane is going to meet a revised set of economic development goals, those conditions must change.
Turner replaced Bob Cooper who led the EDC for 10 years before leaving last April to start a similar organization in Ventura, Calif.
The EDC board gave Turner the goal of creating 5,000 new jobs in Spokane over the next five years through the recruitment of relocating or expanding businesses.
But the board wants the vast majority of those jobs to pay an average wage topping $28,000 annually. And they want some of those jobs to pay above $45,000.
Turner says companies paying that kind of money want to find a work force with the skills to merit that level of compensation.
Of the barriers Turner sees here, the biggest is, “the availability of a quality work force ready to meet demands of 21st Century employers.”
But, Turner adds, an important initial step has already been taken. The attempts to sort out and coordinate the higher education efforts in the Spokane are encouraging, he says.
“I’m very impressed to see the extent to which we’ve recognized in Eastern Washington the need to make a commitment to this kind of work force development,” he says.
Turner was chosen from among 100 job applicants nationwide for the EDC post. A qualification that most impressed the EDC board, according to 1997 EDC board Chairman Frank Tombari, was Turner’s ability to get disparate interests and entities to work together.
Turner previously was president of the Broome County Economic Development Alliance in upstate New York. “What he had there was a number of different cities vying for different things,” Tombari said last year. “So it required a lot of consensus-building ability to pull those groups together and solve the problems they had.”
The problems were formidable.
Broome County, which has a population of 200,000, saw its unemployment rate jump from 2 percent to 11 percent almost overnight when the area’s big defense industry employers shut down.
Turner took the top economic development post there in 1994. By 1997, the county’s unemployment rate had dropped to 3.6 percent. Among the keys to the turnaround, Tombari said, were the development of industrial parks and small business incubators under Turner’s leadership.
Coming from that perspective, Turner says he’s still “trying to get my hands around” Spokane’s impatience with its slow but steady growth.
“I go to conferences here and we talk about how our growth rate has slowed form 4 percent to 2 percent and we are ready to hang ourselves over it,” Turner says.
“And the context I still am in the process of shedding is this Northeastern context where we’ve had population out-migration and no real growth at all for 30 years.”
Turner has been particularly struck by Spokane’s constant comparisons to Seattle.
“I sense disappointment,” he says. “That’s because our growth isn’t comparable to Seattle’s, that somehow we are deficient. And I think that’s being entirely too difficult on ourselves as a community.
“My sense is that if we were growing at 8 or 9 percent a year, we would be very concerned about congestion and capacity issues and the deterioration of quality of life.”
In his initial months here, Turner has sorted out other barriers - “but these are barriers with a small B,” he says - that Spokane must confront.
He is concerned about industrial development capacity.
He is concerned that existing industrial parks will not accommodate the community’s plans to recruit the higher-paying, production-oriented jobs it covets.
“We need to stay ahead of that curve,” Turner says.
The state’s tax structure, which taxes business gross receipts rather than profits, is another big recruitment disadvantage, he says.
“You deal with it by trying to counterbalance it,” he says. “You try to point out the multitude of advantages that can offset it.”
One issue that he says the state must address, though, is that of tax increment financing.
“We certainly put ourselves at a significant disadvantage, public and private, by not having a comparable tool available to us,” he says.
Tax increment financing is the ability to dedicate a company’s future tax revenues to pay for capital improvements in site development up front. It is not, Turner emphasizes, forgiving taxes altogether.
In the Northeast, he said, incentives that give away property taxes have become an economic recruitment staple. And he doesn’t want to see the same things happen here.
“In New York State,” he says, “most communities have the ability to absolutely forgive property taxes for up to 20 years.
“When that occurs, a business comes to the community and consumes resources and services that in effect everyone else pays for.”
Tax increment financing doesn’t cross that line though, Turner says.
“It would simply put us on a parallel with most other communities,” he says.
Turner touched on another controversial area when he spoke about the relationship between the recruitment of new businesses to Spokane, and the retention and expansion of its existing businesses.
In the past, some local companies have been critical of EDC initiatives made available to outside companies that were not available to companies already located here.
“Generally, my sense is that we are much more likely to grow the solutions to our economic problems than to recruit the solutions,” he says.
“We have to be able to provide the same level of support to existing businesses that our competitors would give to those businesses as they seek to recruit them away,” he says. “And believe me, we have a significant number of companies in our midst today who are the subjects of some recruitment process by other economic development organizations.”
Even though EDC’s mission has been pinpointed to recruitment, Turner says he wants to remain active in and supportive of the Spokane Area Chamber of Commerce’s expansion and retention programs.
“So frequently, the sorts of things an area business is going to require of a community in order to stay and grow are the exact same resources that a new business needs,” Turner says. “So while our job is to concentrate on the recruitment side of the business, we realize we can’t just cut ourselves off from the retention issue.”
One glaring omission Turner sees in the area’s economic development plan is in new business formation.
“An area that is absent from the economic development discussion here is small business development and incubation,” he says. “It really isn’t a part of the attraction discussion, and it’s not a part of the retention and expansion discussion.”
The formation of small business incubation programs is “something we need to address going forward,” he says.
Overall, however, Turner likes the base upon which the Spokane area has to build.
“I’m very impressed with the general call for creating partnerships in support of community development,” Turner says. “You have a lot of momentum in forging alliances and partnerships. I’m very encouraged by what I see here.”
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