Keynote speaker Mark Sweeney, a corporate site selection consultant, served a dose of hard reality and a wake-up call with his audience”™s morning coffee at “Rethinking Westchester: A Blueprint for Smart Growth,” the recent conference on economic development.
With fewer companies undertaking relocation projects since the recession, it”™s more competitive than ever, according to Sweeney, senior principal at McCallum Sweeney Consulting in Greenville, S.C. “There are fewer projects and there are more sophisticated locations competing for them,” he told about 200 attendees at the daylong conference in Tarrytown sponsored by the Westchester County Association and its Blueprint for Westchester economic development arm.
Sweeney represents companies in diverse industries in their selection of manufacturing, distribution and office headquarters locations. His firm advised Tronox Ltd., a global chemical company, in the 2012 relocation of its corporate headquarters to Stamford, Conn. ”“ Tronox chose Connecticut and its loan forgiveness and job creation incentives over Manhattan and London. His clients typically do not inquire about the office parks and downtown office towers of Westchester.
“Westchester County does not have much of a presence, quite frankly, in the site location business,” he said. “Unfortunately, Westchester right now is not in the mix of where people want to go.”
“Westchester is thought of as a location that was a wonderful outside-the-city location for the last half of the 20th century,” said Sweeney. “It is not being thought of as a wonderful outside-the-city location for the first half of the 21st century.”
“The competition between places is very intense and very real,” he said. “The competition in your New York mid-Atlantic region is strong and getting stronger.”
Sweeney said clients look for “a diversity of choices” when selecting the type of office building and urban, rural or suburban settings for their companies. “Lots of diversity of choice is not currently a strength of Westchester County,” he said.
The county, though is suited for high-tech manufacturing in defense and other industries, and its economic development team”™s site portfolio should include “extra class-A” industrial space for those potential tenants, Sweeney said.
The keynoter said economic development officials need to ramp up the county”™s marketing as a corporate headquarters location, as it was in the heyday of office-park development here.
Headquarters should be “the sweet spot” of Westchester County, given its metropolitan New York location, Sweeney said. He said the county”™s high-cost environment of property taxes and home prices is not necessarily a detriment to attracting companies to move their headquarters here.
The county could benefit from a growing trend Sweeney noted ”“ many companies are considering moves from small towns where they began to larger metropolitan areas for a more diverse and educated workforce and for ready access to international air travel, talent and financial markets.
“That is a very promising trend for Westchester County,” Sweeney said.
Sweeney said the public-private alliance of the WCA”™s Blueprint for Smart Growth initiative represents the organization needed by communities to be successful in “the business of economic development.” But to better compete for companies, “You have some improvements, you have some image improvements, that you need to do,” he said.
Clients considering costly relocation projects are “deadline-driven,” Sweeney said. “This deadline pressure has increased over the last 10 years, which is why communities that are prepared have the advantage.”
Sweeney said a public-private partnership, a key focus of the conference at the Westchester Marriott, generally is the best approach to economic development in a community. “Everybody has some skin in the game,” he said. “It”™s a pretty powerful alliance.”
“P3,” as the public-private partnership model is called, “is sort of the new horizon,” said conference panelist Daniel Marsh III, National Development Council director and eastern regional manager and president of the council”™s Housing and Economic Development Corp. “It”™s been around a long time and municipalities are turning to it not so much in New York as in other parts of the country.”
Moderating a panel on 21st century infrastructure needs in a world increasingly dependent on wireless devices, attorney Christopher Fisher, president of the New York Wireless Association, noted that a thousandfold growth in mobile broadband traffic has been projected over a 10-year period ending in 2020. By then, broadband network demand will match the system”™s capacity.
The metropolitan New York area especially will experience mobile communications blackouts. “The screens go blank,” Fisher said.
In the mobile communications industry, “The technology is much quicker than our ability to build out the infrastructure” to accommodate it, said Manuel Vicente, founder and president of Homeland Towers in Danbury, Conn. Building new wireless infrastructure is a revenue opportunity for municipalities, he said.
Local governments “need to be engaged in this process and proactive,” Vicente said. Using a public-private partnership “is a great way to improve infrastructure without putting those costs on the taxpayers.”
“Companies aren”™t going to come to locations where people can”™t use their cellphones,” Vicente said. “That”™s a fundamental fact.”
