Leveraging Lake Erie
Robert Farley Interview TranscriptParticipants:
Robert C. Farley
President, Team Neo
Joe Frolik
Associate Editor, The Plain DealerJoe Frolik: Bob, thanks for joining us today. In one of your past lives you worked in corporate relocation and obviously with the work you did in Fort Worth and now with Team Neo had to do both with retention and attraction of industry. I am curious in terms of for people who are looking to move or expand, how important is the availability of fresh water to them and how much of a competitive asset to our region is having several trillion gallons sitting out here?
Robert Farley: Well there is a couple ways that it helps. One is the whole quality of life issue which just deals with employees coming in and liking an area and feeling more comfortable. Obviously there’s only a handful of Great Lakes and we have one of them and the extent that people can access the lake and use it routinely for boating or for just to walk and you know so on is a big asset and it is something that we can really capitalize on if developed properly. On the business side, it really comes down to the ability to use large quantities of water in a market traditionally around the United States it’s getting tighter and tighter for fresh water supplies. And there’s a whole bunch of industries that use a tremendous amount of processed water from chemicals to technology companies to semi conductor industry and of course the food industry which we have a reasonably large concentration of in Ohio.
Joe Frolik: Oh, okay. Is it something that you think over the next few years growing more important perhaps in terms of what companies are looking for?
Robert Farley: It will, simply because of shortages in other markets around the US and you know typically the processes are not going to become much less water intensive with a few exceptions, so at some point, people have to get to the supply.
Joe Frolik: Okay. Let’s talk about the human capital side.
Robert Farley: That’s a very interesting point. Again having come from the Southwest where water is a constant issue in places like Texas, think about Phoenix, Las Vegas some of these great growth areas where you don’t have a lot of natural water.
Joe Frolik: Is there a sense in those regions that they may be coming up on a limit to their expansion and does that perhaps down the road auger well for cities with places that are on the Great Lakes or have access to predictable water?
Robert Farley: Well it certainly can from the business standpoint that we alluded to earlier. I think the other thing that we have to recognize is that places around the country that are trying to use it as an attraction for human capital as you said earlier, are often looking for ways to kind of create artificially what we have here already in abundance. So they are using storm runoffs and trying to pool lows as sort of a water feature to their communities. In Fort Worth we had a situation where we essentially keep two corporate campuses downtown and in order to make that more likely, we actually had to build sort of a town lake on which they could locate those companies. Obviously here we would have a little less trouble coming up with the natural resource.
Joe Frolik: Right, right. Okay. And again when it comes to the attraction, we’ve talked about over the last few years about knowledge workers, about what people talk about the creative class. Water seems to be or the use of that as an amenity seems to be an important part of attracting people who can do their work basically anywhere. Can you talk a little bit about why that seems to be so attractive and why that’s seems to be so important?
Robert Farley: Well I think what’s happened is the knowledge worker has sort of increased in importance as people who can pick up and be portable. They tend to select places based on lifestyle and amenities. So if they are outdoor people obviously they like to be, if they are skiers, obviously this doesn’t necessarily bode as well for us, but if they want to be in the water, if they want to do boating, if they want to do other water-based recreational activities, you know there’s only a handful of places that they could potentially do some of that if they don’t want to be on one coast or the other. Obviously Chicago for example, Milwaukee to a lesser extent has exploited some of that, but the key really isn’t just the water, it’s the ability to also have living conditions where people can be right on the water. And to the extent that we are able to open that up to more development, I think we will have a better opportunity to pick up more of some of these knowledge based workers.
Joe Frolik: That’s how we get to the ongoing discussion over the last couple of years about how do you open land up on the lakefront and what’s sort of the proper balance of development?
Robert Farley: Well again, it harder for me to say from a standpoint that we work mostly with the companies in terms of saying, okay well this is exactly the right mix of housing and industry and so on, but I think, you’ve talk to Chris and you’ve talked to some other people involved directly in the opening up of the land, and I think they are very aware that it’s an amenity not just for workers but also for businesses as well.
Joe Frolik: Okay. On the business front, certainly there has been some interest in, we talk a lot about clusters. About industries that are relatively closely related. Sometimes they may be competitors; sometimes they may be complementary to one another. Some people have said that with the efforts that have gone on over the past 30 years or so to clean up the lake and the river that there has been a development in the expertise of pollution or region remediation in this region. Is that something that you think potentially could be or maybe is it possible that we have a cluster we haven’t thought about in the past or is there something that we could develop and emphasize more?
Robert Farley: I think it’s quite possible. First of all from the economic development strategy side, one thing that people love kind of in any market is kind of the reinvention story that somebody has taken a problem or issue and they’ve not only cleaned it up sufficiently but they have used that for a kind of spring board to do other kinds of things, and I think that we owe it to ourselves given the nature of the improvements in lake and the river and so on to really take a hard look at whether or not a cluster of that type exists. And if it’s not fully bedded yet or fully flushed out, that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be. Again, people in economic development from an industry side love a surprise, they love to come into an area and find something that’s the opposite of what they thought, as long as it’s positive. And here I think that’s a very likely story to give us some legs for a lot of different types of corporate users.
Joe Frolik: When you identify a cluster or when a region believes or knows when they have one, again, how do you build on that, sort of what’s the next steps, all right we’ve got “x” number of companies, we’ve got this critical mass or near critical mass to do something, how do we take that to the next step?
Robert Farley: Well one thing is you’ve got to document it. You’ve got to actually be able to indicate that it’s really there. So you’ve got sort of the statistical part of really totaling up what that cluster really represents. The second thing is that you’ve got to communicate it. I think that typically in this region people tend to be very modest about what it is they do and what it is they’ve got in terms of resources. And unfortunately it doesn’t do us a lot of good because if we are the only ones who know about it, it’s unlikely to have this sort of clustering effect that you are talking about. So promoting it which is what part of Team Neo’s objective is as an organization, quantifying it and promoting it is the key. Getting it out in the industry channels where people would want to take action based on what they know about a market. And again, the Cleveland/Akron kind of message in the marketplace today is a little bit low key and in some places still a little negative based on you know 20-30-40 years worth of sort of rustbelt image and history.
Joe Frolik: You mentioned rustbelt there and we’ve talked about a little is the market issue which a lot of is-- how do you brand the region? I know some people who are very enthused again talk about the lake as an asset or maybe we should be talking about the water belt. David Beach is another guest we’re going to be talking to, has talked about trying to position Cleveland as a green city on a blue lake this is on environmental issues. How can our natural resources, how can we maybe shape that or how does fit into a marketing and also what are some of the elements of a good and believable marketing campaign?
Robert Farley: Well let’s start with the last part of that first which is essentially, I don’t think of a branding campaign as a slogan which unfortunately a lot of communities have sort of fallen into that trap which is if somehow they come up with a clever 3 or 4 sentence or word deal and stick it on a bumper that that’s really going to be the answer to revitalization. Branding in corporate America and in economic development takes some time to come up. We may not have a single brand in Northeast Ohio, although I think that the water and the environment is certainly one key dimension to that and the reason we may not is there is such a diversity in terms of the industrial base and the makeup of our economy or even our population, that it almost defies in some ways a sort of a single umbrella. So as we go farther into this what we are trying to do is sort of build on the competitive advantages of the industry clusters themselves and hopefully that will kind of lead us to a better view of what the long term branding of what Northeast Ohio might be.
Joe Frolik: All right great. Thank you, that has been helpful.