'Micropolitan' Baldwin casts a big shadow

For a "micropolitan area," Baldwin County is making some major economic strides.

So says Robert Ingram, president and chief executive officer of the Baldwin County Economic Development Alliance.

Late last week, Ingram got word that Baldwin County -- labeled as the Daphne-Fairhope, Ala., micropolitan area by the U.S. Census Bureau -- was the fourth-hottest micro for economic development in the country last year.

Site Selection magazine, a leading industrial recruitment tracker, compiles the annual ranking.

Baldwin County was among the top 20 in the 2005 list. Ingram said his organization -- a partnership between municipal and county governments, chambers of commerce and businesses throughout the county -- set a goal to be among the top 1 percent in 2006.

Being No. 4 among 674 filled the bill.

"With the help of wonderful city and county public officials, aggressive private sector leadership and Baldwin County's unsurpassed quality of life, we were able to do this," Ingram said Friday.

Cullman was No. 6 on the micro list.

Micropolitans are generally defined as areas with a population under 50,000 whose local economies are largely self-sustaining, the magazine said in introducing its rankings.

Site Selection also ranks major metropolitan areas with more than 1 million population, metros where the population is between 200,000 and 1 million (Huntsville was the No. 3 area there) and metros with less than 200,000 people (both Auburn-Opelika and Decatur were among the top 10 there.)

Its rankings are compiled by tallying what it calls qualifying projects. The more qualifiers, the higher the ranking.

A qualifying project, said Editor Mark Arend, needs to meet one of three criteria -- capital investment of at least $1 million, creation of 50 or more new jobs, or new construction of at least 20,000 square feet .

The project must be private, rather than public, and can be new or expansion of an existing business, he said.

Some of the larger projects Baldwin County submitted were RX Advantage (corporate headquarters and institutional pharmacy), The Parts Store (distribution), Goodrich expansion (aerospace manufacturing) Mobile Lumber (manufacturing of building components)," and expansions at existing manufacturers Vulcan Inc. and ProCell, Ingram said. The 18 projects Site Selection recognized meant about 950 jobs and capital investment of approximately $61 million.

Location, location, location has long been considered the key component of buying real estate, but Arend said labor, labor, labor matters most in choosing a place to do business.

"The things that companies tend to look for would be an adequate labor supply, an appropriate labor supply, an affordable labor supply," he said. Businesses also look for a pro-business regulatory environment and reasonable land and operating costs.

"Areas at the top of the list are delivering on some of those requirements," he said.

Arend said he was pleased that Site Selection now had micropolitan areas as a way to judge the economic development efforts in smaller communities.

"A lot of the economic development work that goes on is very much on the local level," he said, offering as examples a city that might go out of its way to develop infrastructure or ease permitting in order to attract new jobs.

"I think the community that is willing," he said, "deserves a pat on the back."

(Readers may write K.A. Turner at the Press-Register, P.O. Box 2488, Mobile, AL 36652-2488, call her at 219-5644 or e-mail kturner@press-register.com)