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Great, if not spectacular, in Conway Sunday, Jun 22, 2008 By John Brummett So the big Hewlett-Packard announcement for Conway wasn't software development. This won't be Silicon Valley East. But it wasn't just a call center either. It's in between. Like Lou Holtz said: Things are never as good as they seem and never as bad as they seem, but somewhere in between reality falls. Words to live by, I tell you. They'll offer a sales staff. They'll do technical support for customers. They'll have customer service lines. If your printer is on the blink, you'll call Conway. Or an Albuquerque bedroom community, where a similar facility is planned. People - eventually 1,200 of them, starting with a first wave in 2009 - will make an average salary in the low-$40,000s to start. Sales people will be able to make much better money. It's good. It's great. It's just not wham-bam, holy-cow spectacular. But few things are. Let's call it several steps in the right direction for a state badly in the backwater of the modern knowledge-based economy and threatened with becoming even more desolate depending on what Verizon does with or to Alltel. This could become much bigger, something indeed wham-bam, holy-cow spectacular. As the ever-reliable Roby Brock of Talk Business reported exclusively Thursday morning on his Web site and on the site of his content partner, our own Arkansas News Bureau, Hewlett-Packard has been talking for a couple of years about consolidating data centers to six super locations. One might think that Conway could emerge as a consolidation site. But one would not want to get one's hopes too high. But one would not want to set one's aim too low, either. Remember Lou's wisdom. Now, about the main inducement: Gov. Mike Beebe has committed to using $10 million from his $50 million "quick action closing fund," which is to say money out of all our taxpaying pockets, to assist this wealthy company with the $28 million construction site. Conway's private economic development group, the Conway Development Corp., will be the conduit, then own title to the plant and formally lease it to the company. This is an arrangement as essential in the modern state-by-state competitive environment as it is unsettling. It is not justifiable as a payoff to one rich company in one already thriving exurban community. It is justifiable only as an investment in a broader strategy to begin attracting these kinds of new-economy jobs to a state in dire need of them. It's money well spent if indeed this turns out to be a "watershed," a "tipping point" and a source of "traction," to use some of the catch phrases, for ensuing growth in this vital sector. Asked about the inducements Thursday, Beebe said he'd liked my word that morning that accepted the reality of state-granted financial incentives without exactly embracing them warmly. "It's one of my favorite words," he said. "Alas." And perhaps this goes without saying: Conway's appeal was based on three colleges. It was based on a young population. It was based on its being part of the Little Rock metropolitan statistical area. This is one cohesive region, like the other thriving one in Northwest Arkansas. Cities don't compete anymore. Greater metropolitan areas do. Now, if all this running up-and-down the highway between these regional sisters - between Little Rock and Conway and between Bentonville and Fayetteville - would lead to some high-speed rail by which we'd stop being hostage to oil ... well, I need to remember Lou's wise and tempering words. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
