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Playing To Bay Area's Strengths

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By MICHAEL SASSO

msasso@tampatrib.com

Published: December 20, 2008

TAMPA - This must be an ominous time to take over an economic development agency charged with bringing jobs to the Bay area when many companies are shedding them.

Still, Keith Norden insists he's excited about leading the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce's economic development arm, the Committee of One Hundred, during this recession. It will give him a chance to ask some tough questions, including whether the area is trying to lure the right kind of companies.

As Norden says, every city wants to lure a large company's headquarters. But does the community have the right labor market and infrastructure in place to handle one? He thinks Tampa can handle major companies, but he wants to make sure the area plays to its strengths.

Norden, 56, will start his job as executive managing director of the Committee of One Hundred on Jan. 5. He comes to the committee from the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area, where he was a senior vice president of the Hampton Roads Economic Development Alliance.

Norden received a bachelor's degree from the Old Dominion University and graduated from the University of Oklahoma's Economic Development Institute. His wife, Barbara, and college-age daughter, Meghan, expect to relocate with him to the Bay area, he said.

Some excerpts from a discussion Friday:

Does the recession change the way you do economic development?

I think economic development is much more important in these times than in boom times. It's important that we stay in front of our existing companies and emerging companies, because the existing companies provide 70- to 80-percent of all new job creation. So, a good business retention program is essential.

I would like to generate a new target industries study. It would tell us what we have here, what we need and what makes sense. What we're seeing now is that locations are so dependent on labor availability. So, if we have, say, 40,000 or 140,000 technology workers or software workers, then we need to be going after those industries, because we have a surplus of those workers.

In Hampton Roads, a lot of the cities we represented wanted to go after Fortune 100 headquarters, and we had to do a third-party study - actually three - to show that we didn't have the air service. And studies can do that.

It seems every community wants to be a leader in the health sciences field, like San Diego. How much emphasis should Hillsborough County put on recruiting such firms?

I think it's important based on the universities that we have, really in a triangle area. We have the University of South Florida, we have Florida State, University of Florida. They all have great research opportunities. We have the grants at USF that have amounted to almost $400 million last year, and we would hope for more. So I think that's a great advantage to us. To say that we want to be another San Diego - that is saying a lot. But I think we have a real advantage based on the research that's going on here.

You did a lot of recruitment of international companies at your last position. That's something that critics say the Tampa area doesn't do enough of. What did you do specifically?

We basically did a lot of international marketing from my headquarters in Norfolk, and we hired international folks to do that. We had a German national on staff and a French national on staff that I supervised. We continued to use international interns in Norfolk. We have a Parisian now working there as an intern doing her master's program, and we have a German coming in a couple of weeks.

We also hire contract consultants internationally to help us with marketing activities, because we wanted to spread word of Hampton Roads. One company was Stihl, the garden tools company. In the late 70s they came into the area with one line - it was basically distribution -- and now they have a million square feet under roof with 2,000 jobs.

Reporter Michael Sasso can be reached at (813) 259-7865.

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