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BUSINESS The Empire Strikes Back, Y’all

Those damn Yankees thought they had buried us in negative press. But that was before Dallas figured out how to fight.
By Sally Giddens |

Item: On Sunday, July 20, 1986, The New York Times Magazine cover story tells the country that “Texas [is] In A Tailspin” and that “Texas is reconciling its ambitious expectations with the reality that its economic prospects are now-anathema to the spirit of Texas-only average.”

Item: “The Lone Star State’s Joyride of Growth Runs Out of Gas” proclaims Regar-die’s in August. The article, called “The Black Eyes of Texas,” includes a “relatively painless” list of things Washingtonians could do-short of sending Care packages- to help out the poor Texans. Among those sacrifices: drive seventy-five miles per hour; tell their congressmen to order the banks to lay off the Hunts and developers-after all, they’re just God-fearing people trying to make some money; and buy a couple of Dan Jenkins’s books (in hard cover).

Item: On September 29, Newsweek announces that Texas is hearing America snicker in its article: “The Fall of the Texas High Roller.. .A mystique crumbles along with fortunes.”

About six months ago. when the doom-sayers’ howling was deafening, I started a Texas Bashing file. And then I waited. I didn’t know exactly what I was waiting for, but in October, I found out: Dallas started fighting back.

The flattening blow that finally knocked some sense into Dallas was the loss of International Paper Company to Memphis, one of the major corporate relocations of 1986. Attracting corporations that are shopping around for cities is a serious business, and some observers say Dallas just didn’t strut its stuff as it should have.

The winnings in the relocation game are sweet. Take a look at one prize Dallas did snag last year: Swift Independent Racking Company, the nation’s largest full-line meat packer with domestic and international sales of more than $4 billion. When the company moved to Dallas in September, it leased 52,000 square feet in the InterFirst One building and made plans to expand into another 18,000 square feet. The company relocated eighty families to Dallas that have since purchased more than $12 million in residential real estate. By September 1987, Swift plans to move another fifty families to Dallas. The relocation also created approximately sixty jobs for Dallas workers and will add another twenty-five jobs this year.

Maybe it’s coincidence-officials with the Dallas Chamber of Commerce assure us it is-but on the heels of the loss of International Paper, the Dallas chamber announced an aggressive plan called The Dallas Partnership. The program has a single purpose: economic growth. (Translation: Dallas will never lose another coup like International Paper again.) The privately funded partnership wants to raise $5 million during the next three years. By mid-November, $4.3 million had been committed.

Yep, these folks are serious about economic development, and they aren’t the only ones. The same week-and this time all of the credit was given to the loss of International Paper Company-Cold well Banker Real Estate announced that it was “tired of the negative publicity about the Dallas area” and launched its own effort to booster Dallas. The promotional program was dubbed “Big D, the Place to Be,” a catchy cheer made up by Coldwell Banker’s advertising staff in, of all places, Houston.

Later in October, six area chambers of commerce created a not-for-profit, neighborhood-based foundation to concentrate on economic development in Dallas and its suburbs. Farther north, Addison city leaders committed $150,000 to a nonprofit corporation called “Addison Happenings.” This corporation plans to sing Addison’s praises -literally-with “Celebration USA,” a music and dance troupe that will perform in area hotels during conventions. You know the tune: Big A, the Place to Stay.

All of this to change Dallas’s attitude? Yes. Talking to these people, their catch phrases sound like so many motivational book tides: thinking negatively is a self-fulfilling proph-ecy… see it, believe it, go for it. .. make it happen.. .you are what you think you are.. .they think you are what you think you are.. .you are what you eat. Nope, wrong subject. Point made. Dallas’s attitude about itself festers, making things worse at home, then spreads like a virus across the nation. But it’s one thing to tell it like it is; it’s quite another to tell it like it’s not, and some misinformation is being spread about Dallas.

En route to New York a couple of months ago, a businesswoman was chatting away to the man next to her about the state of the Dallas and Texas economy. “So, how bad is it?” he asked, choosing the opening line that is probably the most overused these days on the red-eye flight to La Guardia.

She explained that her business, advertising, was definitely down. Good answer, accurate, but not good enough (meaning bad enough) to use in a Texas-bashing article if, perchance, this guy writes for The New York Tunes. And then she started spewing the misinformation.

“Unemployment is extremely high, much higher than the national rate. It’s primarily the oil and gas business that has brought Dallas to an absolute halt. You can see the oil field workers in the grocery stores hiding their food stamps, too proud to use them.”

Imagine the guy whipping out his reporter’s notebook. Well-informed Dallasites on the plane must have been straining to keep from yelling, in unison, “You stupid bimbo. Don’t you know there are no oil wells in Dallas County?! Don’t you know that only 2 percent of our employment base is involved in oil and gas mining and extraction?! Don’t you know that the unemployment rate in Dallas (5.9 percent for September) is lower than the national rate (6.8 percent for September)?!” But, of course, they didn’t. And, of course, he wasn’t. And most importantly, she probably didn’t know.



Ted Enloe is chairman of the Economic Development Committee of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, and until an executive director is hired, the head cheerleader for The Dallas Partnership. Although he doesn’t call it by the same name, his Texas Bashing file is larger than mine. During the last year and a half, Enloe. whose full-time job is as president of Lomas & Nettleton Financial Corporation, has spent more hours thinking about the economic development of Dallas than most of us would want to in a lifetime, and his ideas will be carried out through The Dallas Partnership. Are you thinking that these various cheerleaders are going to be bouncing and bumping into each other all over this economic playing field? Enloe insists that they aren’t, that The Dallas Partnership will not overlap with other groups. It will build resources that many organizations can use-kind of like one big synchronized drill team all marching to the Dallas beat. (Can’t you hear them now?… Big D, the Place to Be. . .)

So, what kind of strategies are The Dallas Partnership people talking about? For one, to make sure people telling Dallas stories on airplanes have accurate information.

“What we’ve got to do is start accentuating the good things we have here-to people on airplanes, to our competitors, to our suppliers, to our customers,” Enloe says. “Because all of these people are potential participants in the Dallas economy.”

Enloe concedes that one reason people might be overanxious to get in on the Texas bashing is that we did sing our praises too loudly when the Lone Star machine was in high gear. (Remember “Drive 90. Freeze a Yankee” bumper stickers?) So he’s not talking about bragging, just informing.

“Another bit of misinformation regarding Dallas is that we tend to be painted with a Texas brush rather than people really getting into the strengths and weaknesses of the Dallas economy and what our diversified base really is.” Enloe says.

Okay, facts. First, the good news: “We have the third largest airport in the world; we are one of the largest tourist and convention centers in the country. This year we will have over 2,100 conventions here and they will probably bring into the local economy more than $775 million. At the moment that trade is stable. Dallas has a tremendous defense industry and an active technology/telecommunications industry. I know that semiconductor manufacturing happens to be down now. but what’s very important is that we have a technological base here.” Enloe says.

And the bad news? We know it so well. .. “PR and advertising cannot overcome the facts, and the facts are that our local real estate market is very, very overbuilt and very soft, There’s no way we can run up to New York and have a conference with the editorial board of The New York Times and convince them of anything else, because the truth is, we’re overbuilt.”

And though we’ve been overbuilt before, never before have the three main engines of the Texas economy been down at the same time: agriculture, oil and gas, and real estate-but wait: that’s talking about Texas again. Think Dallas. . .two, three, four.

Mayor Starke Taylor made some progress in distinguishing Dallas from Texas on September 8 when he participated in an international investment seminar in New York sponsored by Institutional Investor magazine and thirteen private organizations. Taylor was one of three “sales reps” (Ed Koch sold New York. Andrew Young pushed Atlanta) invited to discuss the “Future of Our Cities” before an international audience. And, of course. The Dallas Partnership will continue that effort by getting the Dallas story before the national media. But it won’t stop there.

Enloe says The Dallas Partnership plans to construct an absolutely first-class multimedia briefing facility, perhaps in conjunction with the Central Dallas Association. Super duper. state of the art, high-tech, one-of-a-kind: this thing is going to knock the socks off of any relocation candidate who sets foot in Dallas. Enloe says the partnership wants to construct a much better demographic data base tor the whole area in cooperation with the North Texas Commission and the Fort Worth Chamber.

Obviously, The Dallas Partnership is going to spend some money. In the past. Dallas has lagged behind other cities in spending for self-promotion because during the Sunbelt boom, just by being Dallas, it got more bang for its rah-rah buck. According to a study done for The Dallas Partnership by Touche Ross, a management consulting firm, Dallas spends approximately $400,000 a year compared to competing cities such as Atlanta and Phoenix that spend $1.7 million to $1.9 million a year on economic development and the relocation game.

“We also need to greatly increase the hard shoe leather, cold call, repeat, over-and-over solicitation of people to come and locate in the Dallas area.” Enloe says.

It’s truly amazing that Dallas hasn’t done this in the past, considering that in virtually every major city in the country that is considered a candidate for corporate relocations, whether it’s the business leaders themselves or an executive director type, the cold calling gets done. The Dallas Partnership is conducting a study through Southern Methodist University’s Center for Enterprising on Dallas’s strengths and weaknesses. Using this study. The Dallas Partnership will not only target specific industries that it wants to bring to Dallas, but will also target specific companies. Another great idea whose time is now overdue.

Industry retention is very important to The Dallas Partnership. And in October, a crisis arose that underscored the need for Dallas to count-and stroke-its blessings: before our very eyes, Braniff Airlines is being wooed by Kansas City to relocate the bulk of its opera-lion there. Offering incentives such as gate locations and employee relocation expenses, the K,C. city fathers are giving Braniff the hard sell. And although the new uniforms hadn’t yet arrived (heck, they hadn’t even picked their colors), Enloe and the other drill team captains were quick to respond. In October, they set up a lunch with Braniff officials to make sure Dallas was doing everything it should to make Braniff happy.

“Sixty-five to seventy-five percent of the jobs created in Dallas are by companies that are already here, and we have to get out into the job community and find out what their growth plans are and how Dallas can work with them. We need to be there-not after Kansas City is already wooing Braniff-but before- We need to find out if they need more engineers, more educational facilities, more job training programs, or a bus stop outside their plant.” Enloe says.

Results. That’s what the whole drill teamis after. For the average Dallasite, that couldmean more jobs to choose from, more sales,maybe a salary increase down the line. During the next few months, members of the BigD drill team will be learning that Dallas stepkick. It should be a good show. And after awinning season or two. maybe I can throwaway my Texas Bashing file.

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