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Fifth Place Aint Good Enough

Florida isnt satisfied with its fifth-place rank in high-tech employment across the nation and launched an aggressive marketing campaign in June to attract more high-tech jobs.

For states, marketing is a lot like money: More is always better. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Enterprise Florida kicked off the states eFlorida marketing campaign in late June to entice high-tech businesses to set up shop in the state.

The sizzle of the eFlorida campaign is its Web site, eFlorida.com, which offers loads of information to site-selection consultants, IT professionals and high-tech executives to convince them that Florida is the only state to consider when opening new facilities or relocating.

Sizzle attracts; but steak satisfies, and Floridas leadership is aware that they had better satisfy the needs of high-tech businesses. To create that satisfaction level, the state has shown that its not afraid to take some interesting steps.


Behind the Marketing
The eFlorida Web site is the public face of Enterprise Florida, which was created in 1996 as a nonprofit, public/private partnership comprised of Florida businesses and government officials. Enterprise Florida replaced the states Department of Commerce and has since served as the lead economic-development entity for the state.

Gov. Bush is the chairman of Enterprise Floridas board of directors (oddly enough, Bush was the secretary of the Department of Commerce when it was disbanded and replaced by Enterprise Florida).

"That whole strategy came out of a late 80s, early 90s Cornerstone study that the Florida Chamber of Commerce initiated," said Mike Langley, a consultant to Enterprise Florida and the governors office on technology and economic-development issues. "One of the recommendations was that to move into the next millennium, the forward-thinking activity would be to look at a privatization of the Department of Commerce to get a strong business voice into the economic-development activity in the state."

Bush, as the states governor, has played a part in other significant moves to stimulate economic development, including the 1999 privatization of the states former Workforce Development and the Work and Gain Economic Self-Sufficiency (WAGES) boards into a non-governmental organization called Workforce Florida Inc.

Workforce Florida is the states lead workforce policy organization and oversees implementation of the states workforce programs.

In addition, the state universitys Board of Regents has been dismantled, and a seven-member Board of Education has been created.

Langley said the Board of Education will handle all the states educational priorities for K-12, community colleges, private educational institutions and state universities.

"Its a pretty unique approach," he said. "The reason that we did [these things] is because we clearly identified our education and workforce issues as a top priority. The Board of Education will not just handle one element or another -- thats the way it was before, you had one group doing K-12; one doing community colleges; one doing universities; and one doing private schools. Now youve got a consistent management/policy directorate over all education that occurs in the state."

With these sorts of changes to its bureaucratic structure, Florida is hoping to alert the high-tech industry that its serious about creating an enterprise-friendly environment for businesses, Langley said.


Incentives, Inducements and Tax Credits - Oh My!
Providing the right carrot to high-tech companies is also crucial, and, although states routinely market themselves as business friendly, the types of incentives they offer may not entice high-tech businesses, said Patrick Zimmer, a site-selection consultant and president of Development Advisors.

"Everybody can talk the talk, but its a matter of whether you walk the walk," Zimmer said. "Everywhere you go, I dont care if its a town of 1,500 or a town of 500,000, everybody says they want high tech. What they have to do is what Florida did; [state officials] went out and completed a survey of all the leading high-tech areas in the country to find out what those areas are offering and what they are doing to attract high tech."

Zimmer said that run-of-the-mill economic programs that states and municipalities put in place to lure high-tech companies dont do the job anymore and that governments need to devise creative and innovative programs to lure todays companies.

He hears governments speak of "clustering" industries or tax-credit initiatives, but he doesnt believe that companies are buying either one of those pitches.

"I tell [governments] that theyre fooling themselves," he said. "For these companies, there are way too many other options to look at. The huge investments and the high-paying jobs are going to the communities and states that are going to be more progressive. States fool themselves by putting tax-credit programs in place. Weve located 80 projects in the last four years, and the tax credits are virtually meaningless."

Although state governments tell companies that $10 million worth of tax credits are available to them if they locate in a particular state, Zimmer said the reality is that companies may only wind up with $500,000 worth of benefits.

The problem is that communities and states put programs in place simply to have something to offer and also without a lot of foresight, he said.

"As companies have gotten more sophisticated in their search and their process, theyre realizing that those programs dont have a lot of meaning to them in their bottom line," he said. "The communities [and states] that have figured this out are way ahead of the ball game."