Commentary: Recently, I described how local groups who influence economic and jobs growth can do more to stop the outmigration of college graduates and young professionals to competing markets like Denver or Phoenix.
With the arrival of a new CEO to run the Las Cruces Chamber of Commerce, I offered up a mandate to diversify our economy and stem the Las Cruces brain drain.
Over a casual lunch on her second day on the job, Chamber CEO Debbi Moore embraced the mandate.
We talked about the area’s strengths and weaknesses in a general way over lunch.
Afterward, I began to think more pointedly and identified these three crucial challenges and opportunities facing Las Cruces, and the Chamber:
· The abandoned Las Cruces Country Club blights the cityscape
· Over-reliance on a retiree economy means fewer, higher paying jobs
· Young talent migrates to neighboring job centers in Arizona, Texas and Colorado
In a nutshell, there are plenty of well-heeled retirees and lots of ambitious college-age millennials populating Las Cruces, but where are all the 25-50 year old professionals?
They are missing in action. It is a gap that needs to be closed.
We have competitive advantages that need better marketing to companies outside of New Mexico. The state may have learned about that when it came up short in an incentives bidding game and lost a $5-billion Tesla car battery plant to Nevada in 2014.
The Las Cruces Chamber could step up to the plate and fill an important niche, in the sense of creating an identity and name recognition for Las Cruces.
It’s called economic development marketing, and many cities, like Atlanta for example, have sustained these corporate recruitment campaigns for decades.
How about a campaign for us?
Promote Our ‘Firsts and Bests’
Playing to our strengths, we could name the campaign, “Of all places, Las Cruces, New Mexico!”
Think of the potential and fun in showcasing our own physical and natural assets in a way that differentiates us from anywhere else:
- What city hosted the birth of America’s space exploration and missile defense programs?
- Where do you find the best wine in the West, outside of California or Oregon?
- Who grows the most pecans in North America?
- Where can you experience the largest gypsum desert anywhere?
- Where would you climb a national monument with volcanic mountain tops resembling organ pipes?
- What city is considered an international center for astronomy?
- Where was Billy the Kid captured and executed?
Why, of all places, Las Cruces, of course!
And, believe me, there are plenty more “first, best, most and only’s” for our community and the surrounding region, if we would only capture and package them as selling points for future employers…and employees, for that matter.
Of all places, Las Cruces offers more than meets the eye. We can go toe-to-toe with most any city on key location factors with strengths such as:
- Cost of living and cost of doing business
- Tax rates
- Quality of living
- Innumerable natural attractions
- Healthy, outdoor lifestyles enabled by great weather
- Quality of higher education
- Strategic location at the junction of I-10 and 1-25
- Proximity to the Mexico International Free Trade Zone
- Bilingual local population base
For recruitment of large-scale projects like manufacturing plants, distribution centers and corporate regional headquarters, the Mesilla Valley Economic Development Alliance is in control.
My experience with major economic development groups tells me the Alliance needs to step up its game in terms of targeting, pursuing and landing projects offering large employment, capital and tax bases.
The Alliance should go after companies with larger-scale but clean operations like:
- Cisco Systems develops a solar-powered data center
- FedEx or UPS builds a Southwest logistics center
- Capital One needs a bi-lingual regional call center
- Ernst & Young sites a consulting field office to support El Paso and Albuquerque
You don’t always have to be the big dog to win a meaningful corporate presence. But you first must position yourself and then compete on your own merits.
One of those assets should be a larger base of skilled, available workers, which takes time to build.
Plus, it can take more than two years for a corporation to choose a location.
So, what else can be done?
Viable, Small-Scale Alternatives
For the Las Cruces Chamber, which is known more for lobbying than creating jobs, there is a meaningful role awaiting that could expand the Chamber’s impact in solving the jobs and business development challenge. It is a small-scale solution with larger-scale impact.
What types of employers might the Chamber set out to target?
- Mid-cap companies in need of young talent
- Start-up’s with venture capital seeking lower-cost markets
- Alternative energy innovators like solar, biomass and wind
- Distribution operations who see the value of I-10 and I-25
- Professional services like advertising agencies, consultants, engineers, architects
- Specialty doctors, especially cardiologists, rheumatologists, oncologists and more
Consider the retirement and aging demographic of Las Cruces, and one of the challenges becomes an opportunity.
New Chamber CEO Debbie Moore regards the shortage of doctors in Las Cruces as a serious gap to close, and she sees the value of what we call “segmented” economic development to attract more physicians to the area.
Think about the effectiveness of tapping this one high-paying professional niche: physician-specialists, along with their support base and supply chain partners.
Realizing this one objective alone would go a long way toward solving ongoing imbalances in older vs. younger people, higher paying jobs, and the brain drain to neighboring states.
Solving the physician shortfall may even present a viable opportunity to turn the fallow country club grounds into the mixed-use medical development it was intended to become.
That requires changing the conversation with the neighbors who oppose the medical park. They were never given a proactive voice in the change process. But an inclusive approach recognizing these home owners as stakeholders could help change the conversation from “not in my back yard,” to “what’s in it for me?”
If we take a balanced view, understand the varying needs and views of different stakeholders, and then account for the strengths listed above, we win!
Regional Unification
Under-utilization of strategic partnerships with local allies is another problem with potential winning outcomes.
These could involve more frequent collaborations between the city, the county and NMSU, as well as multiple interests throughout Don Ana County like the various Chambers of Commerce, the military-industrial sector, science and technology companies, logistics and transportation centers, social agencies, public schools, health care, public safety, the arts, media, or other community stakeholder-employers.
For example, what if more emphasis were placed on fostering incubator and R&D types of start-up enterprises that spin out of NMSU laboratories and field studies into the private sector? These would also incorporate the subject matter expertise of the existing science, technology, industrial and military sectors based here.
Another possibility: there is a strong creative and arts base integrated into the Las Cruces lifestyle. Market the arts as the focal point to a larger creative class that would also contribute to economic growth.
In the process, don’t overlook the local existing industry base with players like ADP, Comcast, Lockheed, Raytheon and Virgin Galactic already doing business and providing jobs here. They reflect a healthy critical mass for others like them who might also locate an operation here.
Richard Kadzis has more than 35 years of experience in economic development marketing and corporate location strategies. In 2014, he authored the book, “Enterprise City: How Companies Are Changing the Global Urban Landscape,” available in Kindle via Amazon.com. He resides in Las Cruces.