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Region's future is not like its past Steady job growth portends healthy future Thursday, February 19, 1998 By Steve Massey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The difference between what Pittsburgh once was and what it hopes to become couldn't have been more clear.
At the Doubletree Hotel, Downtown, 200 business, civic and political leaders gathered yesterday to hear why Dick's Clothing and Sporting Goods and Toyo Tanso Specialty Materials chose to bring their companies and 800 jobs to the region. It was an upbeat message served up with a breakfast of quiche and home fries.
A few miles away, workers at LTV's coke plant popped in and out of the cramped United Steelworkers office on Flowers Street, across from the Hazelwood complex that's been around in some form since the Civil War. The workers want to know what kind of benefits and retraining they may get when the doors shut for good on 750 jobs there.
For those keeping score, that's 800 new jobs, 750 lost jobs, for a net gain of 50.
That's been the economic development story for the region this decade -- a two-steps forward, one-and-a-half back process that's seen regional employment inch to record highs yet the pace of growth remain stubbornly slow.
It's a frustrating scenario for everyone involved, from local politicians trying to build up depleted or stagnant tax bases to workers forced to pound the pavement for livelihoods.
It doesn't help that many new jobs don't pay nearly as well as the high-wage, low-skill heavy manufacturing jobs they're replacing. Or that the good jobs that are being created require advanced skills and education that blue-collar workers often lack.
Still, despite all the attention focused on plant closings and layoffs, the region is still adding more jobs than it's losing.
It was that message the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance, an umbrella organization that coordinates regional development activities, wanted the Doubletree audience to take with them yesterday and spread to others.
"The trajectory of our growth is not yet what it should be," Timothy Parks, the alliance's president, acknowledged. But instead of "crying in our soup" and harping on the negatives, business and civic leaders should be "getting on with the business of creating a constructive growth environment."
Already, there are signs the old walls that have divided cities, counties and an alphabet soup of development agencies are crumbling.
"The days of turf battles are long gone," declared John Thornburgh, president of the Penn's Southwest Association, a non-profit agency that works to lure new investment and companies to nine Southwestern Pennsylvania counties -- Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Lawrence, Washington and Westmoreland. "We have too much at stake to worry about who does what or who takes credit for what."
Working with development officials in each of the counties, Penn's Southwest yesterday identified 160 projects unveiled in the past year that will create 2,300 jobs, retain 500 jobs, generate an annual payroll of $63 million and represent 1.1 million square feet of development.
The projects included Philip Services Corp., a multibillion-dollar steel processing, materials recovery and consulting concern that placed its U.S. headquarters and 60 jobs in One Mellon Bank Center, Downtown; TeleTech Holdings Inc., a Denver-based telemarketer whose regional call center in Uniontown could employ 600 in three years; and National Gypsum Co., a Charlotte, N.C., concern that's building a $70 million plant in Shippingport, Beaver County, that will employ 150.
Prospects look even brighter for 1998, Thornburgh said, and could get off to a rousing start if the Marcegaglia Group, an Italian steel tube producer, goes ahead with plans to develop a plant in Munhall.
What the region's leaders need to do, Thornburgh and Parks said, is to tell more stories that play up the positives, stories like those told by Ed Stack, chairman of Dick's, and Matt Kondo, president of Toyo Tanso, a specialty metals manufacturer.
Almost four years ago, Stack moved Dick's headquarters to Pittsburgh from Binghamton, N.Y., where his father founded it 50 years ago as a 500-square-foot bait and tackle shop. Now the average Dick's is 100 times larger -- 50,000 square feet -- and the headquarters has grown from 75 to 250. Including stores, it employs 750 locally.
Stack weighed several cities before settling on Pittsburgh, including Baltimore, Boston and Cleveland. But he was attracted by Pittsburgh's strong sports tradition, central location to the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast markets where it's expanding, and by a family-friendly environment.
"It's a great place to raise a family," said Stack, a father of five. "If we had the opportunity to make the decision again" to move headquarters, "we would still come to Pittsburgh. It's been everything we hoped it would be."
Kondo cited similar reasons for locating Toyo Tanso's 50-employee carbon fiber insulation plant in Natrona Heights. He also was pleased with the availability and motivation of skilled workers. And, he joked, he's been pleased by the gray, gloomy weather.
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