Y'all Come

Dec. 21, 2004
Car and truck makers -- as well as suppliers -- are driving deeper into the U.S. South.

From the border states of Kentucky and Tennessee to such Deep South states as Alabama and Mississippi, making cars and trucks and the things that go in them is becoming as common as a southern accent. Although the economics could reverse and plants move to more profitable climes, the 10-year rise of automotive manufacturing in America's South seems "irreversible," says Albert W. Niemi Jr., dean of Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business in Dallas and an economist who has tracked manufacturing's migration out of the North and East. "If you look at labor, land, energy [and] taxes, there is a significant cost advantage to doing business in the southern economy," he states. There's also the South's perceived quality of life. "It's cold here in Texas, but we're not going to get any snow tonight," Niemi quips. "Can a northern state compete [with the South]?" asks New York-based James Schriner, the leader of Deloitte & Touche's Fantus Corporate Real Estate strategies practice. "On the surface, you'd say, probably not." Boasts Tony Grande, the outgoing commissioner of Tennessee's Department of Economic & Community Development, "The South is truly the new automotive center of North America." Tennessee, for instance, now ranks fourth in U.S. auto production, touts such marquee names as Nissan and Saturn and lays claim to more than 900 automotive suppliers. Having located its U.S. operations in Tennessee in the early 1980s, Japan's Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. in 2001 announced plans to invest $1 billion in plants in Smyrna and Decherd over a four-year period. Meanwhile, General Motors Corp.'s Saturn division is undertaking a $1.5 billion expansion in the state. Bridgestone/Firestone Americas Holding Inc. has its headquarters in Nashville. In 2002 the company broke ground for a 750,000-square-foot distribution center in Lebanon, Tenn. Farther south, Nissan this spring is slated to open a $1.43 billion plant in Canton, Miss., about 20 miles north of Jackson. Nissan minivans will be first off the assembly lines, followed in 2004 by the Altima sedan. Some 5,000 people are expected to be employed when the plant reaches full production. Geographically next door in Alabama, a $220 million Toyota Motor Corp. engine plant is slated to begin production this spring in Huntsville, the city that built the Saturn V rocket that launched U.S. astronauts to the moon. "When Toyota was considering Huntsville, we told their board of directors that if we could build rocket engines, we felt that we could build their engines," relates Brian Hilson, president of the Huntsville-Madison County Chamber of Commerce. The plant will be Toyota's first V-8 engine manufacturing facility outside Japan. "I think a lot of the growth this far south has been a natural evolution within automotive production," says Hilson. Indeed, Alabama's emergence as a production location goes back before Mercedes-Benz's 1993 car and truck assembly plant in Tuscaloosa and extends forward to the Hyundai Motor Co. $1 billion auto assembly and manufacturing plant in Montgomery, where production is slated to begin in 2005. Meanwhile, state governors taking office this year aren't expected to withdraw the welcome mat for auto and truck manufacturers. "Regardless of party, we have been very consistent in our commitment to the automotive industry," stresses Tennessee's Grande. "Philosophically, we're very pro-business. And the new governor is already very much engaged in bringing automotive projects to the State of Tennessee. . . . While we need a diverse economy, the automotive industry will continue to be a major driver of the Tennessee economy." Alabama's Hilson observes that economic development has had a great run in the state during the past decade, with "a lot of emphasis" on the auto industry. "What I think we will be able to do is [to] continue to build upon that. There's not any reason at all to think that [new] Governor [Bob] Riley's administration will do anything less than that," he says. The drive south probably won't end with manufacturing. Tennessee, for example, would like to attract some of the design firms and R&D operations that remain up North. "We do very well in manufacturing, and we're making inroads into the financial services side," says Grande. "But there are a lot of high-paying, high-skilled jobs on the engineering side" that Tennessee would like to have as well, he says. However, there are bumps down the road, both for the states and the auto companies seeking to locate in them. With budgets in some cases squeezed more tightly than they have been in 50 years, for example, some states may not be able to offer the same level of location incentives that they have -- or may tighten their terms. At the same time, Alabama knows that to continue to attract carmakers and other manufacturers, it needs to improve the quality of its public education. "We've got to create some change in our ability to generate tax revenues sufficient to better support public education statewide," Hilson says. "If we don't do that then the statutory incentives that we are able to offer that affect the financing and tax-incentive capabilities really become secondary." And while states often publicize the number of jobs a particular project promises to create, companies, for their part, need to be careful not to overwhelm the local labor market, stresses Buzz Canup, president of Canup & Associates Inc., a Jackson, Miss.-based site-location and economic-development consulting firm. "Identify a location that has the workforce density that is sufficient to support not only your requirements, but continue to support the requirements of other business and industry in the region," he urges. "You don't want to go into an area and create a tremendous labor shortage over a short period of time and have an adverse impact on the community or region -- or, in some cases, even the state."

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

 John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.
      
      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).
      
      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.
      
      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”
      
      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.
      
      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
      

 

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