TVA Generates Electricity, Jobs
Published Apr 07, 2003
John J. Bradley, senior vice president of economic development for TVA, says the company’s multifaceted approach to economic growth makes it an ideal resource for small businesses as well as large corporations.
The Tennessee Valley Authority is certainly known for generating low-cost, reliable electric power, but generating jobs is another of TVA’s missions. Since he took the helm as senior vice president in 2002, John J. Bradley has been fine-tuning TVA’s economic development initiatives.
A 22-year veteran of the Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce, Bradley saw the TVA job as “a huge opportunity to go from one county to more than 200. My philosophy on economic development has always been regional in scope, and the valley truly is a geographic region.”
The TVA region includes all of Tennessee and portions of six surrounding states. The nation’s largest public power company provides electricity to 158 distributors who serve nearly 8.3 million valley residents.
“TVA’s approach to economic development is really an overall approach. A lot of different aspects feed economic development – community development, minority business development, technical services, support for existing businesses,” Bradley says. “All that is very critical to what we want to accomplish at the end of the day, and that’s to create jobs.”
TVA Economic Development, with 58 employees across the valley, focuses on four areas:
1. Industrial development and expansion, with eight Regional Industrial Development Associations charged with packaging information and incentives to lure new business and encourage growth of existing business.
2. Community development, to help communities draft strategies for long-term economic competitiveness.
3. Technical services, including engineering, architectural design and environmental review.
4. Small and minority business support, with community-led workshops, business incubators and even managerial assistance.
“One of the things that TVA brings to the table that I don’t think any other economic development organization brings is depth,” explains Bradley, citing the in-house expertise of professionals as diverse as nuclear engineers and wetlands experts. “If there’s a place that TVA can fit in helping close a deal, that’s where we want to participate.
“We will continue to do the things that we do well, but in addition to that, we’ve put a renewed focus on lead generation. There are fewer deals out there than there were just three years ago. More and more economic development agencies are becoming more and more competitive. It’s tougher to win a deal. Working together as a region, our chances of success increase.”
Bradley set a goal for this more aggressive strategy – the creation of 48,500 jobs across the valley during the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, 2003. Will TVA Economic Development meet that objective? “We better,” says Bradley forcefully. He told his staff and the RIDAs “to examine our activities to make sure we are working toward creating jobs. If we’re doing anything else, we probably ought not be doing it.”
To generate leads, one-on-one contact is a strategy that works. So TVA will sell Tennessee to site selectors nationwide and globally, while employing its impressive network of power distributors to maintain contact with existing business and industry.
“If you work an existing business program right, what it does is feed your economic development efforts,” Bradley says. “It has been proven time and time again that 80 to 85 percent of new jobs are created by local businesses.”
Two years ago, a consultant hired by TVA identified target industries for all the RIDAs. “If we’re going to identify targets, we probably need to become experts in those targets,” Bradley says. “So now we have people on board who are becoming target market specialists.”
Some of those industry sectors are biotechnology and biomedical, automotive, plastics, electronics, agribusiness, logistics, food processing and cold storage.
To sweeten the deal are low-interest loans and a new grant program. TVA Economic Development supports three revolving loan programs to help new and expanding businesses with capital challenges. “About $20 million is out there right now in loans, and that tells you people need those programs and are using them,” says Bradley.
During the 2003 fiscal year, Valley Advantage was born, a $5 million investment fund geared toward assisting larger projects.
In January 2003, Medtronic Sofamor Danek decided to expand its existing medical device manufacturing facility in Memphis, instead of building a new facility elsewhere, partly because of a $200,000 incentive package from the Valley Advantage fund. Three other cities were also competing for the $50 million, 100,000-square-foot facility, which will create 600 jobs.
“I will tell you, the deals that we have won lately, this fund has made a difference,” Bradley says. “We really consider this fund a deal closer.”
Projects that meet the criteria for Valley Advantage must be $50 million in scope, employ 100 people, add 1 megawatt of load and pay wages 10 percent higher than the county’s average wage.
More than $4 million has already been committed.
Story by Sharon H. Fitzgerald
Photo by Harrison McClary
Current Weather Conditions In Nashville, TN (37243)
Cloudy, and 44 ° F. For more details?
Click here...
