Place Marketing

By Lisa Thompson
lisa.thompson@timesnews.com

On Oct. 23, business leaders in Atlanta will huddle to brainstorm about how to ease the water-shortage crisis affecting businesses as diverse as soda manufacturing and real estate.

If Erie economic development specialist Jake Rouch has his way, he will have gotten to some of those businesses' owners first with another solution:Come to the cool, wet, shores of Lake Erie.

Erie's economic development leaders on Thursday let go of the past.

No more will they simply troll Web sites looking for leads on companies looking to relocate or sit in their offices waiting for tips from the Governor's Action Team, said Rouch, the vice president of the Erie Regional Chamber and Growth Partnership.

The development officials are going hunting for businesses that need what Erie has, in this era of global warming and depleted natural resources -- water.

First target?Water-intensive businesses doing business in drought-stricken Atlanta.

Odd, submarine-shaped gray cardboard mailers soon will be landing on the desks of Atlanta executives at companies such as Anheuser-Busch, EarthLink and AK Steel.

Inside the mailers, the companies will find a note from Rouch that touts Erie's abundant freshwater supplies and offers that water at a steep discount -- 40 percent for five years -- to any business willing to set up shop in Erie.

As a reminder of the city's great, sloshing water supply, there is also a small souvenir -- a pair of cuff links shaped like old-fashioned water spigot handles. One cold. One hot.They're attached to stiff cardboard postcard with a reminder that water shortages are on the rise.

Erie, located on the shores of Lake Erie, the card says, "provides a smart and stable environment to expand Atlanta's businesses.

"Rouch plans to travel to Atlanta for a national economic development conference from Oct. 18 to 22. He hopes to meet with some of these executives in person.

Later in the month, he'll carry the campaign to San Francisco.

The new campaign, "Tap into Erie," marks a sea change of sorts for economic development.

Rouch said the agency in January decided to expand its focus from retaining and growing existing businesses to actively recruiting new businesses to the area.

"We frankly were not paying attention to trying to recruit businesses here," he said.

Rouch said every time officials kicked around what Erie assets to market, they came up with the stock list -- abundance of college students and colleges, good transportation, first-rate medical establishments, a decent manufacturing base and a fine quality of life. But none of those, he said, was outstanding enough to pull Erie above the competition.

Finally, this summer, they settled on the obvious -- water.

To check their instinct, the Erie Regional Chamber and Growth Partnership and several other organizations commissioned a $45,000 study to examine the prospects of luring water-intensive businesses to the area.

The study, by Erie-based McManis & Monsalve Associates, completed in August, said the region does have an opportunity to market its water resources. Only one other city, Milwaukee, is marketing its water on a national basis and with no success, the report said.

The key to success in Erie will not only be targeted, imaginative marketing but offering incentives, such as custom building for all lease purchase agreements, Rouch said.

Making water supplies the focus of economic development in Erie is only "logical," especially given the critical shortages emerging in the Southwest and Southeast, said James Kurre, an associate professor of economics at Penn State Behrend's Black School of Business, and director of the Economic Research Institute of Erie.

His only caution was that officials target industries that "use water, not use it up."

"If it is using all the water up, it is short term rather than a long-term policy," he said.

Rouch said those kinds of considerations went into the planning of Tap into Erie.

The mailing targets breweries, data centers and small steel mills. Those industries focus on conservation to keep costs in check, he said.

Rouch said even if the mailing does not result in a mass relocation, it should create valuable buzz.

If executives remember nothing else about Erie, maybe they will remember its attitude, he said.

"We want to make a splash," Rouch said.

"Erie is open for business and it is aggressively trying to get companies to come in and it is doing it in a creative and cool way."

LISA THOMPSON can be reached at 870-1802 or by e-mail.