MOBILE — Mobile County Commission President Mike Dean went before a meeting of Forward Mobile in late May 2005 with a single message to deliver, and he delivered it plainly: the county’s decision to hire an outside economic development consultant was not a vote of no confidence in the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce.
"I let them know that our hiring a consultant doesn’t mean we are not going to fund the chamber," Dean said afterward. "That should not be read as a rejection of the chamber and its work. I wanted them to hear that out of my mouth rather than them hearing whatever they might hear from others."
The contract that caused the stir
Two weeks earlier, Dean and Commissioner Stephen Nodine had voted to award a $45,000 contract to Competitive Strategies Group, an Atlanta firm headed by Jay Garner, to study the local economy and recommend a plan for attracting new business. Garner was no stranger to Mobile; he had directed the chamber’s own economic development efforts from 1985 to 1994.
Competitive Strategies brought in McCallum Sweeney Consulting of Greenville, South Carolina, a site-selection specialist. McCallum Sweeney had been involved in the searches for the Boeing 7E7 plant, which stayed in Washington state, and the Vought project, which went to Charleston. Brookley Field had been in the running for both.
Commissioner Sam Jones, then a candidate for mayor of Mobile in that summer’s municipal elections, opposed the hiring.
Some community leaders read the contract as a splintering of the area’s economic development effort — a breach that might complicate pending recruitment deals. The concern was sharpened by a prickly session weeks earlier in which the newly elected Nodine had clashed with Forward Mobile over its approach.
The case for self-examination
Dean’s argument was that results matter more than feelings, and that opportunities do not wait. Every organization, he suggested, benefits from periodic self-examination; without it, complacency shortchanges potential.
He had numbers to hand. Forbes magazine had recently ranked Mobile 121st out of 150 metro areas for business. Inc. magazine placed the city 128th out of 274. Good can be better, Dean said, and better can be best.
He also conceded a personal grievance. "I had felt like maybe the chamber had slighted us," he admitted — and then took part of the blame for it. "Sure, it was partially my fault. If you want to be a part of the inner circle, you need to make yourself available and that’s what I intend to do."
What the county wanted
Dean’s underlying complaint was that the county owned assets it could not develop alone: the homeport, the old Brewer Center off Schillingers Road, and 1,200 acres in south Mobile County. He wanted the chamber’s help maximizing them, and he wanted the county at the table.
"By no means should what we’re doing in the county change the way we want the chamber to function: to go after new business and expand our existing business," he said. "We do not want them to change their focus. We want it to be a cooperative effort." He also called for involving the smaller chambers — Prichard, Bayou La Batre, Dauphin Island, Tillmans Corner.
With Mayor Mike Dow leaving office, Dean was explicit about his ambitions. "I want to step up and be a leader," he said, while praising Dow’s tenure. "I want to develop a relationship with Forward Mobile, so that they know they have a friend in Mike Dean."
Who was in the room
Forward Mobile drew, as Dean put it, "a lot of heavy-hitters." Among those attending were Cheryl Thompson of Alabama Power; Charlie Story, a retired Degussa Corp. executive; J. Gary Cooper of Commonwealth National Bank; Sydney Raine of Mobile Works; Gigi Armbrecht of BellSouth; Mike Fitzhugh of BankTrust; Bestor Ward of Ward Properties; Mayer Mitchell, a businessman and philanthropist; John Lewis of Lewis Communications; and Lowell Friedman of Creola Investment Group.
Brookley and the big one
Dean, a 49-year-old Republican in his second commission term and a former state legislator from south Mobile County, closed on an optimistic note. Brookley Field had been named a finalist for a 1,150-employee, $600 million aircraft engineering and assembly plant.
"I believe that it’s ours to lose," he said. "We’ve got the money to fund the necessary infrastructure. They won’t have to wait. We are poised for this major opportunity. We are prepared to land the big one and we hope that we can."
The larger anxiety behind the whole exchange was population and payroll. "We have to stop the flow of people going to Baldwin County," Dean said. "A lot of graduates in Mobile County are now looking for jobs elsewhere. We need to make sure they can stay here."
Aerospace at Brookley would eventually arrive — Airbus opened its U.S. assembly line there in 2015 — but in the spring of 2005 the question was still whether Mobile’s institutions could pull in the same direction long enough to win anything at all.