Team Assignment 3

Team Assignment 3 requires the team to make an overview presentation to the site location committee of a large manufacturer about the advantages of building a plant in Eugene's industrial district--Feb. 1990. This page is divided into "Preliminary Steps" and the team assignment.

Preliminary Steps

You may want to check your course syllabus or your course home page at your school to make sure you were asked to do Team Assignment 3 and not Individual Assignment 3. Before you begin, you may want to review some preliminary steps and review the list of resources you could consult:

Begin by reading the brief history of the west Eugene wetlands and the introduction to the communication simulation if you have not already done so.

You also can visit the resources listed at the end of this page at any time.

TEAM ASSIGNMENT 3: Presentation to the Manufacturer's Site Evaluation Team
Feb. 1990

The Situation

So far, so good. It's early in 1990, time to get back to bringing companies and jobs to Eugene and to make the slow recovery stronger in the new year. Steve Gordon of the Lane Council of Governments seems to be making progress in doing the technical work and building community consensus about how to combine development and wetlands restoration. Development may be possible in the industrial area after all. Among the possible industries of greatest interest to the Metro Partnership, executive director John Lively thinks, is the aircraft industry. As home of the University of Oregon as well as Lane Community College, Eugene's citizens have the highest level of education on the West Coast. Nonetheless, because of the small number of high paying jobs available, Eugene-Springfield has a lower wage scale than in Silicon Valley or other parts of California. This combination creates an attractive labor force.

Rohr Industries, an aerospace supplier and Fortune 500 company looks like a good prospect. French-owned Rohr has its US headquarters in California and is expanding rapidly. It is looking for job-training assistance, low utility rates, and access to airlines and Interstate 5. The Southern Willamette Private Industry Council has put together an employment and training package that amounts to about $160,000 in the first year alone and includes extensive use of Lane Community College training programs and applicant screening by the State Employment Service. The city of Eugene, aided by the state, has decided to offer to spend $1.4 million to make the proposed site suitable for development.
Background on Rohr: Rohr currently employs 11,500 workers at nine facilities in the United States and one in Toulouse, France. The 50-year-old corporation specializes in building the heat-resistant parts that house jet engines. The company has opened five new plants since 1984 and has added more than one million square feet of facility space in the past three years. Roughly 75 percent of Rohr's sales are to commercial companies such as Boeing, Lockheed, and Rolls Royce. Government and military contracts make up the rest. The possibilities for Eugene are huge. The city hopes to offer continuing expansion sites and to obtain about 100 jobs in the beginning, 450 by three years, and 1000 by the end of ten years.
Next week a team consisting of Rohr executive Dick Dalton, Reese Wilson (who is a Menlo Park, California consultant working for Rohr), and two other Rohr members of the siting team will visit Eugene for an official all-day discussion with local representatives. Because Rohr doesn't want these talks to affect labor negotiations at some other plants, it has banned any public disclosure of its visit. Nonetheless, plenty of people know about it, from the Governor's office to the Willamette Private Industry Council and the Eugene City Council. They had to know in order to have a package for discussion. A site just east of the airport appeared to be free of wetlands, close to the airport, and close to a spur that connects with I-5, the major north-south highway. Unfortunately, under the new manual adopted earlier last year by four federal agencies, including the Corps of Engineers and the EPA, much of the site does contain wetlands. Governor Neil Goldschmidt got the state to offer to pay the cost of wetlands mitigation. The Wetheads worked a wetlands replacement proposal into their planning and the city council has agreed to expand the industrial area to make the site, which is just outside the industrial zone, eligible for other tax breaks.
A problematic decision: The city of Eugene adopted a "nuclear-free zone" ordinance several years ago, primarily to prevent the hauling of nuclear waste through the city, but the concept is sacred to those opposed to nuclear energy in any form. Now a stronger form of this ordinance is scheduled on the county ballot very soon. David Zupan of Eugene PeaceWorks and Steve Johnson, chief petitioner for the Committee to Keep Eugene Nuclear Free intend to challenge Rohr's move to Eugene, although Johnson admitted, "Rohr makes next to nothing I know of that would violate the ordinance (on the May ballot), but if they can't live with the strong ordinance, then they shouldn't come to Eugene."

Mayor Jeff Miller has looked into the matter with the city attorneys and is confident that the military portion of Rohr's business wouldn't violate the current city ordinance. Both the proposed revision to the city version and the county version ban not only nuclear weapons but also delivery systems and their components. Rohr makes parts for the Navy's F-14 fighter, which normally is armed with conventional weapons but can be armed with a nuclear missile. It is not clear whether it would be best to be up front with both the wetlands issue and the nuclear free zone issue during this visit.

Your team will have to decide. The company is set to make a decision in the next two weeks. If these thorny issues are not addressed now, they might throw a wrench in closing the deal, especially if the company thinks issues are being hidden. On the other hand, too much emphasis on negatives or obstacles might discourage the deal. How to handle this is tough. It is known that the Rohr site team has already visited more than 50 other communities in 17 states.
You, of course, know what package of inducements the company will be offered:

$2.3 million Provide recruiting and training for new employees, over an 8-year period
$1.52 million Extend west Eugene enterprise zone to provide a three-year property tax exemption on $15 million factory
$1.45 million Install sewer, water lines on 100-acre site
$450,000 Improve roads surrounding the proposed plant
$100,000 Build new wetlands to replace those lost in the first phase of construction.
$5.82 million TOTAL

The Team's Challenge

It is not your job to pitch the package of incentives in your airport welcome, but to introduce the benefits of the area and the cooperativeness of local and state officials, which is manifest in the unusual arrangements, such as coming up with money to pay for wetlands mitigation. You can mention these efforts, and the people and institutions that make the pitch possible, but not pitch the whole package. For example, you can talk about the educational institutions and the education level of the population, which will make the training offer credible.

Now all you have to do is think of the best possible ten-minute welcome and introduction to the area. Someone else will have introduced all the local officials who are gathered at the fairly small airport, whose lobby has been turned into a special meeting area for thirty minutes between flights. Coffee and Danish pastries will be served; Metro Partnership executive director John Lively will introduce all the bigwigs by name, and then your team has ten minutes to create the best possible grounding for the pitch that will come later. Good Luck! Lots of jobs depend on the success of this visit. Resources for your use are shown below.

Resources for Team 3: Presentation to Manufacturer

Excerpts from The Eugene/Springfield Community Profile

Climate
Community Environment
Development Incentives and Workforce Incentives
Economy
Employment, SIC classification, Labor Market
Health Care
Housing
Sports and Leisure and Art and Entertainment
Transportation and Location
The Eugene, Oregon World Wide Web site

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The West Eugene Wetlands Team, Rice University
Copyright Rice University, 1996
Last Updated: 1996.08.14