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Ten years into plan, goals still elusive

By Blake Fontenay
January 9, 2005

Almost 10 years ago, the Memphis 2005 plan was introduced with great fanfare.

A coalition made up of about a dozen government, educational and business organizations came up with what they hoped would be a blueprint for the community's future.

The plan included specific goals covering everything from economic development to education to crime. Memphis wanted to measure its progress against seven peer cities, mostly its neighbors in the South.

The initial commitment to reach those goals seemed strong.

"This is not a planning effort that is intended to ... reside on the shelf,'' proclaimed John Kelley, then chairman of the Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce, when the plan's details were unveiled in November 1995.

The plan hasn't exactly been shelved, although it has been through some big changes during the past decade.

For one, it's now called "Think Memphis: Planning Ahead." Some of the goals have been modified or expanded. And even though many different groups collaborated on the original document, it's now primarily used by the chamber of commerce, an organization now known as the Memphis Regional Chamber.

Marc Jordan, the chamber's president and chief executive officer, said the original plan called for funding from city and county government to be matched by private contributions.

As the local governments have gone through tough times, their contributions have steadily declined, though.

City and county funding for the plan peaked at slightly under $1.4 million in 1999 and dropped to around $600,000 last year.

Meanwhile, private fund-raising has remained around $1 million to $1.2 million annually since 1997.

"The public sector funding sort of went away after a while,'' Jordan said. "As we look back on it, we probably didn't do a good job of keeping the coalition together."

In order to fulfill some of the plan's more lofty goals, such as providing more job training programs to the local workforce, Jordan said a greater private sector commitment will be needed.

Which isn't to say the plan has been a total failure.

For example, one of the early goals was to bring at least $1 billion worth of new nonresidential capital investment into the community each year.

That threshold was met from 1997 through 2003. Chamber officials are still collecting some data from last year, although the $1 billion mark appears to have been reached again.

Another one of the plan's goals was to bring 12,500 new jobs into the community each year. That goal has been met only twice, during 1997 and 1998. However, other peer cities have fared worse in job creation during a shaky period in the nation's economy.

In 2002 and 2003, the Memphis metro area attracted 5,000 new jobs. During that time, the average in Memphis's peer cities was a net job loss of 5,500. Only Nashville fared better than Memphis, with 8,500 jobs created during that span.

In terms of overall economic strength, Memphis still lags behind its peer cities.

POLICOM, an independent economics research firm based in Florida, ranked Memphis 23rd among 361 metropolitan areas nationwide based on statistics collected over a period of several years.

Six of the seven peer cities -- Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Charlotte, N.C.; Dallas; Indianapolis and Nashville -- all finished higher in POLICOM's survey. Only Louisville, Ky., which ranked 30th, finished lower than Memphis among the Memphis 2005 plan's designated peer cities.

John Threadgill, the chamber's chief administrative officer, sees that as an indicator of how ambitious the original plan was.

"Obviously, we picked some darned good cities to benchmark,'' Threadgill wrote in an E-mail. "One could easily say that Memphis is in the major leagues of economic development, we're just not going to win the 'World Series' in a year or two."

A research team at the University of Memphis has helped the chamber keep track of progress in meeting the plan's goals from year to year.

David Cox, executive assistant to university president Shirley Raines, pointed out that many of the benchmarks, such as school test scores or crime statistics, are beyond the chamber's control.

Cox said the chamber can and does play a role in the community's economic future through the types of companies it tries to bring here.

However, Cox said public policy issues, such as taxation and local government's commitment to neighborhood revitalization projects, are also factors.

"The initial 2005 (plan) was very ambitious,'' Cox said. "It touched on so many areas of the community."

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