Lined up along the
factory floor like dozens of super-disciplined spiders, the
big machines extrude strand after strand of shimmering,
hair-fine fiber. The stuff comes out looking much like
cotton candy, and you find it hard to remember that it's
made from what would otherwise be trash.
It's part of a success
story in Chattooga County, Georgia, where the energy created
by a local government in partnership with an imaginative
entrepreneur has created nearly 400 new jobs. That it's also
helping to protect the environment is a fine bonus.
"It's sort of
mind-boggling to see the progress," says Sewell Cash, mayor
of the city of Summerville (the Chattooga County seat) and
one of the public officials who took the lead in providing
help to a homegrown firm, a carpet manufacturer called Image
Industries. "This thing wasn't popular with everyone. We had
money in the till, but we were going to spend ourselves
broke."
Mayor Cash is talking
about a decision of the Summerville City Council to use all
of its capital reserves—$1,080,000, accumulated and
hoarded over decades—to buy a 150-acre industrial
park, build a building on speculation, and then lease that
building and part of the acreage to Image Industries. That
kind of public partnership with private business ventures
was new to the area, and it didn't help that Image
Industries was itself a relatively new firm committed to
technological innovation.
Image recycles
polyethylene terephthalate (PET) containers—primarily
two-liter soft-drink bottles—into usable plastic.
Bales of the brightly colored bottles are broken open and
shredded into shimmering plastic confetti. The confetti is
melted down, pelletized, and extruded into polyester fibers,
which are then incorporated into high-quality carpets that
offer excellent wear and superior resistance to
stains.
None of this was on the
minds of Summerville city officials in 1985. Mayor Cash and
a new City Council were concerned that it had been exactly
30 years since any significant new industry had located in
Chattooga County. The textile industry on which the area's
economy is largely based was suffering from foreign
competition, and unemployment was an alarmingly high 14
percent. Long term, the area was projected to lose
population.
The Council began to
invest in improvements to the municipal infrastructure,
especially water plant facilities and natural gas delivery
lines. (Natural gas in Summerville is a municipal utility.)
They also felt that an industrial park was needed to attract
industry. When a suitable location came on the market, the
mayor recalls, "They backed their ears and said, 'Let's buy
it!' "
In addition to buying the
land, the city erected a 40,000-square-foot building
although no tenant was anywhere in sight. The building was
to stay vacant for nearly three years.
In time they found their
entrepreneur—Kelly Hudson, co-founder of Image
Industries. Hudson and a partner, Larry Miller, had started
the firm as a home-basement enterprise in 1976. The firm had
grown rapidly, specializing in carpets made from polyester
fibers, then a niche market. By the late 1980s, facing
severe competition from larger, better-established
companies, Hudson decided to build a new plant equipped to
process recyclable plastics.
Significant
Savings
"Recycled material was so
much cheaper," explains Hudson (who is no longer president
of Image). "At the time we first started we could save 20
cents a pound on 50 million pounds. So it was worth 10
million bucks to us. Big, big number. We decided at that
point that we might as well go ahead and bet the
farm."
The next decision was
where to locate a new plant, and about that time Hudson was
contacted by Mayor Cash.
"Some of the folks came
down," Hudson recalls. "They said, 'We want you to build
here. "We want to create jobs here.' I grew up in
Summerville. My parents and kinfolks live in Summerville. We
knew them, and we knew the type of community Summerville
was. And they'd spent some money and stuck their necks out.
We just couldn't turn it down. Image has been glad ever
since. The work force has been wonderful. It just turned out
to be a good situation for both parties."
Mayor Cash recalls his
own nervousness, however:
"He said, 'What can you do for us?' At the time it was embarrassing. We couldn't do
anything for him."
The problem was that the
industrial park lacked sufficient water for the extensive
washing and fire-protection needs of a large recycling
operation, and the city had already spent its cash reserves.
However, with the assistance of the Coosa Valley Regional
Development Center, located in nearby Rome (Floyd County),
the city secured an ARC grant for $150,000. Matched with
almost $380,000 of state and local funds, the grant made it
possible to upgrade the site to Image's
specifications.
The public investment has
paid off handsomely. In addition to Image Industries, the
Summerville Industrial Park has two other substantial
tenants: Century Glove, Inc., which manufactures cotton work
gloves and employs about 100 people, and Signature Interior
Woodwork Corporation, which builds custom wood cabinetry and
employs some 40 people.
As for Image itself, its
Summerville operation opened with about 30 employees working
in the city-built, 40,000-square-foot facility. By 1994 its
expansion plans warranted a second ARC grant to the city in
the amount of $50,500. Today approximately 380 people work
in two buildings occupying more than 360,000 square feet.
Many of the jobs, particularly in the fiber-spinning side of
the operation, are high paying.
Overall, unemployment in
the Chattooga County area is an amazingly low 3.8 percent.
Much of the good news is, of course, due to a generally
strong national and regional economy, but some of it also
results directly from Image-related spin-offs. For example,
Bob Evans, owner of a small welding business, says that his
shop gets about 75 percent of its work from Image
Industries. Not only has he added three full-time and two
part-time workers to his payroll, but he's also invested in
new equipment and upgraded his entire staff's skills.
"We've added metal
shears, rollers, and benders just for them," he says. "We've
done work for them that we didn't know we were capable of
doing."
Investment and
Growth
Image pays the city of
Summerville almost $50,000 annually in property taxes and
over $57,000 per month for gas, water, and sewer services.
The company is not only in the process of paying off its
original mortgage to the city; it has also bought adjacent
land for expansion and is exercising an option to buy over
eight acres from the city. Moreover, it continues plans for
growth. In June its directors announced a merger with the
Maxim Group, Inc., a carpet retailer operating 775 stores,
for an exchange of stock valued at over $90 million.
This spring Image
Industries received a 1996 Georgia Economic Development
Association Governor's Award to Existing Industries. The
nomination by the Chattooga County Chamber of Commerce noted
not only the company's economic contributions but also the
positive social impact of its business decisions. Although
almost any growing business would have been welcome in
Chattooga County, it's a special source of satisfaction all
around that the Image Industries operations are built around
recycled materials.
"It takes about ten
two-liter bottles to make a pound of polyester fiber,"
Hudson says. "This year Image will keep the equivalent of a
billion two-liter bottles from going to the landfill. Any
time that you can gain an economic advantage and at the same
time improve the environment, it's a win-win
situation."
In the light of all this
success, it's important to remember that the end of the
story couldn't have been foreseen at its start.
"Image's decision to go
into recycled plastics made the original decision more
difficult for the city," Jim Parker, Chattooga County
commissioner, reminds his interviewer. "They [the mayor and
council members] were not only helping to finance a private
industry, but an unproven industry. But because of the kind
of demanding work involved, many of our college kids now can
have good jobs to come back to."
Sue Spivey, president of
the Chattooga County Chamber of Commerce, agrees. She
mentions having heard Jesse White, ARC's federal
co-chairman, talk about the special virtues of "homegrown"
industries—a long-term commitment to a community,
incentives for talented young people to remain in an area,
and, above all, models of how willingness to take prudent,
well-planned risks can yield big rewards.
"He challenged people to
create 'an entrepreneurial environment,' " Spivey says.
"That's exactly what the city and Image have done. At the
time they were extreme risk takers, and they were criticized
for it. But they created an entrepreneurial environment. And
now we're getting local people moving back here to work, and
we're upgrading their skills."
Fred D. Baldwin is a freelance
writer based in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
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