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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > June > 02
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Ellen Belcher: NCR fight was over before it started
If NCR Corp. likes Georgia, it really likes its money.
Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher and state Sen. Jon Husted are adamant that when Mark Hurd was CEO of the company, NCR’s plan was to expand in Dayton. They have letters to show that state and local leaders were in negotiations with the company in 2004 and 2005 about increasing jobs at the Dayton world headquarters, though there’s no letter from NCR committing to anything.
Clearly, there were exchanges, and they sounded positive.
In retrospect and compared to what Georgia is paying the company to move its world headquarters there — $60 million in incentives — the package Ohio and the region pulled together back then is piddling.
Dayton and Montgomery County put $2.65 million on the table; the state of Ohio was committing $3.8 million.
Maybe that helps explain why everyone from Gov. Ted Strickland on down couldn’t get Bill Nuti, CEO of NCR and Hurd’s successor, to give them the time of day for the past two years. Who knows, maybe Nuti saw the aforementioned incentive package and decided from the beginning that Ohio wasn’t worth wasting a meeting on.
Bidding for jobs is the name of the game in today’s business world, but, wow. NCR’s move gives you a feel for how cut-throat and expensive that practice is.
Ohio, too, has played this game, winning some and losing others. Last year the state, Franklin County and Columbus put up a stunning $67.6 million in taxpayer money to get Net Jets to add 810 jobs — far fewer than NCR is promising to Georgia — at its Columbus hub.
The line NCR and Georgia officials are putting out is that the company wanted to consolidate operations in Georgia (it has more workers there than in Dayton); that it likes easy access to Atlanta’s bustling international airport; and it needed Georgia’s demographics (the state is rich in 25- to 34-year-olds).
Certainly, these are not irrelevant or unimportant considerations.
But, please. For every great thing about Georgia, you can find an equally good thing about Ohio.
In fact, Nuti never looked, never gave Ohio or Dayton a chance. It’s pretty hard to know about the affordable housing, the easy commutes, the low cost of living, the rich arts scene or the universities if you’re living in New York City and don’t get to town much.
Which brings us back to the money — and the fact that NCR’s history in Dayton didn’t count for a whit.
Husted, of Kettering, said that in one of his multiple conversations with NCR officials in which he was asking for a meeting with Nuti, he evoked NCR’s long history in Dayton and its founder, John Patterson. The official, Husted said, told him, “This is not John Patterson’s company any more.”
Point made.
Plenty of people are saying that Patterson must be turning over in his grave at the thought of NCR leaving the community that he gave so much to. (Besides making his company into a nationally celebrated relief agency during the 1913 flood, he helped build the Miami Conservancy District and campaigned for a more professional city government.)
Fred Bartenstein, who ran the Dayton Foundation from 1983 to 1992, recalls that it was Patterson who started that philanthropy, which is designed to look out for Dayton in perpetuity. Patterson sent NCR’s “director of social welfare” to Cleveland to learn about the Cleveland Foundation. Upon hearing of its good works, he then got his nephew and sister-in-law to help him capitalize the organization.
“He didn’t call it the NCR Foundation or the Patterson Foundation,” Bartenstein said. “He wanted to create a philanthropy that everybody could participate in … one that would be here no matter what companies come and go.”
Would John Patterson, a fierce competitor and industrialist, ever imagine his own company leaving? Who knows, but, before he got so much attention for his efforts during the flood, he did once threaten to move NCR to Schenectady, N.Y.
“Dayton didn’t appreciate him,” reads one newspaper accounting of the history.
NCR watchers have been anxious about the company leaving town since Hurd departed. No matter was too small to worry about whether it would tip the company over the edge. Even the closing of the Stewart Street bridge for so long was seen as a possible excuse.
The most plausible speculation is that Nuti simply had different plans than Hurd, and that no one was going to stop him.
The assumption in Georgia that the company had some attachment to Dayton was, in the end, just NCR’s bargaining chip to play in a game Dayton was never even in.
Permalink | Comments (16) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Economy, Ellen Belcher, Local Business, Local History
Martin Gottlieb: Austria messes around; bids to be the un-Hobson
As you may have heard, President Barack Obama wants to close the American prison for accused terrorists and enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay (on the same island as Cuba). Actually, President George W. Bush said he wanted to close it, too. But Obama has set a deadline — in a year.
Gitmo, as it’s called, has become an international symbol of bad practices: holding people endlessly without trials, concrete charges or contact with the outside world, and, in earlier stages of the Iraq war, mistreating prisoners.
The Bush administration had hoped that by keeping the prisoners outside this country, it could circumvent laws pertaining to other prisoners. The conservative U.S. Supreme Court shot down that stratagem.
Some people have raised alarms about the idea of putting these dangerous prisoners in the states.
However, Obama notes that “Nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal ‘supermax’ prisons, which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists.”
He approvingly quotes Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-N.C.: “The idea that we cannot find a place to securely house 250-plus detainees within the United States is not rational.”
(The president’s speech on the subject, which disposes of many of the alarms raised about his plans, is available at www.whitehouse.gov. Go to “speeches,” then to May 21. The speech label mentions national security.)
But Rep. Steve Austria, R-Beavercreek, is rising above the rational. He has proposed legislation “to prevent the enemy combatants currently housed at Guantanamo Bay from being relocated to Ohio.”
Curiously, Austria’s press release (available at his Web site) does not explain what would be so awful about putting the prisoners here. Because nobody knows how to contain them? Because Ohio doesn’t have the right kind of prisons?
Instead, he settles for noting three times in a brief statement that the Obama administration has put forth no plan for where the prisoners would go.
But he also notes that the House Appropriations Committee has turned down the Obama request for $80 million to close Gitmo and move the prisoners, precisely because there’s no plan. The Senate has also balked, citing the same reason.
One might think that would be enough to handle the situation, eliminating the need for state-by-state bans.
But one must understand the political problems of a freshman congressman in a minority party. He’s not going to get much that’s real accomplished, except maybe to get some money or other federal actions on local projects.
And, as to that, Austria can’t compete with his predecessor, Dave Hobson, a master of the process. Perhaps Austria had that fact in mind when he opted out of the competition for local “earmarks” for this year.
Note: This year. Maybe later, when he gets the hang of things.
Meanwhile, you take the opportunities that present themselves to, at least, look like you’re doing something.
And who’s to say he’s really making no difference? Remember the fellow who said he was working hard to keep wild elephants off the streets? When told there are no wild elephants on the streets, he said, “You’re welcome.”
The thing is, though, a politician does pay a price for the job this way. You become known in Washington for just messing around, rather than keeping it real. You become the un-Hobson. It’s hard to imagine the all-business Hobson engaging in this sort of cheap stunt.
But maybe Austria is on to something. Maybe the state-by-state approach is the right way to handle national issues. Maybe, when we go to war, for example, we should let the states decide one by one which ones will be subject to having their reserve and National Guard units called. The liberal states could say, “Let the red states handle things, if they’re so gung ho.”
Taxes and environmental regulations? Let the blue states have them if they’re so gung ho; let the others opt out.
Austria didn’t invent the hyper-parochial approach to national politics, of course. And a couple of years ago, newly elected Gov. Ted Strickland said he didn’t think Ohio should have to accept Iraqi refugees. His point was that the president had caused this problem; let him and his supporters eat it. Strickland quickly backed off, though.
At that stage, it wasn’t really about where to put refugees. The state wasn’t going to have a say. It was about what kind of reputation a guy wants.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics
Editorial: What’s it mean to lose NCR?
The loss of NCR to Dayton is, of course, more than the loss of a thousand-plus jobs, difficult as that alone is to deal with in these times.
To have NCR’s corporate headquarters here — long after the actual making of cash registers had ended — has added something to the community, something that’s on the cusp between tangible and intangible.
For a community that frames its history largely as a part of the history of American invention, the NCR headquarters building was a modern day testament to that past.
When visitors and schoolchildren are told the history of the cash register, or about NCR’s and Dayton’s role in World War II code-breaking, or even about the historic construction of dams to protect Dayton from floods, having the physical presence of NCR — the descendants of John H. Patterson, so to speak — meant something.
For past generations of Daytonians, the NCR presence meant a great deal more. Lives by the tens of thousands revolved around the institution. NCR is better called an institution than a corporation, because its role went so far beyond making machines, pushing technology and providing jobs.
For decades, it fostered culture and community as innovatively as it improved technology and changed the way America (and eventually the world) did business.
NCR’s profound sense of paternalism linked the company and the community in a special way, creating both a standard and a tradition that, by today’s standards, looks almost quaint.
But NCR’s presence has shrunk and shrunk. Of late, the CEO and his team didn’t even live in Dayton. Now the news comes that the company is moving its headquarters to Georgia.
That announcement comes on the heels of the news that Iams — another, more modern local institution, no longer locally owned — is moving its headquarters to Mason, outside of Cincinnati.
Iams, too, has had a role in the community far beyond doing business, largely in the philanthropy of founder Clay Mathile and his family (which generously continues).
The NCR and Iams news came right as General Motors — once itself the core of the community’s economy — declared bankruptcy.
Phew. What a week.
Life will go on much as before for those not directly victimized by the loss of a job, though the economic ripples that always occur when a company pulls up stakes will be real. For most, however, life and even livelihood do not revolve around companies that dominated the physical and psychological scene of Dayton.
But for people who worry about the definition of a community, about how to make things work in the big picture, what we have here is a symbolic turning point, a moment of truth, a sort of reckoning about the future.
Modern reality strikes us in the face, as if it was worried that it didn’t already have our attention.
Maybe the reality to be confronted isn’t simply that the old institutions aren’t the center of things anymore. That’s long been true. Maybe the point to be focused on now, as our attention is turned back to the matter, is that they won’t be replaced. Not really, not by anything similar.
Now, after all these years, we know that even when potential replacements come along in the business world, they somehow get absorbed into the national scene and eventually move on. Smaller operations dominate. One mustn’t look for the center of things anymore.
There’s still Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, of course. Its economic impact certainly extends well beyond its gates. That can and should become even more true as the search for connections between military technology and the civilian economy goes on.
But those gates are very real. And people in charge inside quickly pass through them on the way out of town. Most of them, anyway.
The connection of the base to the community can be close, but there will always be a sharp limit.
We are pretty much on our own.
Permalink | Comments (42) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Economy, Editorials, Local Business, Martin Gottlieb
