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Pittsburgh Mayor Murphy: Introductory Remarks It’s clear that we have not ever marketed ourselves very well. The Pittsburgh Regional Alliance has spent the last three or four years trying to figure out how to position themselves to do that. And I would say right now with minimal, if any success. That is missing. I think we have built the raw materials -- the airport, the universities. I think we have enough of a technology industry growing here that we have some reputation.
I probably talk to a dozen companies a week, some here some not here, about locating here. With the ones that are here, it’s a matter of figuring out how to accommodate them. With the ones that are not here, we’re not on their list. They would not even think of Pittsburgh. You just had in your paper a small article about Dell computer making a decision to locate a major facility in Nashville. Dell, in fact, was looking around for three years. I didn’t know that. I found that out shortly before they announced it. Dell needed to be near an airport, because they fly out all the computers they put together. That was 3,500 jobs. We probably would have been able to make a shot at that. Six weeks ago, we went out and bought our first home computer. We went to Gateway in Ross. You go in and order what you want and they build your computer. It gets to your house in two days, shipped by UPS. It comes from Sioux City, South Dakota or Hampton, Va. I asked the salesman how do we get one of those facilities in Pittsburgh? He gave me the name of the president. I called him up, and he said "It’s funny you mention it, we are outgrowing Hampton, and we are looking around, and Pittsburgh is not on our list." I spoke to the guy handling their real estate, and now they are considering Pittsburgh. Those decisions are being made every day, and nobody is putting us on the list. That’s the biggest problem. We need to solve it collectively. If Gateway comes, they are not coming to Pittsburgh. They would be going out by the airport. To the extent that we in this region compete with each other, we’ll fritter away our opportunities. The difficulty we face in the city is that if they go out to the airport, the city doesn’t benefit directly. Other communities, like Minneapolis, St. Paul have attempted to address that through a tax-base sharing mechanism. That would be sacrilegious for these guys (Roddey and Wecht) to talk about publicly, but it is ultimately the bottom line. And we will be forced to continually compete with each other if we don’t address that issue.
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