UALR magazine
Spring/Summer 2007 • Vol. 3 No. 1
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Q&A with Governor Mike Beebe: Pressing Questions on Economic Development
UALR Magazine sat down with Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe shortly after the end of his first legislative session in which economic development and education were major priorities.
- UALR: There was a time it seemed when tax breaks and a new highway or railroad bypass were the top economic development incentives the state had to land manufacturing jobs. How are we going after the jobs of the 21st century?
- Beebe: I’m taking a diversified approach. There will still be a place for traditional manufacturing recruiting. It’s just a smaller piece of the pie than it used to be. There will still be a need for recruiting and retaining traditional manufacturing. But in today’s world where manufacturing jobs are going overseas… knowledge based industries are where we need to be going.
- UALR: Will the shrinking manufacturing sector mean everybody will need to embrace lifelong learning?
- Beebe: Absolutely. You can’t abandon a generation of people because the world has changed. You have to help those people who need the help to get those skills necessary for them to remain competitive; otherwise, the taxpayers will pay for it in another way. So we might as well have these folks be productive taxpaying citizens with the skills necessary to support themselves.
- UALR: Is the goal of raising the state’s per capita income to the national average doable?
- Beebe: Yes, but first the whole level of public education and skills related to that has to be raised. The one thing we can do is not a short-term, quick fix — and we are doing that. Pre-school will have the greatest impact on raising the level of academic achievement and job skills before kids get so far behind. If you can’t do that, the odds of enticing that person to look at a chemistry or algebra book by the time they get to high school are zero. If you can start them more competitively, then you have enhanced their chances (to succeed).
- UALR: Have education and economic development merged as governmental functions?
- Beebe: When you and I went to college, we got a catalog that would tell what courses were offered, how many courses you had to have to graduate in a major or a minor. In effect they threw that book at you and said, ‘Here, this is your contract. If you like it, fine. If you don’t, that’s fine too.’ Those days are gone. Now, we go to a widget maker and say, ‘We’ve got a building here and it’s empty. You come here and put a business activity in the community and tell us what equipment you want to train workers to be the best you can have. You tell us what curricula you want taught for your employees to be the best workers possible — that’s the curriculum we’re going to teach.’ So all of a sudden you have an educational institution that is customer-friendly to business. That’s how you get competitive with North Carolina or Massachusetts or Indiana or China, or India, for that matter.
- UALR: That’s how UALR’s Donaghey College came to being in 1999.
- Beebe: Exactly. That is my emphasis, that’s my direction, that’s my approach to the tie between economic development and education. But it is not just the colleges, it’s not just the research universities with the biosciences and nanotechnology and the CyberColleges. It’s pre-school, it’s K-12, it’s after-school programs, it’s summer programs. It’s everything on a continuum from the beginning to the end. It’s adult education, it’s workforce training, it’s workforce re-training for workers whose job opportunities have changed and who may not have the skills necessary to remain competitive.
- UALR: Statistics indicate that in the past, 60 percent of Arkansas students are discounting themselves for the highest paying professions before they even get out of high school because they don’t take the tough classes. How do you deal with that?
- Beebe: In some cases, they weren’t taking those classes because their schools weren’t offering them or their schools didn’t have qualified, certified teachers. That’s changing – the 38 units have to be offered. The next thing is to encourage those students that they have the ability to do it. Arkansas is now No. 1 – tied with New Hampshire – in percentage increase of children in Advanced Placement (AP) courses. And Arkansas is the model for the rest of the country for requiring every school to offer at least one AP course, and that will continually expand.
- UALR: Not long ago, Oklahoma saw that Arkansas had created an innovative economic development fund to support high tech efforts. Arkansas established its fund with $6 million. Since then, Oklahoma invested $100 million. Are we doing enough?
- Beebe: This session, we put $30 million of our surplus money into that fund. And I have enlisted (corporate CEOs) Lee Scott, Warren Stephens, Johnny Tyson, Hugh McDonald, and others to raise private money to match it. The business community and Accelerate Arkansas are helping us find economic development tools that work, and we are adapting with what’s working in other states – the Georgia Research Alliance and the Innovation to Enterprise – i2E – in Oklahoma – which gives Maria (Haley, director of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission) and her agency and me the tools we need.
- UALR: When do you expect real results from your new initiatives, like the “quick action” fund?
- Beebe: That was one I talked about during the campaign. The fund is really an innovative tool that gives the state flexibility to negotiate to save jobs, as well as bring new ones on board. For instance, if a company plans to downsize its operations by merging two plants, one in Iowa, for instance, and Arkansas, this fund will allow us to bid for those jobs by offering to retrain our workers to do the Iowa job here in Arkansas.
- UALR: When do you think we will see concrete evidence that these investments are working?
- Beebe: Since the session, we have two major economic opportunities that already are including Arkansas on the short list because of the opportunity for utilizing the tools of that quick action program. It’s a credit to the tools we now have.