AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF — BOISE, Idaho
Corpus Christi wants desperately to be another Boise.
Corpus Christi is an oil city, a military city, a city with an economy that lags behind other places. Boise, a city of comparable size with a similar economic history and in an isolated part of the country, is an innovative technology city with a penchant for creating wealth and jobs.
Boise is a City of Ideas, like Austin and Portland, Ore., and Dallas and Atlanta, and it has become a magnet for talent and creativity. That these magnets are exerting their pull on the best and the smartest from old-economy cities is not lost on the leaders in Corpus Christi.
They've expanded their economic development strategy, looking to a City of Ideas for lessons. They've been to Boise and returned as believers that Corpus Christi can be remade in its image. Boise has its mountains and a river running through downtown and the recreation that goes with them. Corpus Christi has its bay and the Gulf of Mexico beyond, a promise of waterfront living for people who do not know what Corpus Christi has to offer.
Corpus Christi's leaders know, however, that their city will not prosper by simply improving the quality of life. Corpus Christi has no technology base, and employment in the refineries has dropped steadily.
Boise has been a small but sturdy center of technology for more than 25 years and appears poised for dramatic economic growth in the coming decade.
Corpus Christi leaders know that their city must offer stimulating, well-paying jobs to lure and retain young workers. A City of Ideas, they learned, is led by its entrepreneurs and its innovators rather than its elected officials and bureaucrats.
"You know a city has made it when its economy policy is set by the business community rather than the political structure," Corpus Christi Council Member John Longoria said. "I think we've had our creative community beaten down by naysayers with an agenda to stifle growth. Well, they got what they wished for."
The Boise boom
In the decade that ended April 1, 2000, the population of metropolitan Corpus Christi grew by 8.8 percent, to 380,783 people, according to the census. During the same period, the Boise metropolitan area grew to 432,345 people, a 46.1 percent increase. Corpus Christi ranked 175th in its rate of growth and Boise seventh, just behind fifth-ranked Austin, which grew by 47.7 percent during that decade. Idaho demographers predict that, by the end of this year, metro Boise will add another 45,000 people.
Boise watches Austin carefully, admiring its economic growth and cultural dynamism. Boise's leaders repeatedly liken their city to the Austin of 10 or 12 years ago. They pay close attention to how Austin grows and how its leaders respond to the stresses on the city's infrastructure, particularly traffic.
For the first eight years of the past decade, Boise's technology economy grew by almost eight times the national average, according to a study by the Milken Institute, a Calif.-based economic research organization. Corpus Christi's tech growth was less than half the national average, the study said.
Relatively well-paying jobs in the oil and gas industries in Corpus Christi have been disappearing faster than the national average, a Corpus Christi Regional Economic Development Corp. study concluded.
Not surprisingly, Corpus Christi's per capita income of $21,326 in 1998 lagged well behind Boise's $26,461 and was among the lowest of any metropolitan area its size in the country, the Milken Institute study said. Its growth in per capita income and in employment was also among the lowest, but Boise topped each list in the Milken study.
Boise leaders love to cite the endless positive rankings: Second in the country in the rate of growth in high-tech companies during the 1990s. Top 10 in high-tech and overall job growth and percentage increase in salaries. First in the growth of patent filings per capita. Seventh in the number of a skilled workers arriving from other states. Boise is the sixth best place to do business and advance a career in the United States, according to a recent Forbes/Milken Institute survey.
"This place just stinks of opportunity, just reeks of it," Boise attorney John Eustermann said, relishing the brashness of what he's just said. "Things are changing fast here. . . . We're in Boise for a reason. It's pretty cool."
Leaving Austin
Boise in the morning, from Goldy's in Hyde Park to Guiseppe's Coffee Shop downtown, is alive with such white-collar workers as Eustermann: young, Euro-sharp, connected to the rest of the world by cell phone.
Tony Hauser embodies the young-innovator ethic. The 31-year-old University of Illinois graduate and his wife, Lisa, who grew up in Paris, Texas, and graduated from Southwest Texas State University, came to Boise from Austin. The couple met at Dell Computer Corp. and later went to work at Micron Technology Inc., the largest computer chip manufacturer in the world. Micron employs 10,000 people in the Boise area. Dell employs about 16,000 people in Central Texas.
After about 18 months at Micron, Hauser left and launched WebMillion.com Inc. The idea for a free online lottery financed by advertising was ridiculously simple and almost immediately profitable. At its height in 2000, WebMillion attracted 150 million page views every month. Hauser and his other investors sold the company for $15 million before the dot-com crash.
Until last Monday, when he started as a sales and marketing specialist with Provizio, a competitive intelligence research company in Boise, Hauser stayed home with sons Colin, 2, and Mason, 7 months. Most days were spent at Camel's Back Park, a lovely green expanse leading to foothills veined with bike-and-hike trails.
This, Hauser says, pointing at the hills, is why so many people are coming to Boise and staying. Just 16 miles north is Bogus Basin, wonderful skiing for a $199 season pass. Two hours north is Sun Valley. The Payette River to the north offers world-class whitewater rafting. At noon, workers don waders and fish for trout in the Boise River running through downtown.
Hanging in the Hausers' garage next to the BMW and the SUV are mountain bikes, skis, snowboards and flyfishing equipment.
"If I didn't live here, the only other place I'd live is Austin," Hauser said. "Lisa is a Texan who never wanted to live anywhere else. Now I couldn't get her to leave. What makes this such a great place is the optimism."
This optimism expresses itself in risk-taking. Entrepreneurs in the second half of the past century built modern Boise. Harry Morrison built an internationally competitive construction and engineering company, Morrison-Knudsen. The first of Joe Albertson's chain of grocery stores is still in business.
And then there is the man whose house sits next to the huge American flag at the top of the only foothills hummock, green and manicured as a golf course.
J.R. Simplot made a fortune in Idaho potatoes, the ones McDonald's insists on using worldwide. But he got to be a billionaire with faith in a couple of Idaho brothers who, in Dallas in 1978, developed a better way to make a computer chip. Ward and Joe Parkinson and a third founder, Doug Pitman, thought Boise was as good a place as any to make the chips.
"There is a story they tell here about J.R. Simplot," said Phil Reed, who founded the first computer store chain, Computerland, in 1981 and has been an investor and consultant in tech businesses in Boise for a decade. "These fellas came to Simplot and showed him a little handful of sand. They told him they could turn it into something they could sell for $8. He said, 'I'm in.' "
The development of Micron, just five years after Hewlett-Packard Co. came to Boise, gave the city the same kind of early technology foundation that Texas Instruments Inc., Motorola Inc. and IBM Corp. gave Austin. Since then, Boise's technology community has grown to more than 400 companies, as many as 150 of them started with some connection to Micron or Hewlett-Packard, according to the state. These technology companies employ more than 18,000 people.
Early on, Hewlett-Packard hired Steve Hodges, who grew up in Wichita Falls and earned degrees in electrical engineering and business at the University of Texas. Hodges made $15 million selling his first business, making computerized change mechanisms for soda machines. He started three more businesses, including the one he founded in 1999, Telemetric, maker of remote monitoring and control equipment.
"I'd already decided I wasn't going to leave Texas, but I came here and really liked it," Hodges said. "I love Austin, but even 20 years ago I was worried the city was getting too big. Boise still has a small-town atmosphere. I'm an outdoors kind of guy, a triathlete. This place is perfect for me. It is a place for individuals, a place for innovators. I could do what I do anywhere. This is where I want to be."
The values of entrepreneurship and outdoor recreation are coupled repeatedly as the reasons people have come to Boise.
"They are reasons that allow me to attract sharp, well-educated employees who can pick where they want to go," said Bob Lokken, founder of the business software company ProClarity. ProClarity has doubled its staff every year for three years to 120 and expects to do it again this year in spite of the sluggish economy.
Twenty years ago, micromanagers were throttling Boise, Mayor Brent Coles says. For years, city leaders blocked a shopping mall, demanding that frustrated retailers locate in a downtown center. They ordered buildings razed while retailers balked. Empty lots, like missing teeth, made downtown seem even more abandoned.
In 1983, a group of citizens staged an overthrow of local government. Dirk Kempthorne, who became mayor, is now the governor of Idaho. Coles served on the City Council for 10 years and became mayor in 1993. As a past president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Coles has watched carefully to see what works in cities across the country. What works, Coles says, is assuming that business is good for Boise.
Idaho has a law prohibiting cities from giving incentives to businesses, Coles says. Boise works to make things as easy as possible for a business that follows the rules to get up and running, he says.
In addition, Coles has focused on improvements in the infrastructure, anticipating the growth that came with the technology boom of the 1990s. The investments included a $100 million plan for an airport upgrade and a $50 million wastewater treatment plant. In May 2001, taxpayers approved a levy to raise $10 million to buy vast stretches of the foothills to keep them public, he says.
And, with an eye on Austin, Coles has embarked on a plan to persuade voters to support a light-rail system, something he believes Boise should build before traffic becomes untenable.
"This is about planning for the future and competition," Coles said. "Do you know how many times we compete with Austin? Every single week. We have a chance to see what other cities do and don't do. We can truly become a great city if we continue to make good decisions."
Creative in Corpus
If Boise is Austin a dozen years ago, Corpus Christi is Boise just after Kempthorne and Coles were elected. Leaders want Corpus Christi to grow but must overcome past rifts to make it happen.
"It's going to sound like rhetoric, but there is a feeling that, for the first time in a long time, a creative and dynamic leadership has been given permission to succeed," City Council Member Mark Scott said. "We know the quality-of-life deal is very important."
A vote in April 2001 supporting the dredging of Packery Channel is symbolic of that importance, Scott says. As with the mall issue in Boise, Corpus Christi warred for more than 30 years over the project to create a channel between Corpus Christi Bay and the Gulf of Mexico on Padre Island. The channel would give Corpus Christi a direct access to the Gulf without travelers having to go miles north around Padre Island to Aransas Pass.
Opponents called it a waste of taxpayer money and an environmental mistake. But with a proposed $675 million resort and condominium project riding on the completion of the channel, Scott says, voters believed that Corpus Christi's quality of life would be improved.
Recognizing the importance of a university in the educational and cultural life of the city, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi switched from a two-year to a four-year school in the early 1990s. Boise State University made the same move in the 1960s. The upgrading of programs in business, applied technology and allied health is an effort to keep young people in the Corpus Christi market, says Robert R. Furgason, the university's president.
The Harte Research Institute at the university, which has yet to be built, is an attempt to create something unique, the first research laboratory focusing solely on the Gulf of Mexico. A $46 million endowment by Edward Harte, former head of Harte-Hanks Communications, made the institute possible.
But as they have for decades, Corpus Christi residents are waging a fight over a different kind of access to the sea. A group called Plan Our Waterfront wants all development decided by voter referendum.
This fighting sends a message that Corpus Christi isn't a good place to do business, says Dusty Durrill, a local investor. Durrill agrees with council member Longoria that the City Council cannot simply will Corpus Christi to modernize. Corpus Christi is hamstrung without a foundation for technology development. The years of political fighting have discouraged investors. And yet, locals believe, without much proof, that a benefactor like Ed Harte will appear to build a Micron or a Hewlett-Packard, Durrill says.
"We don't have enough of the spirit of venture capitalism or big merchant leaders who want to make things happen," Durrill said. He took hits for it, but Durrill eventually won approval for a statue of the late Tejano singer Selena to be placed on the bayfront. City officials now call the statue honoring the singer, who grew up in Corpus Christi, a small but necessary step if their city is to become a Boise.
"It's all about this city's image of itself," Durrill said. "It's like we're, say, in a time warp among other cities. She's an old gal. To me, you've got to drag her in, hose her off and put a little lipstick on her if you're going to want to take her to the dance."
by Mark Lisheron and Bill Bishop