Michigan business executives and the state’s governor wooed about 50 business leaders and other officials in Washington on Thursday, trying to prod them into investing in the Wolverine State.
Ford Motor Co. executive chairman Bill Ford Jr. said the success requires a better job of telling the story of Michigan.
“The image of Michigan and the image of Detroit clearly plays into our recruiting capability,” Ford said. “The image of our region is behind the reality now, and hence we are in an outreach mode to talk to the ex-pats — people who had a tie to Michigan.”
The group is focused on people who lived in Michigan or went to school in the state.
“We’d like to re-educate them about what either their home or adopted state is up to — and they’re often very surprised,” Ford said, adding that Michigan is the perfect place to host the automaker’s continued growth.
Gov. Rick Snyder said the state’s economic climate puts it in a good place to host additional growth. “Michigan’s well positioned to continue to be a global powerhouse in terms of manufacturing and exporting products,” Snyder said.
Snyder noted that Michigan is home to 375 research and development centers in the auto manufacturing and parts sectors and to 75 percent of the North American R&D in the auto sector. “That’s huge,” he said. “We’re the place to be.”
He said autonomous and connected vehicles will be built in Michigan, not California. “We clearly have the eco-system to be the world’s leader,” Snyder said.
Doug Rothwell, president and CEO of Business Leaders for Michigan, said the state has taken huge leaps: “We’re not Pollyanna-ish in the sense that we’re digging out of a hell of a deep hole here in Michigan. Nobody had it much worse than we did, but we feel like we’re making tremendous progress.”
Michigan still is recovering from the single-worst economic period since the Great Depression. The state still has the nation’s fourth highest unemployment at 7.5 percent, which is significantly above the national average of 6.1 percent in June.
Other stops have included New York and Chicago.
CMS Energy Corp president and CEO John Russell was part of the tour. The parent of Consumers Energy is the state’s seventh-largest employer, and spends $2 billion in Michigan every year on goods and services.
The utility plans to spend an additional $1 billion in the state over the next five years.
Russell said young people are flocking to urban cores: “We need to create downtowns where people want to live.”
He said he thought people wanted to come to Michigan to live by lakes and in subdivisions — but that’s not what younger people want. Unused buildings in Jackson and other cities are being turned into lofts. “It works in San Francisco. Why can’t it work” in Michigan, he asked.
Source: MEDC
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