Can Firestone site ever get new industry?

Let’s say Firestone wanted to put a big tire plant inside Memphis’ city limits.

Where would the company build its factory? In 1937, the answer was clear. Land was open and ready up on the Wolf River, near the Mississippi.

Firestone went in there, built on the high table of countryside and made 194.8 million tires over four decades. At its peak the factory employed 6,000 people. That was then. Today, 81 years later, the answer is just as clear.

Where would Firestone put a big Memphis factory? No place. Not in Memphis. Not in Shelby County. And certainly not right away.

No large parcel has been primed for a major factory.

Shovel ready

That point was made quietly in the Boyette report delivered last month to the Greater Memphis Chamber.

The business group hired Boyette Strategic Advisors, a Little Rock firm, to examine city and county government’s approach to economic development.

Among its insights, Boyette noted: “Memphis/Shelby County does not have shovel-ready sites available to submit for project requests.”

Project requests means grants. The state of Tennessee and the federal electric utility in Knoxville, the Tennessee Valley Authority, hand out money to spend on preparing land for development.

Once the infrastructure is in place, Memphis can show off property ready for building on when the Firestones come calling.

Just last winter Toyota chose Huntsville, Alabama, for a car plant over the Memphis Regional Megasite, a vacant piece of state-owned land some 50 miles northeast of Firestone. The megasite had no sewer service. Huntsville’s was shovel ready.

Open secret

Surprised someone from Little Rock had to tell us no shovel-ready sites are available?

Fact is, Memphis commercial real estate brokers and economic developers already know this. It’s an open secret.

Reid Dulberger, chief executive of the city-county EDGE agency, the economic development arm of Memphis and Shelby County government, many times has pointed out the dearth of sites.

Now the new report hangs the shovel-issue up in the air like a target to aim

at, noting “In-state competitors, including Nashville/Davidson County and Clarksville/Montgomery County, have taken advantage of programs like TVA InvestPrep to improve, develop and enhance property. Memphis/Shelby County has not taken advantage of that program.”

The report underscores the urgency, saying: “In 2006-2016 alone, Shelby County lost $2.174 billion in income and over 53,000 citizens based on IRS migration data. In the City of Memphis, the population declined by 1.9 percent from 2006-2016.”

‘Roll up our sleeves’

Lots has been written already about the Boyette study and the related campaign launched early this year by FedEx executive Richard Smith, the chamber’s voluntary chairman.

Contending Memphis’ economy has been stalled for nearly two decades, Smith favors an overhaul of EDGE, a public agency formed in 2011.

EDGE officials say they doing what their charter calls for. EDGE reports 81 PILOT tax cuts and 52 loans has brought $4.8 billion in investment by companies on new buildings and equipment since 2011. These companies in turn hired or retained 26,452 workers paid $70,219 per year on average. And the workers spent $627.2 million at businesses throughout the community.

Sharing the same concern as Smith, Memphis City Council Chairman Berlin Boyd formed a group to examine EDGE. This past week, the seven-member study committee began deliberations. Recommendations will emerge in the coming weeks.

“We’re going to roll up our sleeves and really look at the facts and be objective. How do we get results?’’ said committee member Mark Yates, chief vision officer of the Memphis Black Business Association and former vice chairman of EDGE’s predecessor, the Memphis Industrial Development Board.

Firestone’s prime site

In a city barren of shovel-ready sites, a swath of industrial countryside remains in North Memphis, where a desolate smokestack towers over high brush. This once was Firestone.

While the heavy undergrowth looks like deer habitat, water, electric and sewer lines run up to the property. MLGW’s massive Substation No. 2 stands ready. Empty roads five-lanes wide lead several blocks to U.S. 51. The federal highway bridges the Wolf just before Interstate 40.

For various reasons, the land reverted to nature after the tire plant was closed in 1983. Property records show First Moorehead Investments Inc. sold a parcel on the site, 974 Firestone, for $285,000 in 2001 to Mid-South Junior Golf Association. Plans for a golf school never materialized. Unpaid city property taxes since 2008 exceed $80,000.

Neglected for years, the entire factory site remains prime industrial property, except for one issue – the chemicals Firestone might have spilled. Contaminated soil hasn’t been carted away.

Since Firestone departed, Memphians elected Dick Hackett, Willie Herenton, A C Wharton and now Jim Strickland city mayor. There have been sporadic efforts to improve the site. During Herenton’s second term in 1998, the city sought federal brownfield reclamation money. Now On Strickland’s watch, Memphis is looking seriously at shovelready progress.

Spurred in part by the Boyette report, the chamber last month applied for state improvement grants and site certification on nine industrial properties in the city and county including Firestone.

New Chicago

Strickland was age 22 when Firestone closed. He’s 57 now. Explaining why Memphis let the site remain fallow so long requires thousands of words.

Or boil it down to one idea: No one cared. At least no one with influence and authority cared enough to ensure something happened.

Today it looks like empty. Memphians once called the place New Chicago. More when Firestone was there.The Cook in Memphis Cook Convention Center, Humphreys Boulevard, Sam Cooper Boulevard – the names trace to industrial fortunes tied to New Chicago.

These days, the U.S. Census shows 39 percent of the 17,000 people living in the New Chicago area’s ZIP code 38107 receive food subsidies. Just over 29 percent of the parcels on the tax rolls in 38107 are vacant.

EDGE set out last year to address the blight. The agency sought state aid for improving the Firestone site. The grant was not made. Now the chamber is trying another avenue to win state assistance.

“That site has a lot of stuff working against it,” said Gwyn Fisher, the Greater Memphis regional director for Tennessee’s Department of Economic and Community Development.

“There are environmental concerns, the soil. Any company that moves in there wants certainty” the concerns have been abated.

To provide certainty, reclaim the property, requires leadership.

“Something like this has to have a champion,’’ Fisher said.

Something, usually one person, must see the job through.

“It comes down to leadership,” Yates said. “There has to be a concerted effort to focus on that property as an asset.”

Ted Evanoff, business columnist of The Commercial Appeal, can be reached at evanoff@commercialappeal.com and (901) 529-2292.