After years of misses, state draws bead on elusive economic project

Coming from (thank God for) Mississippi in 2002, I was stunned to learn that Arkansas hadn’t tried to land the Nissan plant.

Mississippi had — and got

it.

It became the first of two automakers now operating in that state with thousands of high-paying jobs.

Mississippi went after Nissan with a full-court press: at the state and federal levels, Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, Delta and hills.

I was business editor of Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger, the state’s leading newspaper.

We likewise put on a fullcourt press, with a steady diet of coverage in the weeks and months leading up to the momentous announcement.

The paper was not cheerleading; it was telling a big story. A business reporter went to Smyrna, Tenn., for a few days to find out everything we could about the impact of a Nissan plant that had been operating there for a number of years. While the story was still hot, we sent another business reporter to Columbia, S.C., who wrote a series that grew out of the Nissan coverage.

The Mississippi plant, which was built at Canton, was hailed as the biggest industrial development since Ingalls Shipbuilding at Pascagoula, which is celebrating its 75th year of building warships and now employs 11,000.

Pristine white, the $2 billion Nissan plant stretches for nearly a mile along Interstate 55 like a palace. It employs 3,300. It is a vision of progress. I kept my media badge from the big day, Nov. 9, 2000.

It may sound corny — not boosterish, I hope — but when I pulled the red badge out of a drawer the other day and read the words “One Vision. One Future” it stirred my soul just a bit. It think that’s called pride.

Not long after I became business editor for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2002, I received a copy of the annual report from the Arkansas Economic Development Commission.

Know what the agency was bragging about? Call centers. There’s not a thing wrong with that kind of work, but they’re not the higher-paying jobs the state has said it needs.

The Democrat-Gazette is not a cheerleading paper either. But I’d like to think that its coverage of business had something to do with Arkansas (“Land of Opportunity”) really going after the next Japanese automaker, Toyota, looking for a place to build a plant.

Arkansas didn’t get to cut the nets down in 2007, but it went after the plant that time. Yet it lost out to, yep, Mississippi.

The same year, former Nucor Corp. Chief Executive Officer John Correnti sought

state support for a steel mill at Osceola, but that fell through, and the mill landed at Columbus, Miss., where it has been a resounding success.

This year, Correnti returned for another go at Osceola with the Big River Steel project. His former employer, Nucor, which now operates two steel mills near Blytheville, mounted opposition to Big River, making the argument that expansion in Mississippi County could force it to shift some of its 1,800 Arkansas jobs to its outof-state facilities.

Well, there should be room somewhere in the expanding Nucor network. Such as the $750 million plant that it is to open in Louisiana in the summer.

There have been other failures in the way of “superprojects.” Arkansas is still the only state in the South without a vehicle assembly plant.

Last week, the Arkansas Senate overwhelmingly approved incentives, including a $125 million bond issue and tax breaks, to make the $1.1 billion Big River Steel plant a reality at Osceola. The House was to take it up but hit a technical snag in committee. As of the deadline for this column on Friday, the House — where there appears to be sufficient support to reach the required 75 percent approval — was to take it up on Monday.

It appears that the lawmakers know that more than 500 jobs paying an average of $75,000 a year is nothing to sneeze at — and that this is no time to blink as opportunity again stares them in the face.