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The economic development agencies of Riverside and San Bernardino counties join together with the Los Angeles Port Authority and UC Riverside. The first goal is to get more high-paying manufacturing jobs into the region.
Move over Inland Empire Economic Partnership?
There’s another entity trying to bring jobs to Riverside and San Bernardino counties, only this one is trying to do it on an international scale.
Inland Southern California Link iHub is made up of San Bernardino and Riverside County’s economic development agencies, the Los Angeles Harbor Department and the University of California, Riverside’s Center for Economic Development & Innovation.
The organization, which has yet to establish its budget, held its first meeting last month, in Riverside, and is scheduled to meet again in November. It plans to meet every three months, with the Riverside County Economic Development Agency serving as the lead agency.
The organization is scheduled to last five years but will undergo an occasional review, said Cindie Perry, director of the San Bernardino County Economic Development Department.
Officials from UC Riverside will act as advisors to the coalition, and try to come up with ways to diversify the Inland economy while getting foreign countries to invest in the Inland region.
“The Inland Empire is going to have a seat at the table,” Perry said.
Broadly speaking, the coalition is an economic development partnership that wants to create more high-paying jobs and increase job retention, said Imran Angelov Farooq, the group’s chief administrator.
Its main goal is to bring more manufacturing and health care jobs into Riverside and San Bernardino counties, to reverse the trend of those jobs – especially manufacturing – being shipped to China, India and other countries overseas.
That’s a tall order given California’s reputation for being hostile to business in general and manufacturing in particular, with its high taxes and tough environmental laws.
But Farooq, a partner with The Omnius Group, an economic development firm that finances public and private partnerships throughout Southern California, believes the new organization has set reachable goals.
For years, the two-county region has been seen by most international businesses as a secondary market, a place to go if they couldn’t find an adequate location in Los Angeles or Orange County. But there’s reason to believe that perception might be changing.
“I really believe that a lot of industries, manufacturing and otherwise, want to come to Southern California, and that we can get them to come to the Inland Empire,” said Farooq, who helped put Inland Southern California Link iHub together. “As it is, we’re only getting a few of those.”
One such move was becoming part of the state’s Innovation Hubs program, which is trying to do throughout the state what Inland Southern California Link iHub is trying to do in the Inland Empire.
“The Hubs program is a brand, so that gives us some credibility,” Farooq said of the state certification the organization received last October. “It’s good that the state let us into that, because it raises our profile.”
More than 80 percent of the goods that are shipped through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach pass through the Inland Empire. With its skilled workforce, available land and economic development incentives, the region should be able to persuade some overseas businesses to locate here, Perry said.
Including the port authority in the coalition was crucial because it has direct experience with China, potentially a major source of manufacturing jobs.
“It’s always a good thing when port-related businesses expand in one of our counties,” Perry said. “When that happens the impact is felt on a local, national and global level.”
The coalition plans to pursue logistics jobs, where the Inland Empire is already strong, along with high-tech and manufacturing jobs, which are especially coveted because they pay well and encourage innovation, Perry said.
For the coalition to work it must develop “a new mindset,” one in which two rival economic agencies to work together rather than compete for jobs as they normally do, according to Perry.
That means if a business is a better fit for Riverside, the San Bernardino County EDA will do everything it can to secure those jobs for Riverside, and vice versa.
“Our first job is collaboration, getting each agency cooperating with everyone else,” Perry said. “We aren’t competing, so it does no good for one county to try to steal jobs from the other. The goal is to get jobs into the Inland Empire.”
The coalition isn’t starting from scratch in its efforts to attract foreign investment. The Riverside County EDA manages its own full-time office of foreign trade, which it formed in 2009.
Riverside County also operates four foreign trade zones – in which foreign companies are given relief from tariffs and other taxes in exchange for locating there – and it has executed bilateral trade agreements with Canada, Japan and Croatia.
Just getting four diverse agencies to agree work together is an accomplishment, particularly when two of them are rival economic development agencies, said Jim MacLellan, director of trade development for the Port of Los Angeles.
“If it’s done correctly, this can be very successful,” MacLellan said. “It’s just a matter of figuring out where our strengths are and where we can be successful. It’s an aggressive approach to economic development, which is a good thing.”
Despite some similarities, Inland Southern California Link iHub is not in competition with the IEEP, the Inland Empire’s premiere job attraction and economic development agency.
“They’re trying to get [domestic] businesses to come here,” MacLellan said. “What we’re trying to do is more international.”
Now is a good time for the Inland Empire, or any region in California, to try to attract foreign businesses and encourage foreign investment in their market. Not only is the U.S. economy improving but the cost of doing business in some foreign countries is going up, MacLellan said.
“We’re really seeing that in China’s coastal markets, where they’re starting to look to cut costs,” MacLellan said. “We also have a more educated workforce, which is attractive to a lot of industries. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture, but I think the timing for this is good.”
