Promotion Pays

After turning over its economic development activities to a private firm, San Bernardino County now boasts that it was the state’s top county in 1985 for attracting new manufacturing plants, up from near last the year before.

During the year, the county attracted 23 new plants from as far away as Japan, Taiwan and Georgia.

The plants, ranging from furniture factories to makers of exercise equipment, added 3,500 jobs initially and a capital investment of more than $100 million.

Key to the turnaround, county officials say, was their restructuring of the county’s Department of Economic Development and hiring of a private firm to manage the county’s industrial promotion activities.

Such a privatization move was modeled after similar efforts by other governments in hospital and prison management, says Robert L. Hammock, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors.

Pathfinders, a Dallas-based economic development, marketing and sales firm which handled the promotion work, undertook extensive marketing efforts domestically as well as in the Far East and Western Europe.

“The major assets of the county are many,” Pathfinders President Joe White says, noting the county’s proximity to major West Coast and Pacific Rim markets and its relatively low land and housing prices. “We just needed to tell the world about them.”