The Exodus Scenario Doesn’t Play
With his blue eyes and blue Mercedes, his brushed-back hair and chin carved like the point of a plow, Jay Allbaugh could pass easily for one of those handsome baby millionaires who flutter about south Orange County like so many swallows, chirping the day away on their car phones. What blows Allbaugh’s cover is a slight twang--and his inability to complete a sentence without saying something swell about Oklahoma.
“I’m an Okie,” admits the 35-year-old great-grandson of an original Sooner. “My family, my heart . . . my love is in Oklahoma.”
Allbaugh was dispatched to California a year ago by the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, settling into a small, unmarked office in this shiny new city-town. His mission is simple and audacious: Persuade California businesses to move to Oklahoma.
A likable man, Allbaugh is hardly your stereotypical Okie redneck. He can pronounce business without making it come out “bidness.” He apparently managed to move here without lashing a mattress to his car roof. And not once in two hours did he spit, chew or drink from a boot. Even the way he bragged on Oklahoma was charming, a respite from all the whining you hear these days from Californians.
I got the full pitch--charts, brochures, dewy-eyed descriptions of Oklahoma’s scenic and cultural splendors. “Quality of life,” he said, “you can find that any place. This”--and here he jabbed at one of his charts--”this is what the businessman is interested in. The bottom line. It all comes down to the cost of doing business.” By the time he stopped for air, I was wondering why my people had ever left Bluejacket.
Arizona, Utah, Nevada, the Carolinas, Maryland--seemingly every state in the union--has parachuted in pitchmen like Allbaugh. They work off computerized lists of likely targets, mailing out brochures, nurturing connections, making cold calls. They place ads poking fun at California gridlock, and shuttle in politicians to make deal-closing promises. Tax breaks? Tell us how much you need. Environmental regulations? In our state, bub, we eat spotted owls. Labor pool? Wait till you see how we got cowboys learning computers down at the vo-tech school.
Interstate jousting is old sport. What’s new is the notion that California, poor, pitiful California, might provide easy pickings.
“California,” said Allbaugh, “is a case in point on how not to treat business, on what business environment not to create. Oklahoma, on the other hand. . . .”
So far, he’s pitched about 100 California businesses and landed two. But, he said, 17 more “are leaning.”
I asked him, gently, if he ever felt like a buzzard.
“I’ve had some Californians accuse me of . . . that,” he said. “But basically, the reception from California business has been positive.”
That, I do not doubt.
When California’s governor starts describing the state as unmarketable, a “bad product,” and when business organizations circulate polls indicating that entrepreneurs are poised to defect en masse, then you know we’ve got big trouble--but not the trouble described by Wilson & Co.
Enough Okie cunning survives in my genes to suspect that a bit of a con is being played on California, by Californians, and that raiders like Allbaugh are unwitting accomplices. Some credible studies have concluded that the premise that businesses are fleeing is a myth, but still our governor and business leaders keep banging the drum of defeat. Why?
Try this theory. California business leaders and conservative politicians don’t much like tough smog standards, Cal-Osha, workers’ comp, taxes, permits and a host of other regulatory bogymen. Never have. Could it be they see opportunity in this current round of statewide malaise, a political opening that would allow the rules to be rewritten, softened? Don’t bet against it.
I have a tough time swallowing the exodus scenario. The last time I checked, California’s economy was still larger than those of all but a few nations, the state still enjoyed ready access to some of the world’s great markets, and the population still hovered at something like 30 million.
Even Allbaugh has been impressed, dazzled by everything from Southern California’s climate to the amount of venture capital floating about the state. When his 6-year-old visits, she can’t get enough of Disneyland and the beach. “And that San Francisco is something,” he said. “I had no idea.” In fact, while Allbaugh insisted that he’d someday be heading back to Oklahoma, the more I listened to him, the more I wondered if perhaps I’d met Californian No. Thirty Million and One--the Okie who came in from the cold.
