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Mobile lawyer Preston Bolt has worked on business initiatives in the city for 40 years. In the past, he’s served as the leader of the Mobile Chamber, represented both public and private entities in business deals and served as counsel to the Mobile Industrial Development Board.
Most recently, he was instrumental in helping create Mobile First, an initiative from the Mobile Chamber and the City of Mobile that asks businesses to pledge to hire local employees and contract with local businesses.
We discuss Mobile First, what he sees as the future of Mobile and how to grow the city without leaving people behind.
Questions and answers have been condensed and edited for clarity.
What are some of the challenges facing Mobile?
In some ways, the same challenges that we had when I first got involved in things — I’ve been involved in education and education reform for probably 35 or 40 years, as sort of my civic involvement. And we still face challenges in trying to deliver a world-class education to all children, to deliver, now, workforce development to all those who need it, to keep flexible as a community so that we can provide good labor and good leadership for the businesses that we’ve been successful in recruiting. So, in that sense, the number one thing I would point to, education, is not much different than it was forty years ago.
But on the other hand, we have had a tremendous amount of growth. And with that comes another set of challenges. Workforce is part of it, but it’s also to determine how new businesses fit with the existing economy, how we best take advantage of the advantages that we already have and build the community that we want to have. We’re in a better position, I think, now than we were when I first looked at all this. But at the same time, we have to keep on our toes to keep people happy. We want people to want to live in Mobile, in this area, and to want to make a career here and to build new businesses and to improve their lives.
What does the future of Mobile look like, in your mind?
Ideally, we will increase our focus on jobs that can be filled by people who are more highly skilled. At the same time, we will have to provide the ability for people to get those jobs. You can’t leave a big part of the community behind that, frankly, came up in jobs that didn’t require a high school education, much less a college education or technical training. And it’s easy to focus on the good jobs without focusing on all the people who need help in being able to take advantage of those jobs. So I think, from an economic development standpoint, our focus needs to be on creating jobs and creating opportunities for people to take advantage of it.
That leads me that leads me to another question. When we talk about growth, I think there’s always concerns that someone’s going to get left behind. How do we make sure that people aren’t left behind? How do we make sure that the growth is equitable?
That is the $64 question. It’s difficult. I don’t know whether you happen to read the NPR blog, or the podcast about money and economics issues, but they’ve been talking about a place called Orick, California, that is next to the Redwood Forest, and the fact that it is a depressed city. And one of the things that economists have learned over the years is that people whose jobs disappear don’t automatically migrate to another job or another place where they have jobs. Instead, they tend to hang on and watch their lives and the lives of their families go downhill. And that is not the situation we’re in, but it is an indicator that people are not as flexible as the traditional economist thought they would be. We have to make it doable for somebody who is trying to work a job, for instance, to maintain their family.
But to achieve a higher level of employment, they’ve got to be trained. And that takes time and that takes money. And how do you make that happen? I say workforce training in a broad sense, not just basic workforce training, but all sorts of training. The goal of education system is to produce people who are qualified workers and citizens, not just qualified workers. Trying to build those folks out of our existing population is a huge challenge. But there are programs that have been successful, at least in pockets, in doing that, and it’s just a matter of trying to replicate it and make it work.
Tell me more about the Mobile First Initiative.
First, there are similar programs around, so we’re not reinventing the wheel completely. We looked at it from our perspective and put our spin on it. Pensacola, for instance, as a program that has been driven by private businesses there for several years and has been successful in changing the outlook on hiring local and hiring disadvantaged businesses. So, we looked at that, and we looked at a number of other programs around. The ultimate idea behind it is that the citizens of Mobile and the Mobile area are putting their resources and their efforts and their energy into recruiting businesses and growing businesses. We will be all the better off if we can increase the amount of participation our local businesses may have in that growth.
If a new industry comes to town, and they bring in 50 people from out of town to work there, and they bring in businesses from other places to build their structures and to put in their equipment, then yes, we gain some revenues, tax-wise. Eventually, there’s growth there, and that’s certainly a much better situation than not having that happen. But we’re all better off if we encourage and are successful at encouraging that business to both hire local and buy local as they as they look for their employees and their services. And secondly, we recognize that there are businesses out there that are minority-owned in some cases, women-owned in some cases, that have lacked the resources to be as successful as other businesses, and we want to encourage utilization of those businesses as well.
When we’re having this conversation about growth and about making sure people aren’t left behind, how does the Mobile First initiative fit into that?
Actually, I think it’s pretty much seamless with that. If you look at it from sort of a Chamber of Commerce perspective, and I was chairman of the Chamber way too many years ago. And I’ve worked with the Industrial Development Board, both as a lawyer for companies coming in and now as their counsel. So, we make a big effort to incentivize businesses to come in, and we will continue to do that. But we also want to want to make sure that those businesses are thinking about giving something back to the community that has recruited them and being an active part of community. And part of that is hiring and part of that is buying and part of that is being located here. We want to see almost the same grow out all the efforts that are being made to support them.
What makes Mobile a great place to live?
The easy answer is people. Look at what people have organized in this community, dating back to way before I was around, with the Senior Bowl or the Distinguished Young Woman of the year. People who are looking forward. You look at what’s going on right now in government, the mayor is constantly looking for ways to improve lots of different areas. That kind of forward-looking thinking is what I think is necessary to make a great place to live.
So, it’s people, but it’s also place. The ability to be on the water in 30 minutes, or certainly within an hour, if that’s what you’d like to do. To be to be out in nature, whether it’s hiking, or whether it’s hunting, or whatever you’re doing, in close proximity. To be able to be on Dauphin Street and have great meals and enjoy yourself in a way that wasn’t there when I first moved here. The resources that are available to one. I used to be on the ballet board many years ago, and what amazed was that we have an opera and symphony and a ballet in a city the size of Mobile that rival those of much larger cities. So, there’s all kinds of culture, low end and high end. I think that’s what makes it a great city.
Margaret Kates reports from Mobile for The Lede.
