One of the most important aspects of promoting a city is in making it attractive to businesses and as a haven for tourists. In this discussion between one current and two former mayors, we look at how three U.S. cities market themselves. First up, Emanuel Cleaver II, the outgoing mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, and Gene Roberts, the former mayor of Chattanooga, Tennesse, talk about the pluses and minuses of promoting a city in a highly competitive market. And later, Art Agnos, the former mayor of San Francisco, California, discusses marketing a city as a tourist attraction. Contributing editor Susan Cleary serves as moderator.

MODERATOR: Today, there's so much talk about the global economy and high business mobility. Mayor Cleaver, do you feel, as a mayor of a large city, under more pressure to play an active role in marketing your city?

MAYOR CLEAVER: With regard to bringing businesses to town...we sell our central location.... Being in the Midwest, you actually have greater access to both coasts in terms of the availability of staff during working hours. We found that that's a big deal to companies. Many of them hadn't even thought about the time aspect....

We also decided that it's important for us to market our history, which most people don't know about. So we market the fact that this is former CBS newsman, Walter Cronkite's, hometown. This is Walt Disney's hometown. This is the hometown of Hallmark Greeting Cards. Sprint, the telecommunications company, also started here. We try to use the things that people would know about.

And we found that when you compare the cost of housing in Kansas City to most of the major cities in the United States, we are far, far less expensive.

MODERATOR: It's interesting to look at what your advantages are as a city. For example, I noticed that your slogan in Kansas City is "City of Fountains, Heart of the Nation." How did you start that process?

MAYOR CLEAVER: We had to look at what we felt we had that other cities didn't have. For example, we have more fountains in Kansas City than any city in the world except Rome. So our city logo now is "The Fountain...." We thought the best way to market that was to put it into our slogan and into our city logo....

MODERATOR: Mayor Roberts, I understand that when you were mayor of Chattanooga, you won several awards for environmental management. That also seems to be a good way of highlighting the advantages that a city has. Can you talk about how you have used that recognition?

MAYOR ROBERTS: Frankly, the awards gave us a niche: to have been so bad and changed so much in almost three decades. In that time, we've addressed some real problems in the community: air pollution, water pollution, the look of our city. We probably had the worst air pollution in the country in the 1960s. For decades, you couldn't see the city from Lookout Mountain on many days. So we asked ourselves several questions: How do you address the problem of pollution? And how do you put public-private partnerships together? How do you approach the problem of storm-water run-off into the rivers and streams in your city? How do you bring the business community in? All these things, we found, were of a great deal of interest to a lot of cities everywhere.

MODERATOR: Mayor Cleaver, did you find that it makes a difference to a business if you have a pretty downtown or a good environment? Are these quality-of-life issues really a selling point for business?

MAYOR CLEAVER: Yes, they are. The National League of Cities did a study, and we followed up at the local level. We found that corporate executives anywhere in the country live for the most part within 10 miles of their office. If that is the case, then like everyone else, they're going to want to have access to things of beauty. We found that people were very much interested in driving down a boulevard and seeing fountains a few blocks from their home.

MAYOR ROBERTS: Let me follow up on that to illustrate that point. We had one company who visited us who looked at things like taxes, infrastructure, incentives. But the representatives also looked at the school system and what kind of graduates we were turning out. And to the cultural arts scene in Chattanooga. So, yes, companies do look at the kinds of things that Mayor Cleaver was talking about just now. More so than most people imagine.

MODERATOR: What kind of organizations do you have in Kansas City, for example, that help a business come up with that information? Do you have other organizations that you feel have been very helpful in providing the kind of information, the kind of facilitator services that businesses need?

MAYOR CLEAVER: The answer is yes. Recently, I flew to New Jersey to make a presentation with our governor to a company that has just purchased Hoechst Marion-Rouselle, a German pharmaceutical company.... They have a plant here and when the merger is complete, we want them to move to Kansas City. When we went to New Jersey...we took a video with Don Hall, who is the chairman of the board of Hallmark Cards; Bill Esrey from Sprint and others. In essence, they said, "Our international headquarters are located in Kansas City and we wouldn't move any other place." So while it's not necessarily an organization, we clearly call on the corporate community to help when we are trying to recruit new companies to town.

MODERATOR: What about in Chattanooga -- what kind of organizations do you have that will put together a plan to market a city?

MAYOR ROBERTS: In 1983, we lost 6,000 good-paying industrial jobs almost overnight. The county executive and I got together and decided that we had a big job to do and we couldn't do it ourselves. So we went to the business community and brought some of the key folks together, cited the problem, asked them to get involved. One of the ways they helped was to create the River City Company. They put up $10 million -- all grants, no loans. Its job was to begin the task of redeveloping our downtown, to bring new restaurants there, to bring new beauty there.

Later, the River City Company evolved into the River Valley Company, which included not just Chattanooga but some of our neighboring cities and counties. And through that apparatus, the city and county, along with the business leadership and some of our neighbors, now contribute money. In fact, they put in more than we do. That's the economic development arm of this city and this region.

MODERATOR: Do you feel, Mayor Cleaver, a growing international profile
for Kansas City?

MAYOR CLEAVER: Believe it or not, our professional football team, the Kansas City Chiefs, has helped in many ways. We played the Minnesota Vikings in Tokyo this past year.... I went over with the team, and I met with business leaders in Tokyo. We found that in this growing global economy, if you can't compete with the other cities, not only around the United States, but in the world, you're going to lose.

In another area, we were designated as the site for the Midwest International Distribution Center. So we are now in the process of trying to develop so that we can become the center for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) trade route, which runs from Canada through Kansas City down to the state of Jalisco in Mexico.

In fact, in the upcoming mayoral election, that's one of the things that's being discussed. Who can get us more connected with the world economically?.... More and more, you're going to find U.S. cities trying to reach out to foreign markets and trying to get some of those markets established in their cities.

MODERATOR: Does Chattanooga feel that same pressure -- that same competitive urging?

MAYOR ROBERTS: Yes, but we have to do it in a different way from Mayor Cleaver. We don't have professional sports in Chattanooga, so we compete at the amateur sports level. We compete for major softball tournaments across the United States, for example. The city, the county and the university recently put their money together with some private funds and built an Olympic-style softball stadium. We just built a new football/soccer stadium for the university and we will bring in the national championship game to Chattanooga. So we do compete at that level in sports. Sports is big business....

MODERATOR: Mayor Cleaver, what marketing tools do you use that any mayor might have available to him or her? What sort of inexpensive ways does a city go about raising its profile?

MAYOR CLEAVER: By trying to get as many national and international guests to visit the city.... I think giving people the opportunity to come into your city as opposed to buying $35 million worth of air time or travelling around the world is a much better idea. The mayor of Diyarbakor (Turkey), for example, has said he will come to Kansas City this spring. I think having people come in is a far less expensive way of getting the word out than trying to go out to give the word.

MODERATOR: What about the Internet? Kansas City does have a lot on the Internet. Is that a tool that you've been involved with?

MAYOR CLEAVER: Yes, that's intentional. We have a lot of information on the Internet and are trying to do even more through the Economic Development Corporation (EDC), which the state government gave us authorization to create. The EDC is the economic arm of our municipal government. I appoint the board, and there is a president to oversee it. Three agencies come under the mantle of the EDC. One is the Port Authority, which has control of the riverfront, the Missouri River. Because we have river boat gaming, the Port Authority becomes a major player. Another agency is the Tax Increment Financing Commission, which uses incremental taxes to help support development. The other agency is Land Plans for Redevelopment.... Any time we have a major development, we have to assemble land, and this agency has the right and the domain to do that.

Then there is a division called Business Retention, where we try to maintain constant contact with all of the businesses in town. Once a month we have a meeting with a different group of chief executive officers (CEOs) of various companies. We ask them if they have any problems. For instance, "Is the streetlight working? Has the stop sign been fixed?"

MODERATOR: Does Chattanooga have a similar way in which business and local government can interact?

MAYOR ROBERTS: Yes, we do all those things that Mayor Cleaver mentioned in Kansas City: tax increment financing, various kinds of incentives. We do a lot of work on the river.... But we don't have gambling, so we don't get into that aspect of it. But other than that, we do all those kinds of things to bring business to the city.

MODERATOR: Have either of you been involved in any international organizations that get mayors together?

MAYOR CLEAVER: Yes, we have the I-35 Corridor Coalition (named for the interstate highway that runs through Kansas City), and we meet twice a year. The mayors come all the way from Winnipeg, Canada, down to Guadalajara, Mexico. We are trying to become the NAFTA corridor, to take advantage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

[Editor's Note: Mayor Art Agnos joins the discussion at this point.]

MODERATOR: We've talked a little bit about how you market your city to business, but we really haven't talked about tourism, which in itself, is a big industry. Is it also a way of attracting attention of potential investors?

MAYOR AGNOS: Absolutely! We started doing something in San Francisco back in 1988 when I first started learning about sister-city relationships -- the notion of doing more than just cultural and business exchanges, but also offering discount and higher priority to visitors, to business people that were from a sister city. You treat them like a member of a family.... The sister-city relationship gives you a head start. In San Francisco, for example, we worked out a discount for a number of hotels for travelers that came from our sister cities. We also developed a visitor's pass for tourist attractions where sister-city visitors got a discount.

MODERATOR: Sometimes, it's visitors that point out interesting things about a city you might not have noticed. How do you comb your city for ideas on new ways to look at it or new ways to present what you have?

MAYOR AGNOS: Our Convention and Visitor's Bureau does some of that. They also do follow-ups with visitors, where they talk to tourists to see what appeals to them, what doesn't appeal to them. The Convention and Visitor's Bureau is able to fund the research through the visitors' tax, the hotel tax, etc. And they perform those kinds of services, as well as their primary function, which is to seek and develop convention business for the city. Like any business, you're constantly trying to keep up with the customer.

MODERATOR: In San Francisco, does the city government work with the Convention and Visitor's Bureau to bring in businesses?

MAYOR AGNOS: Oh, absolutely. I'm a salesman for the city in that regard. I remember after the earthquake in 1988, one of the first things I was doing -- in addition to making sure the city was getting what it needed to restore itself -- was phoning organizations who were thinking of pulling out their conventions, reassuring them that the city was ready to receive them and that they would have a successful business visit with their convention.

And of course, every mayor goes out with the Convention and Visitor's Bureau to give presentations on the city.

MODERATOR: Are the presentations something that's put together exclusively by the mayor's office?

MAYOR AGNOS: They're done together. The Convention and Visitor's Bureau tells you who your market is and, you speak to them as a representative of the city. After all, you know how to sell your city and so, you incorporate what ideas you want to emphasize.

MODERATOR: Mayor Agnos, do you have any tips for mayors on getting media attention for a city? San Francisco is so well-known, you might not need to do that.

MAYOR AGNOS: It's a lot easier here than it is in some other places. But every city has its attractions. It's just a matter of working hard to sell it.

MODERATOR: Well, I think our time is up. Thanks everyone.

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