Every Maryland economic development official knows the fable, learned at his mother's knee, of MBNA Corp. and the vanishing bank jobs.
How MBNA grew deep roots in Maryland. How it founded a promising credit-card business in the early 1980s. How Maryland lawmakers capped interest rates and forced MBNA to risk negative real returns -- basically losing money after inflation.
And how MBNA emigrated to a brighter land -- Delaware -- where it employs 8,000 and pelts its environs with greasy gobs of money.
Now a different chapter in the annals of Maryland job repellents is getting a recital, thanks to W. Alvon Sparks Jr.
Sparks is executive vice president and chief financial officer of Geico Corp., the big Chevy Chase-based insurance company owned by Warren Buffett. Having spent most of his career minding ledgers in climate-controlled offices, Sparks is now trekking into the jungle of public affairs.
As the new chairman of Maryland Business for Responsive Government, a Baltimore-based political group, he has shouldered the Sisyphean task of making the state habitable for companies.
His job is to show up frequently in Annapolis and sound off about economic development atrocities. He's warming to his task.
"We spend a lot of time, effort, attention and money up the I-270 corridor attracting high-tech companies, and we gain 250 jobs and think it's a big deal," he said in an interview last week. "At the same time, we lose 1,000 jobs down county and we call it economic progress. I don't understand that equation. I've been singing that song for 10 years."
The county in question is Montgomery, site of the formative trauma in Sparks' development opinions.
It was 1988. Geico was outgrowing its Chevy Chase space, so it wanted to put up another building next door. Because it owned a mostly vacant 26 acres on the site, it figured that wouldn't be a problem. It figured wrong.
Four years and countless zoning applications, hearings and site plans later, Geico didn't have approval for the building, which it had agreed to completely redesign to satisfy the neighborhood.
"By the time we got to 1991, early 1992, it became apparent that we were going to outgrow the building before we got though the approval process," Sparks said.
Instead of expanding in Maryland, Geico moved a regional headquarters from Chevy Chase to Stafford County, Va., near Fredericksburg, where it went from an architect's pencil to ribbon-cutting in 16 months.
Geico employs 3,000 in Stafford County, compared with 1,400 at its headquarters in Chevy Chase. It continues to grow in Virginia, having transferred mainframe computers there as well as a national mailing operation. And Geico, which is trying to develop its 26 acres, still hasn't gotten Montgomery County's approval.
Sparks, who has dealt with Florida, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Virginia, rates Maryland "at the bottom" in welcoming economic development.
Several things should be said in Maryland's defense.
Montgomery County is not Maryland. Montgomery County has acute NIMBY syndrome, and its allergy to Geico comes largely from local activists. The Geico jobs in Fredericksburg are good but not great -- many are telephone jobs that start at $20,000 a year -- and Sparks acknowledges that they all wouldn't have fit in Chevy Chase.
Both Maryland and Montgomery are getting friendlier for business.
Sparks "is probably not off the mark in terms of the processes and regulations and bumps along the road that he had to encounter," said Montgomery spokesman David Weaver. "But we have, over the last few years, not only changed our image, but changed some of the process. We've streamlined some of our permitting process."
Sparks himself doesn't come close to saying Maryland is terrible for business. "For an insurance company, Maryland's not a bad place to be" -- and far better than Washington, where Geico was domiciled until the mid-1980s, he said.
Unlike many business leaders, he doesn't lunge at the chance to attack Maryland's high personal income-tax rates. Personal taxes "are reasonably well down the line" in considerations for corporate site location, he said, and far behind quality of life and labor force.
But his compliments for Maryland make his criticisms more credible.
For all its improvements, the state is far behind its competitors in getting local and state officials to march to the same economic development drum, he said. Competition between localities is counterproductive, he added, and county councils show signs of sabotaging Gov. Parris N. Glendening's Smart Growth policy.
Virginia, he said, is ahead in all these areas.
"If you were talking about East Coast and West Coast, it'd be one thing," he said. "But here you're talking about two adjoining states, and the differences are significant."
Pub Date: 3/07/99