BRINGING UP BRENTWOOD
	APRIL 2004

by Howard Sword
Illustration by Peggy Magovern
Photos by Brad Shifflett

I wear a lot of hats while carrying out my responsibilities as Director of Economic Development for the City of Brentwood. I’m frankly having a great time leading the local commercial/industrial development efforts. My favorite part of the job is interacting with the real estate development community in providing suitable locations for development and redevelopment of the business infrastructure.

From Private Enterprise to Public Service
My educational background includes a degree in Architecture from the University of Oregon. I moved from architecture into real estate development, where I was involved as the Director of Onsite Development for Callahan-Pence Properties in Pleasanton.

Following that, I was heavily involved in the initial phases of Hacienda Business Park, which was the initial part of the giant complex off I-580 in Pleasanton It was amazing to watch from the inside how these 950 acres developed. I was involved in the most fun part, the first million square feet of office buildings.

Until 1999 I served in the private sector. For the previous fourteen years I ran my own company that focused on securing land use entitlements. When the opportunity arose to direct Economic Development as part of the Public Sector in Brentwood, I decided to give it a try and found the work to be very enjoyable. The basic tasks are very similar to my work in the private sector, except that now I represent interests on the public side of the equation.

Bringing Together the Parts of the Picture
My background has uniquely qualified me for the job of Director of Development, since I thoroughly understand what the private interests and needs really are. My job involves me in politics, of course, but my activities benefit both the private and public sectors of Brentwood society. I’m a big believer in developing partnerships among interests on both sides of the fence.

After all, the public sector in a free-market society can’t exist without the taxes from the private sector; nor can the private sector exist without the infrastructure and services the public sector provides, such as water, sewer, police, roads.... Businesses require all of these to thrive or, in most cases, to even exist.

Serving Brentwood Business
My role includes a mission to serve those businesses that provide goods, services, and jobs to the community. I do this in a number of ways. For one thing, I serve as an advocate within the city staff for business interests. My advocacy entails, not only explaining the business interests and how those interests benefit the community, but also in expediting projects that businesses need to compete in the marketplace.

In an emerging city like Brentwood, an advocacy task like this often necessitates coordination with Planning and Engineering Departments in order to obtain the required approvals and permits to develop real estate projects that can attract and support new businesses to the city.

My job also includes responsibility to the existing businesses in the Chamber of Commerce to promote the availability of goods and services within the entire trade area. That trade area extends beyond Brentwood to places like Antioch, Oakley, and Discovery Bay.

If We Develop it They Will Come
We promote general coordination with members of the real estate development community by providing such things as extensive primary demographic information to real estate development concerns interested in investing in Brentwood and serving as a primary conduit for information flowing between the city and those interests.

My office also works with employers to bring additional jobs to Brentwood. At this stage of our development, such activities entail encouraging primarily speculative office buildings to lease to smaller businesses. As the city grows, there will be growth trends in the spine of smaller businesses that eventually will support the efforts of larger businesses to move into the area.

The fact is that large companies avoid moving to rural areas because there is no labor base. Such a labor base will never be created in the absence of goods and services that would attract those laborers. So we cannot avoid the intermediate step of growing these smaller businesses, since larger industries cannot move into a community that hasn’t yet put into place an infrastructure of smaller businesses to support the larger enterprises.

Evolving From Village to City
In other words, Brentwood development is engaged in promoting an evolutionary process that begins with the “rooftops,” by which we mean residences. When sufficient family units are in place, area development efforts begin to evolve in the direction of serving local businesses, such as retail establishments, and businesses providing medical, legal, and financial services. Once the general infrastructure of residences and smaller businesses is established, the city will naturally become more attractive to larger employers.

We can summarize the process, as follows: Larger businesses will be attracted by the emergence of a sufficiently large labor base in the area. The existence of the labor base, in turn, is supported by goods and services provided by the smaller businesses, which make the region a desirable place for the residents — the members of the labor base — to live and work.

The final stage of the economic evolution is when large employers eventually respond to the lure of the newly developed infrastructure and move into the area, bringing with them high-paying jobs, and creating what is called a “basic economy” — one that does business on a regional, national, and international basis. These basic economy businesses are the type that do more than simply serve the local population; they create products and services for export outside the community.

Growing Pains
Brentwood development is not yet at the final evolutionary stage, but is at the booming heart of the second stage: putting into place an excellent commercial base. For example, there are more than 50 restaurants in the City of Brentwood, which is a robust number for a city our size. We are participating in development of offices that feed directly into the medical, legal, financial, and real estate development stream. These are the basic building blocks that will eventually permit us to attract larger employers.

As everyone knows, things are really changing around here. My goal for the future of our community is to become the retail and professional job center of the entire East County. We are in the initial stages of redeveloping a vital and thriving downtown, as well as a revitalized Brentwood Boulevard Corridor.

It’s fashionable to criticize development in East County because of the effect new homes and businesses have on the already bad commute situation. However, the development we are engaged in promoting ultimately will provide the only possible solution to the commute. We will move Brentwood away from serving as a job base for business centers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and will establish ourselves as our own job center, moving away from the bedroom community aspects that currently make our two commute corridors twice-daily nightmares.

Luring Appropriate Industry
Brentwood will never provide a home for heavy industry. No rolling steel or paper mills will ever be built around here, because we will never be able to accommodate manufacturing that require huge amounts of materials or deliver finished products requiring vast distribution capacities.

However, the United States as a whole is moving away from that kind of heavy industry. Most of the current manufacturing being created in our country requires materials that can fit into a bobtail truck and deliver products that can be shipped out in a FedEx package, or even over a high-speed Internet connection. Rather than becoming some vast distribution center, we’re going to be become the East County center for manufacturing and shipping such things as miniaturized components, intellectual property, software products, publications, etc.

Over the past several years, Brentwood has become an incubator in which we are developing a vertically integrated labor base. In other words, we have people living in neighborhoods throughout our city who are trained and equipped to serve all the positions in a large company from top- and middle-management through clerical and warehousing.

Brentwood is now offering goods and services, safety, recreational opportunities, and educational opportunities that serve as important parts of the whole package of a community poised for sensible growth.

The Right Stuff
Brentwood has a unique cocktail of human resources to offer large industries that will soon be moving into our area. This differs from, for example, Silicon Valley, which has to import warehouse and support people from the East County or the Central Valley. Here in Brentwood we now have the whole range of employees, all living within a 20-minute commute from any place in the area where a company might want to develop a major resource.

Industries that formerly would never consider locating outside of Silicon Valley, for example, are now being driven by human resource considerations as they search for new site locations. Senior management in those companies are becoming aware of the morale, social, and economic problems of employees who have to spend four or five hours a day sitting in their cars.

The vertically integrated labor base provides a huge advantage for us as we seek to attract these basic economy businesses. Our people are willing to take a 15-20 percent reduction in pay in order to have a commute of an hour a week instead of five hours every day. Our residents work better, since they aren’t so tired. They work cheaper, since they don’t have to commute. They show up for work more regularly, since going to work is so much more convenient. They are more satisfied and more productive.

The Northern California economy is beginning to bounce back and East County is standing at the front of the advance and is beginning to attract the large employers that will serve as the final stage of the evolution.

A Place at the Internet Feast
A lot of the potential for future development is based upon the Internet. Some of the huge basic economy manufacturing projects I’ve been talking about are becoming geographically detached. You might buy a product from HP that was developed in Cupertino, but built in China. The invoice might be processed by a freelance accountant working out of her home in Kona, Hawaii, and when you call for tech support, you end up talking to someone in Delhi, India.

Our country’s burgeoning telecommunications industry is creating many jobs, which can be done equally well in New York, China, or Brentwood. All that is required, once again, is a community that is conditioned to provide the kind of environment that will attract workers who can do those jobs.

We will achieve the final stage in significant economic and social maturation during the next ten years. We need to have patience in the early stages. But patience will be rewarded, since the growth will be exponential.

Picturing our Future
We can see an illustration of the type of development we can expect when we look at the Pleasanton/Hacienda Business Park. We started to develop the Hacienda facility in 1980 and grew it slowly. Explosive growth didn’t take place until 1995.

Drive into the area today. Take in a show at the IMAX theater and grab a meal at Mimi’s. Drive around the flourishing Business Park. The place is a hub of working, playing, and dining activities.

I talk about the three Ps of success: Patience, Perseverance, and Persistence. All we need to do is to stay the course. I know these words sound like mere aphorisms, but beneath the sloganeering facade, these things provide the real key to success.

According to the development vision, our awful commutes become a passing problem. Eventually people will be working as well as living and playing in the East County.

Developing Based Upon the Plan
People should realize that our current development activities are not taking place in the willy-nilly fashion that might be supposed from simply glancing at all the construction taking place around us. A decade ago Brentwood made an irrevocable decision to grow when city leaders began to put together the city’s general development plan. The general plan was adopted in 1993, following two years of research, and Brentwood launched itself on the course that has brought us to where we are now.

Once we embarked on a course of developing our community, going backwards was never an option. The kind of regional development we are undertaking isn’t like running around an athletic track so much as it like skydiving out of a plane. We have to see the process through to the end; there’s no getting back into the comfort of the plane.

We are currently in an exciting but awkward midpoint. We are like a 14-year old boy trying to take control of a tumultuous puberty. We shouldn’t be too dismayed by all the present difficulties; the current development stage is simply a transition that must be passed through.

As we work through the discomforts of our current situation, we must realize that now is not the time to stop. We can pass through the current valley by keeping our eye on the mountain pass that we are heading to.

Choice Between Life and Death
The development of a thriving community can be compared to the growth of a living organism. Death is the only way to finally stop growth. So here we are in a difficult midpoint of the development. Stopping the growth now would kill the whole process, since we can’t unbuild the houses or knock down the businesses that have been built. Big businesses do not want to locate in a community that is not growing. Existing businesses will not thrive in an economically stagnant region.

This is an exciting time to be living and working in Brentwood. Ten years from now we are going to have wonderful stories to tell about how the economic miracle got started. I’m looking forward to watching it happen.