The most listened to, relevant organization in Annapolis,bar none.
Robert L. Ehrlich - Governor, State of Maryland

"Jobs: The True Measure of Maryland's Prosperity"
A presentation made by Francis P Lucier

Francis P Lucier
Mr. Lucier is the past Chairman of Black & Decker Corporation. He was named President in 1972, CEO in 1975 and Board Chairman in 1979. He retired in 1984. Mr. Lucier served as President of the Maryland Chamber of Commerce, President of the Council on Economic Education in Maryland, and a steering committee member of the Economic Development Council. He coauthored the 1984 Lucier-Moyer Study that examined the critical impediments to Maryland's economic development.

In January 1983, Don Moyer and I were asked by the then Economic Development Council of the Greater Baltimore Committee if we would take a look at Maryland and figure out why we could not attract more businesses. We had just lost the bid for Bell Atlantic and were told we had the best overall presentation, but still we lost.

If we talk about jobs and if we talk about what has to be done as a legislative body, take it out of the abstract and make it personal. We're talking about jobs. Jobs for who? People you know very well: your kids, your brothers, your sisters, people close to you. This state is not going in the right direction, and it hasn't been going the right way for a long time.

In the field of economic development there are competing states that are tough, and the only way you win is to be as tough as they are. People do business with people, and that's a big piece of the how. Don and I developed a grand plan. But we really developed something better than that. We developed the "how to."

I would say the larger group that needs to understand what needs to be done is the business group. My view of Maryland is that the business group has to work even harder in getting its act together than government does. It's fractionalized into several associations, there is no oneness, there is not significant leadership, and that's what it's going to take.

When we started this study we said, let's figure out who's been winning and losing. What will be the measurement? This is key to anything we're going to do, anything you would do. Measure. Find out. Get the facts. Then there is trust.

We used gross personal income as the indicator. Gross personal income is all the income that's made within a state by anybody that's paid anything. We went back 30 years and started tracking who was growing faster or slower and built a list of winners, a list of losers and some in-betweens.

Winners clearly: Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, South Dakota, and New Hampshire. Those are the key ones. In fact, the whole Sun Belt could be put into the winning category Losers: Illinois, Wisconsin, New York, and Minnesota. Turnarounds: Delaware and Massachusetts, who had been on the loser list in a big way but had begun a turnaround. Some in-betweeners were California and Maryland. I think Maryland has slipped but could be in a turnaround stage.

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