Return the phone calls, M. Jay Brodie admonishes his people. Get the little stuff right. Push the sanitation department to install sidewalk trash cans for the litter-bound merchant. Help the guy who needs a zoning change.
"Of such great things is economic development made," says Brodie, the president of Baltimore Development Corp. since January. "I'm not being facetious."
He's really not.
BDC, the city's economic development agency, was bashed in the past for getting the little stuff wrong -- for ignoring messages, losing paperwork and failing to help its main customers, Baltimore's businesses. As the agency's new leader, Brodie knows he'll be judged, in part, on how well that gets fixed.
Nine months into the job, Brodie, 60, and BDC's new, independent board have reorganized the agency, stressed customer service, improved financial expertise, focused their limited resources more tightly, and considered new incentives to lure and keep businesses.
Among other priorities, BDC wants to lure a major distribution center to Southeast Baltimore, float new parking bonds and amass a privately funded economic-development war chest, similar to ones in Cleveland and St. Louis.
Business leaders give Brodie mainly positive early reviews, although all say that it's too soon to judge the true merit of the new BDC. Brodie himself acknowledges that progress hasn't been as quick as he would like. "I'm impatient," he said in BDC offices at 36 S. Charles.
But something else becomes clear in interviews with Brodie and Baltimore business people: The limits to what even a well-run BDC and its 38 employees can hope to accomplish.
Brodie's focus on the minutiae of customer service -- something everyone agrees is needed -- also highlights the fact that there are much bigger, more consequential forces that he can't control. Crime. Sub-par city schools. Global competition and mergers hurting local businesses. A city economic development budget that many believe is far too small.
"I was impressed by his enthusiasm," said Edwin F. Hale Jr., chairman of Hale Intermodal Transport Co. and First Mariner Bank. "Whether or not he has the resources to speed up or help economic development, I don't know. It's easy to be enthusiastic, but it takes funding."
More than 60,000 jobs have disappeared from Baltimore since the 1980s, and while the losses have slowed, they continue. Brodie flatly refuses to promise that they will stop.
