Littlefield: Meeting with suppliers

Littlefield: Meeting with suppliers

By Mayor Ron Littlefield

Thursday was a day of planes, trains and automobiles (actually buses) with an early morning flight from Berlin to Dusseldorf. We had our first special gathering of a couple of dozen suppliers, contractors and service providers interested in our VW project.

The session in a downtown Dusseldorf hotel was an extended five-hour lunch with presentations by state and VW officials and ample time for meeting, greeting and question answering in one on one conversations with members of our delegation. Those attending ranged from giants of European industry to small component manufacturers and even one or two with established ties in our region —an auto carpet manufacturer, for example, with ties to Dalton. In the afternoon, we dragged our luggage onto a fast train and made it to Frankfurt by early evening. I had a great conversation over lunch with Tennessee’s German rep on tourism. He knows our CVB staff and is working on tourism connections for Chattanooga related to our continuing renaissance.

Today (Friday) our second “Invest in Tennessee” session. This is a great process for building regional cooperation with our near neighbors from surrounding counties who are traveling with us. Chattanooga media has gone home and we are now on our own.

Littlefield: Getting interviewed by BusinessWeek

By Mayor Ron Littlefield

Friday morning, Mayor Ramsey, Trevor Hamilton and I were interviewed by Jack Ewing, European regional editor for BusinessWeek magazine. He was interested in the whole story. We loaded him up with facts, figures and materials — including a copy of the News Free Press Extra edition that ran the day of the announcement. We can’t predict what will come of it, but a little more international exposure for our community can’t hurt.

Friday afternoon. The “Invest in Tennessee” session in Frankfurt concluded after another four-hour session and lunch. We had another gathering of suppliers, but the most significant accomplishment (in my opinion) was the opportunity for our regional representatives to hear and meet Dr. Christof Spathelf of VW.

Dr. Spathelf is head of Group Manufacturing Overseas (and that would include us). He was among the original team members that came to Chattanooga early in the year to begin talks with us about the potential plant location. In fact, he is the one credited with advising us to clear the site so that it would be more competitive — which led to the city/county marathon activity to clear and remove brush before the VW team returned in two or three weeks. He was very complimentary about the city, county and state commitment to the project and added that it was just such “intangibles” that made the difference.

After lunch, he fielded questions from members of our local delegation and others. Most interestingly, we met a young man from Signal Mountain — a 1993 graduate of McCallie School who now lives and works as an international lawyer in Germany: Michael Hixson. His late father was one of Mayor Ramsey’s doctors. Small world.

Tomorrow: Munich

Littlefield: Crowds in Munich

By Mayor Ron Littlefield

Saturday, midday.

We take a fast train from Frankfurt to Munich. Riding along the group compare business contacts and share stories about first tier, second tier and third tier suppliers — and speculate about where in the region most will likely want to locate.

Of course, as the train speeds along, we cannot help wondering just what every visitor from back home wonders when experiencing Europe’s high speed rail: “Why can’t we have this in the United States?” Arriving in Munich, we find ourselves in a hotel near the train station and everything else. It’s downtown, but the Saturday shopping crowd looks larger than anything ever seen at Riverbend. Maybe Chattanooga will look like this in a few years.

This is turning out to be a great bonding experience for the regional leaders with the added value of a quick bath in German culture — such will come in handy as we deal with the development adventures that all will encounter in coming months and years. It helps for more of us to be somewhat more familiar with our new friends and — soon to be — neighbors.