Feature: How U.S. navy town thrives after base closure

Charleston, South Carolina is an important deep-water port in the U.S. east coast. A naval base was set up there in 1901 and became the major economic driver for Charleston and its surrounding area in the later 100 years.

In 1993 due to the end of Cold War and defense budget cut, the U.S. federal government made a decision to close the naval base in three years, depriving the backbone of local economy.

"It was a huge blow to us," said Keith Summey, Mayor of North Charleston City, memorizing the closure of the naval base.

"We were pretty well-known as a navy town. It (naval base) was at that time the largest employer in the great Charleston area," Summey told Xinhua.

The naval base has been the economic engine for Charleston for almost 100 years. Most of the business of Charleston was established to provide support for it. The closure of naval base not only caused people working there to lose jobs, it also made other local business cut jobs and withdraw investments.

"A third of the economy of the whole region was gone and 20,000 jobs were lost," Mitchell Bohannon, former CEO and current consultant to Thomas & Hutton Engineering told Xinhua.

However, the closure of naval base didn't bring Charleston to its knees, instead it became "a blessing" for the local economy as it united the local public and private sectors and transformed Charleston into one of the nation's top 10 metro areas for job recovery and economic growth.

As an important local business leader contributing to the rebound of Charleston after the base closure, Bohannon said, "nothing bring communities together like crisis. It was a real economic crisis on the horizon if these communities did not do something to start generating jobs."

Charleston County and neighboring Berkeley County and Dorchester County changed their previous competing relationship and came together to tackle the crisis soon after the U.S. government announced the decision to close the naval base in 1993.

"When base closure was announced we had a meeting with representatives of all the local governments in the tri-county. We have 52 people there representing 52 different governments in the tri-county," said Summey, who was Chairman of Charleston County Council at that time.

With the help of Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce (CMCC), the three counties established Charleston Regional Development Alliance (CRDA) in 1995 to unite public and private resources in the three counties to attract investments and help business grow in the local area.

"There was tremendous cooperation between public and private entities. We work really hard to try to bring jobs into our community," Bohannon said.

In the first two years after the closure of the naval base, about 20 companies were attracted to invest in Charleston region every year, according to CRDA.

"When the public sector and private sector really work hard together we can accomplish really incredible things happened in the economy," said Bohannon.

In addition to the establishment of regional development alliance, the CRDA and CMCC began to make a "Five-Year Plan" to guide economic and social development through setting development goals and giving recommendations.

To make the "Five-year Plan" really fit the local needs, about 500 local stakeholders from a diverse range of public sector, private sector, nonprofit, and educational organizations were invited to join in the plan making process, and 80 of them are formed an advisory group to guide the process.

"CRDA and Charleston chamber facilitate it and fund the process. The process has really became a very collaborated efforts among us in public, private and NGOs," said Bohannon. "So the final product was not a product of CRDA and chamber. It' s a product of this collaborated process of the community."

"Each of the five-year plans we look at them at a yearly basis to make sure how we are tracking against the plan. Are the targets and recommendations still accurate?" Claire Gibbons, director of global marketing & communications of CRDA told Xinhua. "They really are living plans. They are adjusted each year of the five years," she added.

The tight cooperation among public and private sectors has transformed Charleston into a "very business friendly region," which became an important reason that companies and talents moved here in the past 20 years, where they can enjoy efficient government service, qualified workforce and cozy living environment.

Today, not only large enterprises like Boeing, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo have come to invest and build factories in Charleston area, small and medium-sized enterprises have also enjoyed quick development for supporting those giant companies and local market. The region has embraced a lot of growth points from tourism, aerospace, automotive, information technology, life sciences to logistics. The port of Charleston became the fourth largest port in the U.S. east coast in 2014.

Since 2009, Boeing has invested over 2 billion U.S. dollars in Charleston area building a 787 aircraft assembly plant and relevant research and development centers, creating more than 7,000 jobs.

Summey said to help Boeing build their plant more quickly and save money, he assigned a government building inspector to their site "24 hours a day."

Warren Helm, director of Quality, Site Training and Workforce Development in Boeing told Xinhua that investing in Charleston is a "very very big decision" for Boeing, and the local workforce training program played an "absolutely critical" role.

"What they did is we gave them our requirements initially for our workforce, they help to recruit and train them," Helm said.

Marty Sergi, CEO of Viva, a company recycling waste tires in South Carolina with a Chinese partner Jingxin Group told Xinhua that Charleston' s friendly business environment greatly reduced the cost of doing business there compared to other major U.S. port cities in the east and west coasts.

"If I put my plant in New Jersey, it will cost me about 20 percent more to land the same product in Beijing," said Sergi.

Besides good business environment, "quality of life" is also an important factor to attract outside talents here, Kevin Eichelberger told Xinhua. Eichelberger moved from Atlanta, Georgia to Charleston with his wife in 2008 and started his own e-commerce company, Blue Acorn.

"There is a much bigger pool of talent here than it has been, dramatically more," said Eichelberger, as his company developed from a single-staff company to a company that employed about 130 people in the past 8 years. Endit