Waiting to be discovered

With hundreds of thousands of tourists motoring through each summer to Bar Harbor and Canada, it is a peculiar way to characterize 161-year-old Bangor: a city awaiting discovery.

But the June issue of World Trade magazine does that, with a positive spin that should cause business and promotion interests here to take a fresh look at the concept of regional development.

Newspapers and magazines can go to a great many people, or a limited number of the right people. World Trade does the latter. It circulates 64,000 copies, primarily to CEOs in marketing, manufacturing and export. Big companies and small companies, many are global in perspective, but all have a base somewhere, a home.

In its annual Quality of Life feature, Dennis Donovan of Wadley-Donovan, a relocation consulting firm, was asked by the magazine to pick 10 small communities with built-in appeal for top corporate executives seeking hospitable alternatives to a full-time urban experience. Donovan put pins in the map of the United States and his number seven selection was Bangor.

After cruising north from Fort Myers-Cape Coral, Fla., and Greenville, N.C.; and east from Billings, Mont., Richland, Wash. and Chico-Pardise, Calif., Donovan identified Concord, N.H., and Bangor as “sleeper” communities: “alert, live-wire places with a lot going for them that haven’t been discovered yet.”

The two finished in a dead heat in crime rate (39th best) and Places Rated rankings (175th) of 343 U.S. cities. He liked their uncrowded conditions, available work forces and relatively low taxes, with proximity to Boston-Cambridge schools and the Northeast’s financial centers.

Such independent judgments are easy to accept, but tough to capitalize on. They emphasize what people here take for granted, and reinforce the importance of infrastructure and the interrelatedness of the region.

The asphalt in L.A. and New York, historic centers for corporate headquarters, gets harder each year on spouses and children, and Donovan identified softer locales where executives and their families could put down roots.

But Bangor, by itself, even with its airport and Interstate 95 access, is unlikely to inspire a company hundreds of miles away to box up its customer list and machinery and hire moving trucks.

The companies that find it will see it in a broader context: the University of Maine and the research park in Orono, the Lemforder experience in Brewer, the NYNEX investment in telecommunications, Eastern Maine Medical Center and small area communities providing choice and quality of life.

All are part of a region waiting to be discovered.