Where’s the blip?

For two years running, consultants from around the country have come to Maine to assess the state’s prospects for attracting new employers. The assessment, in the jargon of the trade, is that on the big radar screen of business site location, Maine doesn’t even make a blip.

The consensus of the consultants, brought here by Maine & Co., a nonprofit agency that serves as the first point of contact for relocating businesses, is that Maine has the right stuff to compete — the willing work force, the regulatory climate, the incentive packages — but it hasn’t gotten the word out. Its image is as a nice place to take a vacation, not as a great one to do business.

But maybe the consultants are just being polite. Maybe Maine just doesn’t measure up to its 49 sovereign competitors in the nuts and bolts of commerce. No one seems to know and it’s time to find out.

Maine has launched dozens of economic-development initiatives during the last couple of decades. Some have disappeared over the horizon without a trace. Some are still foundering around. Precious few have brought cargo of any discernable value back to home port. Now the talk is that Maine should shift its promotion emphasis from brochures and web sites to TV ads and face-to-face trade missions.

Before one dime is spent on prime-time ads or airline tickets and hotels, Maine must determine if the problem is the medium or the message. It cannot assume that a hard-driving CEO ignores solid documentation that Maine is a good place to grow because all he or she can think about is lobster and sailboats.

Those who toil in the state’s economic-development field first must determine where Maine stands. Data from other states on taxation, regulation, incentives, assistance and all the other concerns of business is readily available. That data must be gathered up and arranged in such a way that Maine can see precisely where it stands. There is no point is combating the Vacationland image if that is the best thing Maine has going for it.

And speaking of messages, a consistent one would help. The raging controversy of recent days is whether the income of Maine workers is rising, failing or standing pat. The annual income and poverty survey by the U.S. Census Bureau suggests decline and state officials have been working overtime to refute it.

Yet on the Maine & Co. web site is this testimonial from D. Don Scheldahl, an Ohio-based business location consultant who visited Maine last year: “Wages are much lower than I thought … the lowest in New England and across the U.S. in general.” It is highly doubtful that Mr. Scheldahl pulled that conclusion out of thin air. Someone he had good reason to believe that Mainers work cheap, or in the parlance, are “highly productive.” Maine is either a low-wage state or a medium-wage state. It cannot be both and it does no good for state officials to tell out-of-state consultants one thing and in-state workers another.

Maine will not gain the attention of cold, bottom-line business executives until it takes a cold, bottom-line look at itself and its economic-development offerings. Until it does, all the promotion and wishful thinking in the world just isn’t worth a blip.