05/10/03
By SHELLY HASKINS
Times Business Editor shaskins@htimes.com
Huntsville ranks 11th in Forbes magazine's 2003 "Best Places" to do business feature, vaulting 60 places from last year's list.
The same feature ranked Huntsville No. 71 in 2002, No. 126 in 2001 and No. 164 in 2000.
In this year's rankings - which take into account the cost of doing business, job growth, education levels and population - all 10 cities listed above Huntsville were larger metro areas.
"The fact that we have progressed in this particular ranking so well is great news for both business development and population and employment growth," said Brian Hilson, CEO of the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce. "Selfishly, I want to see us No. 1 at some point."
The feature, released Friday on Forbes.com and scheduled to hit newsstands in print this weekend, also included a separate profile of Huntsville and its technology heritage. Forbes writer Tomas Kellner visited Huntsville last month to research the article, which featured interviews with Adtran Inc. CEO Mark Smith and 90-year-old Ernst Stuhlinger, one of the surviving members of the Wernher von Braun rocket team.
Kellner fashioned his lead paragraph while standing on the mountaintop porch of Time Domain Corp. CEO Ralph Petroff, who took himaround the city and introduced him to Smith, Stuhlinger and about 30 other leaders and entrepreneurs.
"Looking down from the top on Monte Sano onto Huntsville, Ala., you can plainly see that the tallest steeple in this Bible Belt city doesn't belong to a church. It's attached to a model of the Saturn V rocket that launched men to the moon," Kellner wrote. "Huntsville has good reason to worship science - that is, high-tech work - that keeps a seventh of the work force here busy."
Kellner, in a telephone interview Friday, said it was Huntsville's high level of educational attainment - one in 11 people here have an advanced degree - and its comparatively low cost of doing business that helped it shoot to the brink of Forbes' top 10.
For example, he said, a hardware engineer at telecommunications equipment maker Adtran makes about $73,000 a year. In Silicon Valley, the same engineer would be paid about $93,000.
"You can produce much cheaper in Huntsville," Kellner said, and the cost of living here is much lower for the worker, making the pay gap a virtual non-issue.
By fall, the plant will operate two production shifts; from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and from 4:45 p.m. to 1:30 a.m., producing 450 engines per day. In addition, there will be two shifts for quality control and three shifts for maintenance, she said.
Toyota is still hiring, company officials said, using its original pool of some 30,000 resumes and applications. On Monday, some employees were being trained on site. The machining side of the plant is still under construction; those parts are now being shipped from Japan, Lillard said.
It may still be a few months before trucks with Huntsville engines can be found on local dealers' lots, said Dennis Cuneo, senior vice president of Toyota Motor North America Inc. Dealers will be able to tell by identifying numbers where the engine was made, he said.
