Pittsburgh, PA - As Franco Harris's "Immaculate Reception" sparked the rise of the Pittsburgh Steelers to four Super Bowl wins in the 1970s, the Steel City itself was on the precipice of a collapse of the industry that gave the city its nickname, reputation and prosperity.
In the three decades since the '70s and the demise of the American steel industry, Pittsburgh's community, university and philanthropic leaders found ways to work together to figure out how to save what was once a great city of the American West.
Their success - Forbes Magazine named Pittsburgh the Most Livable city for 2010 - is what attracted more than 300 business leaders from Lexington and Louisville for a three-day visit to a city reborn.
Detroit wants to know
Dennis Yablonsky, CEO the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, told the attendees of the joint Commerce Lexington and Greater Louisville Inc. Leadership Expedition that he's been getting calls from city leaders in Michigan's largest city since the automotive industry has gone bust to see how they can bring Detroit back.
Yablonsky warns them the Pittsburgh renaissance took every bit of 30-years, and whether or not the time can be bested, is unknown.
"Fundamentally this region did three things over the last 30 years," Yablonsky said. "One, we did not give up on what we were historically good at. We were good at making things, we were good at financing it and we were good at providing the energy we needed to run it."
With that, Pittsburgh started cleaning up its act, and its city.
For a time in the 20th Century, Pittsburgh businessmen would bring two white shirts to work so they could change mid-day and get out of the shirts that had been soiled with the ash and soot that would rain-down upon the city - so dark at midday that photographs of the period look as if they were shot at night.
The environment improved as the large steel mills around the city began shutting down. along with them, however went the jobs of 250,000 of the area's residents. Manufacturing plummeted from providing a high of more than one in four jobs in the market during the late '70s, to fewer than one in 15 today, according to University of Louisville economics professor Paul Coombs, PhD.
Higher Education takes the reigns
Pittsburgh's two major universities, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, started around a decade ago collaborating with each other for the betterment of the city each calls home. The two share a vice president for economic development and stand up for each other to drive home the point that research universities are economic drivers that need time to show results.
"You don't see the payoffs tomorrow," University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Mark Nordenberg said during a higher education panel in the concourse of the club level at Heinz Field.
"You should be impatient," said Jared Cohon, President of Carnegie Mellon University. "I think it is important for our leaders to be impatient. I recognize it takes a while, and the success in Pittsburgh that is being celebrated today, which drew you here, is 30 years in the making."
But University of Kentucky President Lee T. Todd, Jr. fears the message of a research institution's benefits fall on deaf ears in the Kentucky Legislature.
"We're doing our best to hold on to what we've got and to get a little bit more," Todd said Monday afternoon. "We work closely, UK and UofL, during the legislative sessions to plan our legislative strategy because to be perfectly honest about it, being located in the so-called Golden Triangle, we are under attack - that may be too strong (a word), but I don't think so - from some of the other regional universities that want to just spread money out like peanut butter across the state so we can guarantee that we'll stay mediocre like we've always been.
"So we have to get out there, we have to work to try to say 'No, you said you want a research institution,' if you're going to have the top economy, you're going to have to have strong research institutions that generate intellectual property, that generate jobs that not only stay in Kentucky but stay in this country," Todd said.
Working together to push for things in the best interests of both or either university, or to fight what may be detrimental to either school has been a successful proposition in Pittsburgh. Late last year, Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl proposed a 1 percent tax on college tuitions in the city. Cohon and Nordenberg of Carnegie Mellon and Pitt teamed up to fight the proposal and eventually quash the plan.
"We got it withdrawn, primarily by being unified in our opposition and helping the mayor to understand the problems with that proposal," said Carnegie Mellon's Cohon.
But Cohon said the universities finally accepted responsibility for ineffective communications strategies about the institutions' importance to the city, allowing Pittsburgh to reach a point where taxing college tuition seemed like a good idea to some in leadership.
Business Lexington
"It was also a failure on our part to communicate effectively to city leaders so they understood as fully as they should, the role that the universities play in the economy of the region and the city," Cohon told following his presentation.
Local sales tax gets around
In an effort to improve the economic prospects of what most think of as "Pittsburgh" - in reality, 130 neighboring municipalities including the city of Pittsburgh, located within Allegheny County, a 7 percent sales tax exists inside the county while all surrounding counties only tax at the rate of 6 percent.
The assessment is spread among the townships and boroughs and organizations within the county to fund any number of projects. Five percent of that additional one percent goes to the arts in Allegheny County.
Telling the world their story
Lexington has been preparing for five years to host the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games this fall at the Kentucky Horse Park, but last May the city of Pittsburgh was announced as the host for September 2009's G20 Summit. With 5,000 delegates including the world's most powerful leaders, 3,500 credentialed journalists and a surly contingent of protesters, the city had around 120 days to get ready for the onslaught and find a way to embrace and capitalize from the opportunity.
"We immediately put a partnership together that included the mayor and his team, the county executive and his team (and tourism group) Visit PittsburghÖ we put a team together and set some (goals)," said Allegheny Conference on Community Development's Yablonsky.
Since the summit wrapped up, Yablonsky figures the city has been the focus of 7,000 news stories about how it went from a rust belt relic to the temporary home for capitalism's largest get-together.
"Every major publication you can think of in the world has run a story about Pittsburgh's transformation," he said. "We've already booked five conventions that wouldn't have come here otherwise and we believe we're going to get some job creative projects out of it as well."
"The reason we got all the publicity was twofold. First of all, the story was true and people weren't aware of it. People all around the world had a different impression, an old impression of what Pittsburgh was all about. And two, we worked hard at it to get the message out and get in touch with people to make sure they told the story," he said.
To accommodate the journalists who would cover the three-day event, Yablonsky and his staff along with the Pittsburgh team assembled for the summit put together an online pressroom, quartered the media at central hotels and accommodated them on trips made previous to the summit and in the days leading up to the meeting.
"They not only came here and went to the convention center, particularly the journalists," he said. "They saw things as we arraigned tours for them; if they wanted to go to Warhol, we'd take them to Warhol. They'd want to go to our redeveloped brownfield site, we'd take them there. We had a whole menu, this was all on our online pressroom of options they could pick from. Most of them did that in the lead up to G20."
Our visit to Pittsburgh is continuing today and into this evening. Many on this trip are listening and observing with a sense that Lexington, Louisville and Kentucky can and should learn from the experiences of other cities. The real challenge always comes following the return from these expeditions: sorting out ideas that truly relate to what is needed locally to make our communities even better.