West Virginia's Sales Pitch: We're Almost Heaven
Balloons bobbed, the crowd cheered and the local high school band struck up a tune as a train bearing 27 Washington business leaders and their hosts chugged into town last week to begin a tour of the West Virginia Panhandle.</br></br>It was hoopla with a message: "Come do business here." But the tough-minded executive crowd proved to be just looking, thank you.</br></br>The tour, which has as its hosts Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and West Virginia Gov. Gaston Caperton, was unabashedly aimed at luring major business facilities away from the Washington area and into a state plagued by 7 percent unemployment.</br></br>During a daylong trip, which began at Union Station aboard a train provided by CSX Corp. and concluded at a restaurant in Shepherdstown, W.Va., the executives heard presentations on the economies of Jefferson, Morgan and Berkeley counties, visited the Bardane Industrial Park in Kearneysville and trooped through AT&T's material distribution center and Corning Glass Works' plant in Martinsburg.</br></br>West Virginia offers companies "God's most beautiful land" and "America's most hard-working men and women," Rockefeller boasted, as well as low costs, affordable employee housing, manpower training programs and transportation links to the entire East Coast.