Johnson Controls’ urban plan slow to take root in Milwaukee

The Associated Press
20 August 2007

MILWAUKEE — Johnson Controls, Inc., Wisconsin’s largest publicly traded company, crafted a plan in 2005 to help inner city groups build new clinics, sports facilities and job-training centers.

The suburban Milwaukee-based company sought to boost small minority-owned businesses by teaming with them to win contracts, while creating new customers for Johnson Controls’ division that installs heating and cooling systems and upgrades and manages buildings. Milwaukee has one of the nation’s densest concentrations of urban poverty, and Johnson Controls wanted to help civic leaders and faith-based groups for the greater economic well-being of the city.

But the proposal dubbed MetroMarkets never took off in Milwaukee despite some success in other cities like Baltimore, Cleveland and New Orleans. MetroMarkets began in mid-2005 in three cities — Milwaukee, Detroit and Chicago — just as a White House-backed initiative called the Urban Entrepreneur Partnership also was launched to help provide inner-city entrepreneurs with resources to start their own businesses.

But the two could never join in common goals, and Johnson Controls no longer focuses on the UEP model. “The two sides failed to see each other’s vision,” said Frank Cumberbatch, a founding board member of the UEP. The MetroMarkets plans also were slowed by bureaucracy after the team’s resources were diverted to New Orleans in an effort to help following Hurricane Katrina. The entire executive team that conceived or supported the concept is now gone, replaced by Joy Clarke, the executive heading up the project from Baltimore. She said she’s re-evaluating the early aspirations.

“We’re not giving up on Milwaukee,” Clarke said. “We haven’t figured out yet the exact business model that makes sense.”MetroMarkets consists of mentoring minority-owned companies in cases of mutual interest with Johnson Controls providing growth opportunities and expertise, Clarke said.By bidding jointly with minority partners, Clarke said, Johnson Controls won contracts worth millions of dollars in New Orleans, Cleveland and Baltimore.

Company spokesman Darryll Fortune said Johnson Controls is still talking with several Milwaukee-based minority-owned subcontractors for new projects.“Give us a few months,” Fortune said. The company has hired Wayne Embry Jr., whose father was captain and later general manager of the Milwaukee Bucks, to sell the program by networking full-time with Milwaukee’s urban advocates. The original idea for MetroMarkets was to replicate Pittsburgh’s Manchester-Bidwell Corp., one of the nation’s most admired inner-city job-training centers, which tailors its job training to the needs of the local economy. But Clarke said Manchester-Bidwell no longer fits Johnson Controls’ revised concept.

Fortune maintains despite all the changes and altered expectations, the MetroMarkets plan has been profitable. In Baltimore, Johnson Controls helped build a $14 million renewable energy plant in a wastewater treatment facility in a working-class neighborhood. Over 25 percent of the work in the city project went to Johnson Controls’ minority partners, as mandated by city policy.