The Meridian Star invited some community leaders to identify their priorities for 2017. The following interview is with Bill Hannah, president and CEO of East Mississippi Business and Development Corporation.

Don’t blame East Mississippi Business Development Corporation President and CEO Bill Hannah if he uses the term “the Tupelo model,” when referring to his vision for East Central Mississippi.

Hannah celebrated one of his first major victories this year when it was announced that Raytheon Company had chosen Meridian to build new training jets for the U.S. Air Force — that is if the company is awarded the contract as they are competing with three other companies for that jewel.

Part of Hannah’s delight in the possibility of Raytheon coming to Meridian is the announcement shows that some of his hard work for the last year and a half is finally starting to pay dividends.

When asked about his top three priorities for 2017, Hannah pointed the recent Raytheon announcement as an example of what he is trying to accomplish in Meridian.

“We want to be a more inclusive organization,” Hannah said. “There are 15 members on the EMBDC board of directors and I can tell you that it takes a whole lot more than 15 people to get a big project done like Raytheon. When we had Raytheon in town, we had 27 people in the room. I feel like I had every aspect of the community represented in the room. When you bring someone into town, it looks more full and complete to them when you have more people included. It gives them a flavor of the area and that flavor is not just me.”

Hannah said it has taken a lot of time and effort to start bringing community leaders together to make “inclusiveness” happen.

“For this to be successful, it takes the leaders in this community working together, knowing each other,” Hannah said. “They may work in the next building to someone but not know them. It’s my job to get them all in a room and get them to talk, to present our community wholistically. That’s what inclusive means to me.”

When Hannah says inclusive, he also means regional. Hannah said he has worked at involving community and industry leaders from throughout East Central Mississippi and West Alabama, giving a more regional approach than just a Meridian or Lauderdale County approach. Hannah is certainly familiar with the regional concept and saw it work miracles in Northeast Mississippi when the region landed Toyota in Blue Springs.

That’s why he has reached out to leaders in Kemper, Neshoba, Newton, Jasper, Clarke as well as those in West Alabama to become more involved in the organization.

“This next priority sounds similar, but they are different perspectives, but we want to present ourselves as a region, not a city or county but as a region,” Hannah said. “I’m not representing the City of Meridian, but I’m representing 730,000 people which are in an 80-mile radius around Meridian. That’s important to employers but people will travel for quality jobs.

“That was something I saw first hand in Tupelo but it’s not unique to Tupelo. There are several examples across the country you could point to.”

Hannah said a part of his goals in the regional approach in the next year is to collect more data.

“We have to have more regional data,” Hannah said. “There are things that I can’t do if I don’t have the regional data which we haven’t had. We are working on building up that database with regional type facts.”

While Hannah has been focused on the economic development aspect of his job, he said you can’t forget the other end and that’s the Chamber of Commerce aspect that the EMBDC also serves.

“On the chamber side, we have over 500 members and our services to those members are good, but not great,” Hannah said. “I think we constantly have to be looking to our members and seeing what we can improve on. We need to be looking around and seeing what we can add, what we can do better. It’s a never-ending effort and certainly something we can work on.”