Hill City region ranks high in Forbes business index

The Lynchburg region again has a high seat in a Forbes magazine ranking system that measures the business environment in cities across the country.

Forbes ranked Lynchburg as 28th among the nation’s 200 largest metropolitan areas on its “Best Places for Business and Careers” feature released Wednesday. The Hill City had the highest ranking of Virginia’s larger metro areas.

The business community began trumpeting the ranking soon after the feature was published. The Lynchburg Regional Chamber of Commerce announced it to members, and the news was repeated on social networking Web sites like Facebook and Twitter.

“We’re going to extensively market the Forbes ranking on our Web site, Lynchburg Life (magazine) and materials promoting this region for employees and investment opportunities,” said Rex Hammond, president of the Lynchburg Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Last week Forbes staff asked the chamber to send photos of the Lynchburg area, but did not say that it was for the “Best Places” ranking. Hammond said he learned about Lynchburg’s position in that feature on Wednesday. “It was a nice way to wake up today,” he said.

Forbes, a media company with numerous online and print publications related to business, has published its Best Places for Business and Careers feature for 12 years. It uses data from other reports and from Moody’s Economy.com to rank each metropolitan area based on its cost of living, cost of doing business, crime rate, job growth and other factors. Those scores are then weighed and combined to determine a city’s final rank.

The Lynchburg metro area has had a volatile position in the listings. It was ranked 70th last year, 24th in 2008, 65th in 2007 and 109th in 2006, the first year it qualified as one of the nation’s 200 largest metro areas.

Other cities jump around as well. Provo, Utah, took the number two seat this year after being ranked 40th last year.

Bryan David, executive director of Region 2000’s Economic Development Council, said the ranking is good for promoting the region even though it changes. “We certainly want to accentuate it if we move up,” he said. “I think our consistent showing in the top 100 … just shows that we have some consistently very competitive things here.”

Kurt Badenhausen, associate editor of Forbes Magazine, said the sharp changes could happen because the rankings compare cities to each other. A city could stay exactly the same but move on the list depending on what happens in other cities.

“Over the past couple of years … certain cities have been having a hard time … but then, relative to the rest of the country, they might be doing great,” he said. “All the data that we look at is relative to the rest of the 200 largest metro areas.”

The methods for assigning the ranks don’t change much from year to year, he said. This year, Forbes added a measure of Economy.com’s projection of economic growth for the next three years. Lynchburg ranked 64 in that category.

Forbes does not provide the specific data that determines the rankings for economic growth and other categories.

Lynchburg’s rank improved because the region scored better, relative to other regions, in crime rate, cost of living and doing business, and income growth.

“I was encouraged to see the positive movement in income growth,” Hammond said. “That’s typically a factor (where) we lag behind state and national averages, but we experienced good growth during this reporting period.”