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Jefferson City — Before giving up negativity for Lent, the new director of the Missouri Department of Economic Development viewed the state’s unemployment rate, 8 percent and rising, as a glass half-empty.

Now, keeping with the season, she’s gained inspiration from other dark economic times — particularly during the decline of the McDonnell-Douglas Corp..

Then, Martinez said, employees capitalized on their job losses by starting their own companies. Seizing on that example, she says she’s trying her best to "look at this as 230,000 possible entrepreneurs, rather than 230,000 victims of a recession."

The question facing Martinez, a St. Louis attorney who assumed the reins of the department Feb. 10, is how to maintain a half-full glass in the months to come.

Martinez says she can help by taking the lead in tearing down parochial attitudes between state agencies and local chambers of commerce. Economic development and job creation need to be part of every agency’s mandate.

Another way, she says, is for the state’s 43 career centers to focus on retraining Missouri’s work force for a postrecession economy that will emphasize biofuel, battery-powered transportation and green technology.

"We have to take the skill sets we have and deploy them in a different way," Martinez said.

Martinez herself is taking the expertise she’s learned in one job and applying to another. She came to Jefferson City after 26 years at the Bryan Cave law firm in St. Louis where, as a financial and developmental transaction specialist, she counted some of the region’s top-shelf businesses among her clients.

St. Louis activist Ed Golterman and Martinez clashed over the course of his long quest to restore the Kiel Opera House, a campaign he maintains Martinez stalled with her support for the revitalization of Grand Center. In her new job, Golterman fears Martinez will defer to past connections to powerful interests in the business community to the exclusion of the jobless. Martinez brushed aside the contention with a laugh.

Dick Fleming, the president of the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association, said Martinez brings unique elements to the director’s job.

"She’s a wonderful combination of smart and strategic and she has the capacity to implement and really focus on a project and complex transactions. That’s a very unusual set of combinations to have," said Fleming.

Still feeling her way barely two months into a new and far more public job, Martinez, 54, congenially shared an economic outlook for the state that emphasized optimism over substance in an hourlong interview in a conference room outside her Jefferson City office.

Martinez said being a litigator gave her a peak inside the business world without actually being a part of it, an experience that is helping her make the transition from the private to the public sector.

"I understand more about the decision-making process that companies go through and (their) training needs," she said good credit score. "I don’t think others have come to this office with that kind of background."

Martinez also understands that reversing the state’s economic decline requires a balancing act, starting with her department’s negotiations with the Republican-dominated Legislature over the size and scope of tax credit proposals and other economic turnaround initiatives.

State Sen. Jim Lembke, representing parts of St. Louis and St. Louis County, was among the Republicans who initially opposed Martinez’s nomination.

His objections, Lembke said, stemmed from Martinez’s pro bono work opposing a controversial Valley Park ordinance that would have cracked down on illegal immigrants — not her qualifications.

"She is more than capable and qualified for the job," said Lembke, adding that he and his colleagues are looking forward to working hand-in-hand with Martinez to facilitate the state’s economic recovery.

The spirit of cooperation, Martinez emphasized, needs to extend past cooperation between the legislative and executive branches.

She’s devoted a significant portion of her first weeks in office, in fact, to pointing out that no state agency is an island. Economic development, agriculture, transportation — in Martinez’s view no agency in the executive wing — is exempt from the challenge of getting Missourians back to work now and in the future.

"Every department in the state needs to minor in economic development," she said. "We all have to be rowing in the same direction."

To Martinez, that means linking the Agriculture Department to ethanol research and production while ensuring that other state agencies, such as the Missouri Department of Transportation, find roles for the unemployed in the execution of various projects and programs.

As she starts rowing, Martinez says local economic development concerns and chambers of commerce, with a reputation for pitting communities against one another by luring businesses with tax breaks and other perks, can also expect a set of oars.

The current market, she says, dictates that once-competing forces in the state’s economy adopt a one-for-all mindset.

At the same time, Martinez promised to work aggressively by providing tax incentives and other programs to keep existing Missouri businesses from fleeing to other states.

"The best defense is a good offense. I don’t want us to be vulnerable anymore," she said, a philosophy Martinez also pledged will apply equally to small businesses. "We have jobs to create and we have too much to do to look backward," she said.

sgiegerich@post-dispatch.com

314-340-8172

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