High-Tech Collierville?

hat is it about Collierville that makes it the fastest-growing city in Tennessee?

Maybe it's the ability to turn straw into gold. At least that's what an enterprising woman on Poplar Avenue near the city limits was doing last week. Not only was she selling plain-old pumpkins for $4 apiece and up, she was getting another $2 for dried cornstalks and an armful of hay. Thanks, Martha Stewart.

Tennessee's fastest-growing community is also rapidly becoming its richest. Land prices have doubled here in the last few years, with $250,000 houses on $60,000 lots commonplace. And the best is yet to come. A year from now, Federal Express will move 1,450 Memphis-area employees to a new East Campus on Bailey Station Road in Collierville. Another 1,200 employees are scheduled to join them in a second phase.

The reason? Location, location, location.

"Our consultants plotted out where the people who will work here now live and this site was like a bullseye," says Dennis H. Jones, senior vice president and chief information officer for information and telecommunications. That's "I-T" for short, as in the 70-acre IT complex, consisting of five two-story buildings and a convocation center.

The woodsy site is between two big road projects snaking their way east toward Collierville--Nonconnah Parkway and four-lane Winchester Road. When they're finished, they should cut 15 minutes or so off the jaunt from Memphis to Collierville that now must be made along busy Poplar Avenue.

Two big stories are unfolding here. One is a FedEx story, the other is a future-of-Memphis story.

For Federal Express, the move is the first time substantial Memphis operations have been located away from the airport area. The goal was nothing less than "to protect the employment that we have here," says Jones. The East Campus will be home to highly trained -- and hotly recruited -- technical employees who now work in headquarters or some 20 other buildings around the airport.

"For that number of people to be spread out like that and have to work in a team-oriented fashion is not very productive," says Jones. "The new buildings are capped at two stories to encourage teamwork and the free flow of people through the buildings."

Federal Express ultimately envisions a high-tech corridor in Collierville, along the lines of similar centers in Dallas, Colorado Springs, and Reston, Virginia.

The technology center underlines a shift in the FedEx image from planes, trucks, and box-throwers to computers, logistics, and technology. FedEx has long encouraged the latter perception, but it hasn't always taken hold in the media and on Wall Street. A separate office complex could help on that score.

The IT folks aren't the only ones at FedEx moving away from the airport. The company plans another new office complex at Southwind, also convenient to Nonconnah Parkway. It's simply called the "proposed project" in company documents, but is expected to be a new headquarters. FedEx rents its current space in Nonconnah Corporate Center.

The merger of the words "high-tech" and "Collierville" takes some getting used to. This is a 1950s time-warp town with a mayor who operates out of a gas station, a charming town square where antiques are big business, and frequent trains that roar through town, rattling windows. There are good county schools, including a new middle school and probably a new elementary school eventually, in the developments around FedEx that are rapidly taking shape on the south side of Poplar. Jack Nicklaus is designing a golf course to the north of town, Arnold Palmer another to the west.

With Germantown about out of space, Collierville is positioned to capture the suppliers and new businesses that FedEx will bring. In its 25-year-history, the company has proven itself the most powerful growth magnet in Shelby County.

"None of these roads was done especially for us, but we did ask them to rush the pace," says Jones. "If it hadn't been us, there would have been some other type of construction there. An advanced road system is a field of dreams."

Like the movie said, build it and they will come.