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This is a weekly roundup of promotions, appointments and employee accomplishments in the Birmingham metro area. For more People on the Move, check out the Birmingham Business Journal’s print edition each week. Send announcements to ccrawford@bizjournals.com.

AGRICULTURE

Shep and Rite Morris of Morris and Morris Farms in Shorter were named the Alabama Farm-City Committee’s 2010 Farm of Distinction winner. The committee is part of the Alabama Farmers Federation. Five finalists also honored were Bryan and Beverly Hughes of Tuscaloosa County, Larry and Bonita LouAllen of Lawrence County, Chase and Noelle Bradley of Monroe County, Garry and Denise Staples of St. Clair County and John and Katie Wesson of Talladega County.

INSURANCE

Allstate Insurance Co. recognized eight Birmingham-area Allstate exclusive agency owners with the Honor Ring award for high standards in customer satisfaction, customer retention and profitable business growth. They are Jim Anthony of Pelham, Mika Marcum of Warrior, Ken Massey of Alabaster, Breck Price of Birmingham, Pete Russell of Birmingham, John F. Saddler of Homewood, Jessup Standifer of Birmingham and Cindy Stuman of Pinson.

Allstate Insurance Co. recognized Allstate personal financial representatives Richard Akel and Keeley Moore, both of Birmingham, with the Chairman's Conference award for high standards in customer satisfaction, customer retention and profitable business growth. Akel and Moore are among only 6 percent of Allstate producers nationally to reach this level of achievement, based on financial services sales.

LEGAL

J. Vernon Patrick Jr., an attorney with Haskell Slaughter Young & Rediker LLC, has been recognized in the latest edition of The Global Directory of Who’s Who. Patrick has focused his practice on securities, derivative and class action litigation and other complex civil litigation for about 50 years.

MEDIA

Gregory O. Griffin Sr., chief legal counsel for the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, was appointed by Gov. Bob Riley to represent the Second Congressional District on the Alabama Educational Television Commission. Ferris W. Stephens, an Alabama Assistant Attorney General, was appointed to represent the Sixth Congressional District of Alabama.

Panorama Public Relations Vice President Melanie Green and Genevieve Douglass, client services manager, will lead a team handling services for Hallman Hill townhouses and condominiums in Homewood.

REAL ESTATE

John Coleman of Graham & Co. represented GE Capital in the disposition of the former Expressions Cabinetry facility in Gadsden. The 55,000-square-foot building was purchased by United Caseworks and will continue to be used for cabinet manufacturing. Coleman also represented Thistle Properties in the acquisition of a 10,000-square-foot office warehouse off of Academy Drive in Bessemer. The building will be occupied by an automotive related company providing automotive solutions, from mechanical and controls design to fabrication and installation. The seller, Crew Development, was represented by Jack Brown, also of Graham & Co.

RETAIL

ConsignmentChic.com founder Tracy True Dismukes has been named a finalist for the National Association of Women Business Owners/Wells Fargo Trailblazer Award. Dismukes is the owner of a chain of three consignment shops called Collage Designer Consignment and Collage Plus Sizes in Birmingham. Three female business owners will be recognized with the trailblazer award based on business performance, innovation, growth and contribution to the community. Winners receive a $5,000 cash grant and will be honored at the 2010 NAWBO Annual Women’s Business Conference in Washington, D.C.

UNIVERSITIES

The University of Alabama System Board of Trustees appointed University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Health Professions faculty member Stephen N. Collier a professor emeritus. Collier first joined the faculty at UAB in 1980. He left in 1985 to serve as president of the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston and as dean of the College of Health Professions, professor of Health Science and director of the Center for Health Policy and Workforce Research at Towson University. Collier also served in the U.S. Navy for 24 years as an intelligence officer and retired as commander. Collier returned to UAB in 2003 and established the Office of Health Professions Education and Workforce Development to address health work force issues through research, publications, presentations and associated activities.

Lt. General Ronald L. Burgess Jr., director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, spoke at Samford University’s Brock School of Business Samford Business Network on April 6. Burgess is responsible for providing critical intelligence to U.S. forces around the world, including coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as to senior Department of Defense and national security leadership.

The University of Alabama System Board of Trustees appointed Hemant Kumar Tiwari to the William “Student” Sealy Gosset Endowed Professorship in Biostatistics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He joined UAB in 2002 and became an associate professor in 2006.

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Signs were erected this week welcoming bicycles to K Street Mall following a 23-year ban on bikes.

Bicycles were banned from the K Street Mall in 1987 when light-rail tracks wer einstalled.

The signs encourage cyclists to yield to pedestrians and designate the speed limit for bicyclists, among other warnings.

The City Council in November unanimously amended a city ordinance to lift the bike ban. It took effect Dec. 24, 2009.

“Creating greater connectivity for all modes of tranportation continues to be a top priority in maintaining a safe and reliable multi-modal transportation system for the city and the region,” Department of Transportation director Jerry Way said in a news release on line pay day loans. “This is another important accomplishment toward that priority.”

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The National Conference of Black Mayors will hold its 36th annual convention in Cincinnati, the city and the Cincinnati USA Convention & Visitors Bureau will announce Monday morning.

The convention will take place May 12-16, to coincide with Major League Baseball’s Civil Rights Game, scheduled for May 15 at Great American Ball Park.

About 700 conference members are expected to attend the convention, booking more than 1,200 room nights, according to a news release. Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory will host the event.

The Cincinnati Reds will meet the St. Louis Cardinals in the Saturday Civil Rights Game. Among the events surrounding the game, Major League Baseball will present its Beacon Awards to athletes Willie Mays and Billie Jean King and actor/musician/activist Harry Belafonte.

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Monsanto shares rallied to a record in November 2007 when executives declared the company would double gross profit in five years.

As recently as January, CEO Hugh Grant and other senior managers insisted they were on track to meet the goal. After all, Monsanto’s queue was stocked with promising new seed technologies to help meet a growing demand for food.

But on Wednesday, Grant retreated, saying the company won’t meet its 2012 target of gross profit, which is a company’s sales less the cost of the goods and services sold.

“Moving away from our original set of goals is difficult for us to accept, but it’s the right thing to acknowledge now,” he said in a conference call with analysts and investors.

The announcement caps a turbulent past year for Monsanto. The Creve Coeur-based company is the subject of a federal antitrust investigation. It was forced to shed hundreds of jobs and slash prices for its best-selling weed killer because of a glut of generic product from China. And it isn’t selling as much of its new biotech corn and soybean seed as expected because some growers have balked at the higher price.

However painful to do, backing off its 2012 profit pledge was the right choice in the long run, analysts said.

“We don’t like it when we see companies do unwise things to meet a near-term goal at the expense of long-term growth,” said Dan Ortwerth, an analyst at Edward Jones.

Monsanto’s lower outlook came as the company reported on Wednesday a 19-percent drop in fiscal second-quarter earnings.
Monsanto’s net income — gross profit less all other costs — fell to $887 million, or $1.60, for the quarter ended Feb. 28, versus $1.09 billion, or $1.97, in the same three months a year ago. Sales fell 3.6 percent to $3.89 billion.

Excluding costs related to a corporate restructuring last year, Monsanto’s earnings matched the $1.70-a-share average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

Monsanto said full-year profit would be at the low end of the previously announced range of $3.10 to $3.30 a share. The company forecast earnings growth of 13 percent to 17 percent a year beginning in 2011 — a much slower rate than investors had been accustomed to.

The company’s stock slid 2 percent on Wednesday to $68.09 on the New York Stock Exchange. That’s less than half its all-time high of $142.69 set in June 2008. So far this year, the stock has fallen 17 percent.

The biggest drag on Monsanto’s profitability since then has been the decline in its Roundup business.

On Wednesday, Monsanto further cut gross profit projections for its Roundup business to $600 million, from $650 million to $750 million. Only a year ago, the same segment generated $1.8 billion in gross profit.

The reason for the steep drop in Roundup profit: a flood of Chinese-made generic weed killer saturating the U.S. market that forced Monsanto to slash prices.

Just a week ago, the nation’s only other glyphosate manufacturer, Ankeny, Iowa-based Albaugh Inc., filed an anti-dumping petition with the U.S. government.

Monsanto faces competitive pressure in the seed business too.

As a result, the company indicated that it would retool its product strategy, a move that will include some price cuts, to drive higher adoption rates for new products.

Monsanto said earlier this year that its new SmartStax corn and Roundup Ready 2 Yield soybeans would be planted on fewer acres than previously forecast.

Ortwerth said the higher-priced offerings met with some resistance among growers at a time of declining crop prices.

“The recession made farmers a bit hesitant to adopt new products,” he said.

That became evident to Monsanto executives after “listening sessions” with some 1,200 farmers, Grant said.

“The feedback that I have personally from growers is that if our price points were different, their adoption curves would be different,” he said. “When you get told the same thing often enough, it’s pretty compelling.”

The CEO said he was still as confident as ever in Monsanto’s long-term growth prospects, its $1 billion-a-year R&D efforts and the fundamentals of the global agriculture business. But don’t expect any more bold, long-term profit forecasting.

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President Obama’s plan, announced Wednesday, to expand oil drilling off the nation’s coasts has the potential to lead to a slight easing in gas prices, more jobs and more money for cash-strapped government coffers.

It could also damage shorelines, according to environmentalists and some states that depend on tourism.

All experts agree any real impact is a long way off. While the first new Atlantic offshore oil and gas lease sale in some 20 years is slated to take place, putting drilling some 50 miles off the Virginia coast next year, it’ll take 4 to 12 years to see any impact in domestic fuel production, according to government analysts.

Pocketbook: Despite the momentum that built for offshore drilling back in 2008, when gas prices rose above $4 a gallon, increasing domestic production isn’t expected to impact gas prices all that much.

In fact, before he joined the Obama administration, assistant secretary of energy David Sandalow told some publications that "Drilling offshore to lower oil prices is like walking an extra 20 feet per day to lose weight."

Nobody really knows how much oil is beneath the nation’s outer continental shelf or the rest of the Gulf of Mexico.

"I’m ready to drill on the offshore, I have no problem with that," energy magnate T. Boone Pickens told CNN chief business correspondent Ali Velshi on "CNN Newsroom." "But don’t look for big reserves off the East Coast of the United States."

The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service suggests that 39 to 63 billion barrels of oil could be "recoverable" from the new areas that would be made available for drilling. At 2008 consumption levels, that would be enough to exclusively meet the U.S. thirst for oil for 5 to 8 years, according to the Department of Energy.

In the broader scheme of global production and consumption, future U.S. production is considered on the small side.

President Obama acknowledges that drilling, alone, is not a panacea for all the nation’s energy problems.

"I want to emphasize is that this announcement is part of a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil to one that relies more on homegrown fuels and clean energy," Obama said. "The only way this transition will succeed is if it strengthens our economy in the short term and long term."

Jobs: But in the area of job creation, experts agree it could have a big impact, especially in terms of creating higher-paying jobs.

Again, estimates depend on the number of new rigs created. But it could lead to 25,000 people at work offshore, with salaries as high as $90,000, according to Michael Kearns, spokesman for the industry group National Ocean Industries Association.

"This will create jobs in the future, and this is good for business and good for people," said Anas F. Alhaji, chief economist at NGP Energy Capital Management, which supports drilling.

Although that industry already has room to grow. The oil and gas industry was hit particularly hard by a worldwide weakening in demand for oil that accompanied the recession. Oil and gas firms laid off hundreds of workers throughout the Gulf Coast."

Royalties: Another place that consumers can see an impact is through royalties. The federal government - and possibly some states if Congress agrees - could collect a portion of the revenue that comes from newly found, oil Kearns said.

That could be good news for cash-strapped states with gaping holes in the budgets. For consumers, that could mean fewer municipal programs slashed and fewer layoffs and furloughs due to budget cuts. However, such royalties aren’t likely to start rolling in until after U.S. has recover from this economic recession.

Environment: Another big impact will be on the nation’s shorelines. Already some lawmakers, including Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., say they oppose the expansion plans, because it threatens their beach and coastal industries.

Environmental groups say that the economic gain from drilling isn’t worth damaging coast lines. They say more rigs, especially those close to the coast such as the one in Virginia, mean more spills and leaks from oil platforms and storage systems.

"There’s sort of a right way and a wrong way of providing our nation’s future energy needs," said Wesley Warren, program director at Natural Resource Defense Council, which opposes the expansion. "The right path is one that provides economic growth while providing environmental protections. The wrong path trades those two off."

–CNN senior correspondent Allan Chernoff and chief business correspondent Ali Velshi contributed to this report 

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This year, it’s going to take the average American 99 days to earn enough money to pay the IRS. That’s one day longer than last year.

"Tax Freedom Day" marks the date that most Americans have earned enough money to pay their federal, state and local taxes, and this year that day arrives on April 9, according to the Tax Foundation’s annual calculation, which is based on government tax and income data.

Tax Freedom Day arriving one day later than it did last year means most Americans will have to work that much harder — for more than three months — just to pay their 2010 taxes.

The number of days Americans have to work to pay off their taxes has declined steadily since 2007. That’s due to a handful of tax cuts, certain income tax provisions that were repealed for 2010 and because the recession has reduced tax collections faster than it has cut income, according to the Tax Foundation.

But while it will take people less time to earn the money this year than it did in 2007, Americans will still spend more on taxes in 2010 than they will on food, clothing and shelter combined, the Tax Foundation said.

State-by-state: Each state has its own Tax Freedom Day. The day arrived earliest in Alaska and Louisiana — on March 26 — because of "modest incomes and low state and local tax burdens," the Tax Foundation said.

Mississippi, South Dakota and West Virginia celebrated soon after, on March 28, March 29 and March 30, respectively.

Connecticut, the state with the highest per capita income, will be the last to celebrate. Tax Freedom Day won’t arrive until April 27, the 117th day of the year.

New Jersey, New York, Maryland and Washington will join Connecticut as the last states to celebrate. In these states, Tax Freedom Day will fall on April 25, April 23, April 19 and April 15, in that order.  

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