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Last
Chance for Gooberville
Virginia's
mill-town economy is dying, along with a way of
life. Rural inhabitants need to get over it -- and
either learn the skills required to
prosper in the 21st century, or pack it in.
We
have written on a number of occasions about the
challenges that rural areas experience in
achieving economic development. We feel compelled
to do so again, as assumptions about growing
economies seem to be at the heart of current
political schemes dealing with taxation,
education, and transportation, to name just a few.
As
we work closely with community colleges both in
Virginia and elsewhere, the subject keeps coming
up. Community colleges are generally regarded as
integral to the retooling necessary to attract new
business into regions whose economies have changed
for the worse. However, we have learned that some
forms of economic development are unacceptable to
the inhabitants of these regions. Jobless though
many may be, they prefer economic activity that
conforms sufficiently to their cultural values --
environmental, quality of life, etc. -- that they
don't suddenly find themselves living someplace
they don’t want to be.
Indeed,
we have found that many regions not only don’t
want economic development that brings unwanted
changes, they actually don’t want new jobs at
all. Really, in their heart of hearts, they want
their old jobs back.
In other words, they have not yet made the
attitudinal and psychological adjustments to their
changed circumstances that will enable them to
prepare for 21st century economic
development. They
seem to be preparing to write another sad chapter
of “Death by Apathy.”
A
recent experience on behalf of one of our clients
fits the pattern. We
prepared a training package for a local textile
manufacturer designed to increase worker
productivity, and submitted it to the plant
manager for his consideration.
When we called back later to get his
response, we were told that it wasn't a good time
to do training because the plant had lost work to
competitors and was laying people off.
Now the state gets to conduct a post-mortem
and offer training assistance to the deposed
workers so they can feed the kids until the next
company fails.
There's
a story that Sales VPs tell their sales
forces to illustrate that they can't always count on the
customer to connect the dots.
“This guy stops in the corner convenience
mart every day after he gets off the subway to
pick up a package of his favorite new snack for
his morning break. He
does this every day for weeks until one day he
walks in and there is none of the snack in sight.
He asks the person behind the counter where
it is and gets this for an answer: ‘We stopped
stocking that stuff because it kept selling
out.’”
Based
on our heartening experiences, we are wondering if
a huge education program needs to occur in Richmond, other state capitals, and maybe even
Washington, D.C. The assumption seems to have been made in
all these ethereal places that straightforward,
linear, business-development activities will
produce the desired results.
In
fact, until there are specific definitions of what
economic development actually might mean in rural
areas and what achieving these results actually
requires, we all seem to be talking past one
another.
Central
government planners seem to act on the premise
that localities are fully prepared to move ahead
aggressively if they can just prime the pump a
little with a prospect. In truth, local
governments are trying to grow their business base
with, in most cases, a limited vision of what they
future might be. Local citizens are pretty sure
that economic development equates to congestion,
pollution, and loss of control over their quality
of life and therefore don’t support it.
Until
local citizens and politicians get really serious
about preparing for the emerging economy - serious
enough to invest in the skills to make their
workforce competitive and serious enough to
envision what forms newer technologies might
actually take in their regions -- we won't make
much progress.
Virginia
is experiencing the time-honored confusion between
motion and movement.
One of the kabukis generating lots of
activity involves making regions attractive to Hispanic
workers: offering conversational Spanish classes
to everyone from school teachers to bank
presidents, building soccer fields, and converting
empty school buildings (empty because the region
is dying and losing population) into apartments
and “dormitories” for Juan, Pablo, and Maria.
While
it is certainly true that many local economies
need the kind of capable, willing workers that
come here from Hispanic countries, and it is also
true that we can all benefit from cross-cultural
awareness, one has to ask precisely how the
inhabitants of these regions -- the poster poster
children of these particular economic development
efforts -- are benefiting.
The response to the "giant sucking
sound" of NAFTA and globalization shipping
jobs overseas, it appears, is to keep the
jobs in Virginia by bringing foreign workers here
to fill them!
Local
citizens, we hear again and again, need steady,
well paying jobs -- at least $15 to $20 per hour
-- with health care benefits for themselves and
their families.
Just where are those jobs coming from, you
ask? Darn
good question when the answer to other related
questions is, “We don’t want to spend any
money on training our workers because they will
leave and go somewhere else, or, "We can’t
do any training now because we’re losing
business to our competitors,” or, “We’re not
sure just what a 21st century
enterprise is and we’re not sure we want one,
anyway.”
If
the vision and foresight to develop local
economies is not going to arise from a series of
independent business investment decisions or
through the vision and leadership of local
politicians, can we expect anything from Richmond? Could the
Planning Districts be given the responsibility to
lead the development of effective regional
solutions, or will they remain the mechanism for
the General Assembly to dump money around the
state on the pretense that they have done
something useful for localities?
The
ancient proverb states that without vision, the
people will perish. If it isn’t coming from
Gooberville (a
colleague’s all purpose name for rural areas),
it's got to
come from somewhere. No one we know is betting on Washington, so that leaves the state capital.
It’s not too much to ask. Gooberville or not, rural America
– and especially rural Virgini – is too important to be allowed to die on
the
vine.
--
April 26, 2004
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