Connected
Development
Southside
and the Tobacco Commission are patting each other
on the backbone for their just announced regional
fiber-optic initiative.
There
was more than a little pushing and shoving back in
1999 when the General Assembly created the
31-member Tobacco Indemnification and Community
Revitalization Commission to compensate farmers
for the decline in tobacco quotas and promote economic development in
tobacco-dependent communities. The official record
of the legislation patroned by then-delegate, now
Secretary of Transportation Whittington W.
Clement, doesn’t reflect fully all the
discussions that swirled around the best use of
master settlement agreement funds from tobacco
companies to the states.
But
there was little controversy June 18th in
Danville at an announcement that the Commission
would spend $6 million of tobacco
funds to install 700 miles of
fiber-optic cable connecting five cities, 20 counties
and 56 industrial parks across southern Virginia.
Commission
Chairman Sen. Charles R.
Hawkins, R-Chatham, orated on the wisdom of the
investment:
“Coupled
with our grants for the broadband
telecommunications links in southwest Virginia,
we are creating a seamless
network that will literally connect most of rural
Virginia
to the rest of the planet.”
Gov.
Mark R. Warner, fresh from a trade mission to
China, assured the crowd at
Danville’s sparkling new Institute for Advanced
Learning and Research, itself a model of regional
and multi-institutional collaboration, that the
Regional Broadband/Roots of Progress Initiative
(RBI) “will certainly get the attention of new
employers and investors looking to tap the
potential of Southside and Southwest Virginia. ...
This
project would not be possible if
Virginia
had followed the path that so many other states
followed and diverted our tobacco settlement
revenues to other uses.”
High-speed
Internet access for up to 700,000 people and
19,000 businesses at a 20 percent reduction in
access costs is the goal of the project, which
could be completed by January 2006. The network
also will increase competition for local telephone
exchange carriers and Internet service providers.
Project participants suggest RBI will create over
1,500 jobs paying over $70 million in annual wages
and drive $140 million plus in new investments.
These
will be critical new links for a region that still
rides an economic roller coaster. Unemployment
stubbornly remains at over twice the
Virginia
average of 3.4 percent. Retail sales that are
booming into double-digits elsewhere remain
stagnant across Southside.
Joining
the Tobacco Commission as partners are the
Economic Development Administration (EDA) of the
U.S. Department of Commerce and the Mid-Atlantic
Broadband Cooperative, a Richmond-based nonprofit
formed to manage the $6 million in tobacco funds
and matching $6 million from the EDA.
Virginia’s
congressional delegation will be quick to point
out that the EDA $6 million is the second largest
single project disbursement from the U.S.
Department of Commerce. Adesta, Dewberry and
Atlantic Engineering Group will do the work.
The
governor’s office notes in addition that the
project supports four of its economic development
and technology objectives – building the highest
percentage of home broadband connections in
Virginia, coordinating state and federal broadband
resources, increasing Virginia’s attractiveness
to biotech, information technology and telecom
companies and expanding telecom and broadband
services in rural areas.
Tobacco
Commission executive director Carthan W. Currin
III calls the project another piece of the puzzle
to be put in place along with investments in
education, workforce development, basic
infrastructure improvements tourism and incentives
for new enterprises. The commission has invested
over $164 million to date in more than 400
economic development projects in rural
Virginia.
South Boston Del. Clarke N. Hogan looked
forward to “industries of the mind” and the
message from Southside, “From here, you can be
anywhere.”
Such
is the promise of innovative and imagination,
which Southside and the Tobacco Commission now
rightfully are staking out as a piece of their own
future. The RBI may prove in time to be a national
model for an open-access advanced broadband
network to provide wholesale dark fiber and
managed high-speed bandwidth. Leading the nation
in RBIs, in fact, would be a worthy goal for every
Virginia
governor of the future
But
the Southside-Tobacco Commission initiative already
is a model of regional cooperation and bipartisan
economic development in Virginia,
networks that rival any fiber in real power to
drive changes for the better. As Sen. Hawkins
gaveled the May 20th commission meeting
at the Institute for Advanced Learning and
Research to order, he took a minute to reflect on
the value of regional cooperation, “(W)hat
can take place when the counties and cities are
willing to lay aside any differences and work
together for the common good and benefit of all
citizens.”
“We
do not have the ability to waste assets, and when
we work against each other we do nothing but waste
resources and assets,” Hawkins suggested, “and
we cannot afford to do that any longer, and those
days are over. The future is here, and this is the
first step in a direction that will change the
dynamics of our entire population in an entire
section of the state.”
--
June 21, 2004
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