by Steve Haner
Dear Southwest Virginia:
I read with interest Wade Gilley’s recent Roanoke Times column on steps Southwest Virginia should take to brighten its economic future. Sure, appoint another commission, but here are some more concrete thoughts: Stop expecting Richmond or Washington or anybody else to provide the capital or the leadership.
I spent twenty years living in Roanoke, ten of them with the Roanoke Times & World-News, but we left Roanoke more than 30 years ago to move to Richmond. My emotional attachment to the region is just as deep as ever, and on my mother’s side the family ties go back to the Revolution. That talented and highly-educated family is largely gone: north, east, west and south. My parents and their siblings all grew up in Bluefield. Of the fourteen people in my generation, one lives in the region now. Of their twenty-plus offspring, one lives there now.
So, goal one is to stop exporting your talent. You have the educational institutions – Virginia Tech, in my opinion, provides the best value for the dollar in Virginia, and the smaller schools and community colleges in the region are all excellent. I shocked a young lady recently by saying: “Of course I’ve heard of Emory and Henry! My grandfather went there!” But you need to figure out how to provide the jobs, low cost of living and amenities that make Tech and Radford and E&H grads stay in the region.
Goal two is to regionalize, regionalize, regionalize. I’ve been out of Roanoke for three decades, but it doesn’t look like the various Roanoke Valley governments are working much closer together than they were. Hampton Roads cities and counties consolidated decades ago but the localities in your region remain fractured, and deep down may still think like competitors. Look again at consolidation in the Roanoke Valley. Every southwest locality should be in conversation with its neighbors about what services they can share and whether two governments should become one, even if that means fewer jobs for politicians to hold and pass out.
Goal three is to restructure your business taxes to make it impossible for businesses not to include you on the short list for locations. Get rid of your machinery and tools taxes entirely. If not that (but it would be a dynamite step) find some other bold tactic that puts the region on the map. It will be the combination of the workforce and economic incentives that works.
Goal four is to embrace and celebrate growth. Watching the battle over the pipelines is not sending warm and fuzzy signals to anybody who might bring in another proposal requiring major permits and land disturbance, or who needs gas for operations. My experience in Roanoke decades ago was that a major proposal always brought out the whiners afraid of growth and enamored of the sleepy status quo. The jobs usually went elsewhere.
Covering the state Capitol for that paper, I was always amused by the focus on small, ill-advised grant programs to support this or that local activity. Explore Park. Center in the Square. Advocates always touted them as essential to economic development, but they were small stuff. The politicians complied and got a bullet point for their brochure. Thousands flock to Explore now, right? Today the screaming is about loss of federal handouts. Dependency as a state of mind is just as destructive to an economy as it is to an individual.
Stephen D. Haner, principal of Black Walnut Strategies, lives in Richmond.
