In February,
Bacon’s Rebellion published a column, “
Reforming Regional Government,” by Reid Greenmun, a regular contributor to the comments section of the blog. I did not give his column the build-up it deserved. But I won’t make the same mistake with our second contribution from a regular reader.
The blogger who goes by the name of Groveton has penned a piece, “
The Commonwealth is Flat,” which explores two interconnected ideas: (1) that the potential exists to “outsource” jobs from growth-choked Northern Virginia to downstate communities, and (2) that a prerequisite to the first goal is lacing the Commonwealth with better broadband connections. Groveton is the chief technology officer of a major Northern Virginia technology services firm, so he knows of what he speaks.
The first idea is not entirely novel. A string of Virginia governors has endeavored to interest Northern Virginia’s dynamic tech community in investing downstate, particularly in depressed regions like Southside and Southwest Virginia. Delegations of Northern Virginia luminaries have made the trek to Blacksburg, Abingdon and Danville to see for themselves that downstate is not a total technology wasteland. The Virginia Business Pipeline periodically hosts gatherings to introduce NoVa-ites and Downstaters in similar business fields. Outside of the outsourced state IT facility in Lebanon, however, the yield has been disappointingly small.
In what may be the most telling passage of the piece, Groveton suggests that downstate economic developers may not be trying hard enough.
Someone has to organize the people who want to be employed (at a distance) and then sell their services to potential employers. That’s just not happening in Virginia.
I have worked in one or another of those nameless, faceless office buildings in D.C. or Northern Virginia for the last 26 years. Since 2000 or so I have been deluged by people asking me why I don’t outsource some of our work to them. These salesmen come from India, China, Texas, Israel, Oregon, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Russia, Belarus, Vietnam, Canada and countless other countries and U.S. states. They talk about the energy and the skill of their citizens, their lower wages (and therefore prices), their fluency in English, the stability of their currency relative to the dollar and they talk about their networks, always the networks. They tell me that they will create our PowerPoints, do our secretarial work, test the systems we write, develop the systems we design, read our X-Rays if we’re sick and answer our phones when we’re away.
Through all those years and through all those meetings I have never been approached by a single person from any Virginia jurisdiction with any outsourcing offer. Not one person.
Regarding the second key point Groveton raises, Virginians are kidding themselves if they think they have a world-class telecommunications infrastructure. According to the
Speed Matters website, Virginia has only the 11th best broadband connections among the 50 states and D.C. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranked only 15th among the countries of the world for broadband connectivity. Even more discouraging, the U.S. is falling further behind: The OECD ranked the U.S. 21st in the rate it was
increasing connectivity.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s newly appointed “Broadband Roundtable,” to be chaired by former Gov. Mark R. Warner, is a positive step, writes Groveton, but way overdue.
Image credit: Speed Matters, page 52 in the PDF file. Green shows areas where median download speeds exceed 6 megabits per second. Yellow is between 768 kilobits to 6 megabits, and red is less than 768 kilobits. The median download speed in Japan is 61 megabits per second!)
