Some truths are just too hard for politicians to speak: There are some things that constituents refuse to hear. That’s why we have blogs.
One of those truths here in Virginia is that Southside and Southwest Virginia are experiencing an irreversible decline that cannot be halted as long as current economic trends and development policies hold. This is not a reflection upon the earnestness, work ethic or moral worthiness of the people of those regions. It’s just the way it is.
I developed that theme in two recent blog posts, which I’ve knitted together in a single piece, “No Salvaging the Mill Towns“.) If you haven’t read the blog posts yet, skip them and read the column. If you have read the blog posts, you might revisit the column anyway: It states the case more lucidly.
The occasion for these observations is a report by a blue-ribbon panel that has surveyed the handicraft of the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission after 10 years and $400 million parceled out over 900 projects smeared across the region. The panel recommends adopting an “investor” approach to disseminating funds rather than a grants approach, in which funds are doled out to every town, city and county throughout the region. Likewise, the study group recommended making fewer micro grants under $100,000 and concentrating on projects that offer potential to transform the two regions.
As Heinz Guderian, the theoretician behind the Wehrmacht’s WWII blitzkrieg tactics, famously said (in German, of course), “Kick ’em, don’t splatter ’em.” In other words, if you want to achieve a breakthrough, concentrate your resources.
Fortunately, community leaders in Southwest Virginia are getting the picture. One reader has sent me a widely circulated letter written by Barnie Day, a Patrick County community banker, board member of the Tobacco Commission and former General Assembly delegate (and former Bacon’s Rebellion columnist) who, by speaking the hard truth, no doubt has transformed himself into political paraiah.
“We have fertilized and watered the seeds of our own failure,” Day wrote, “with how we have chosen to structure and govern ourselves, with how we have chosen to allocate — in basically a ‘might is right’ fashion — the spoils of this endeavor. … Not only has [this approach] pitted region against region and local government against local government, but in many cases it has fostered spending for spending’s sake — spending without impact — spending sometimes based on little more than availability of funding.”
As Day admits, he argued for and — “God forbid” — actually received funding for a “covered bridge festival.” The Tobacco Commission has lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on sewer lines, shell buildings, community centers, institutes, partnerships and initiatives of all sorts. “But what nags at me is this question: “Will any of them make a 100-year difference?”
In my column, I argue that the problem runs even deeper. The dispersed, low-density settlement patterns of Southside and Southwest Virginia — small towns, tens of thousands of homestead scattered along country roads — are not sustainable (a) in an age of energy scarcity that drives up the cost of gasoline and (b) in a Knowledge Economy in which the “clustering force” rewards companies for locating near large pools of skilled labor.
If there’s any hope for the region, it’s in conducting economic-development triage and concentrating resources into a handful of urban areas — Danville, Bristol, perhaps Martinsville — that are large enough to compete for human capital. Such a policy would be political suicidal for any community leader to advocate. But the hell of it is, the strategy of spreading around the tobacco booty to placate local politicos is doomed to failure. Southside and SW Virginia get only one chance at this: They have to do it right.