George Rebane

This morning ERC held its annual meeting at the Holiday Inn with over 85 of the community’s leaders and interested parties there to enjoy breakfast and see what will pass for economic development (ED) this year.  Gil Mathew, ERC CEO, presided over a well-organized gathering and gave a fine welcoming speech. In it he pointed out to all that the first thing we really need is to agree on ‘what exactly is ED?’, else down the line some will be zigging while others are zagging.  At the end of his talk each of the tables were given some questions to discuss for about ten minutes and then present their thoughts to the whole group.  Well enough.

We duly bent to the task in the short time allowed, and came up with something between little and not much.  However our table’s leader, as most of the folks in attendance, was no slouch, and when he rose to speak, gave a good demonstration of what may charitably be called realtime synthesis – he put together a fine sounding group of words from which it was hard to get any, well let’s call it, semantic purchase.  Which itself was OK, since we gave him even less to work on.  Other tables delivered similar reports; with the ones who actually took notes doing a bit better.

What emerged was a polyglot of all the old saws from wanting high-paying jobs to “attracting a full-spectrum demographic” to providing a cradle-to-grave environment for those born in the county.  To me the most disturbing outcome was that no one really wanted to give the ERC any real guidance – Nevada County’s ED should be everything to everyone.  No one gave a little speech saying that we need to make some choices because our resources are limited both in kind and in their effect.

In the end, the holy grail of a “balanced community” is still somewhere out there beckoning us.  Of course, no one will stand up and say what constitutes balance, other than maybe having some significant proportion of young and old, rich and poor.  Even though many people wanted to attract high-paying IT jobs, the sign at the Bear River bridge should still welcome the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” arriving from some “teeming shore”.  While no one really called out for more “wretched refuse”, it was clear that in the ED plan some provision should also be made for them.

The existence of the retired/leisure constituency was recognized, but no one really knew how to handle them.  One fellow characterized the retireds as a static community upon which we better not depend – I guess this meant that they were old and would die with no one coming here to replace them.  Others simply agreed that “retirement will happen on its own” and need not take up much of any purposive ED plan.

The only actionable point on which most of us agreed was that we should make a concerted effort to attract and recover the well-educated young people who left here after high school graduation.  We figured that in the interval it would be possible to upgrade the farm enough to answer the age old question ‘how ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?”  But, here’s the real kicker, what percent of our high school grads get college degrees in fields that make them welcome wealth generators?

Finally, one of the more remarkable ideas to come from the group was to just go out to the community and ask them what kind of ED would they like.  Walking out to my car, I was trying to puzzle out how I would deal with the data that such a community wide survey would produce – specifically, what kind of usable information could one make out of such a dataset?

So, having received no definitive guidance from its government and commercial sponsors, at the end the ERC was left to fend for itself.  Before closing prayer Gil Mathew did introduce us to a couple of capable looking people who will be acting as consultants in ED planning.  Their tasks are not yet clear, so I will conclude by suggesting that perhaps the first task that they tackle is to disprove the following statement – ‘Using limited resources to achieve the broad target of a demographically-balanced, economically-developed, small community is utter folly, resulting in no discernible direction toward either the desired demographic profile or an acceptable increment of economic growth.’ 

Should that task be considered politically intractable, maybe this one would serve instead.  Disprove the following statement – ‘Focusing limited resources on improving carefully selected, narrower economic metrics that take advantage of our community’s asymmetric attributes will maximize the chance of promoting meaningful economic growth in Nevada County.’

======== added later today

Russ Steele’s review of this gathering can be read on NC Media Watch.  My preamble to this meeting was posted as ‘Economic Development in Nevada County – Another View’.