George Rebane

Today Russ Steele highlights the latest wallowing in the process to come up with a plan for economic development in our county (here).  There can be no sane plan to get from here to there if we don’t first define ‘there’.  I have written about this straightforward process and spoken about it in a number of public forums on economic development over the last year (see here).

It is amazing that there is no one visible in our county’s leadership who either understands and can implement the steps required to do such planning, or has the cojones to say that such steps don’t work for Nevada County and we are going to go down another road.  Were I king, I would not allocate one red cent of county monies for any economic development effort that first doesn’t spell out our goal in a way that allows us to measure our success in achieving it.  Without an explicit statement of that, we will continue blathering platitudes about ‘expanding the tax base’ and ‘smart growth’ and ‘balanced community’ and ‘traffic congestion’ while busily molding ourselves into a backwater bedroom community to serve economic growth that’s happening elsewhere.  Let’s get on with the program!

Stay tuned as we continue to monitor this muddle.