George Rebane

This morning the Nevada County Board of Supervisors continued their latest foray into promoting economic development.  This was the latest episode in a process that actually started in 2007, and now continues across a new chasm that has opened up in the country’s economy.  Supervisors Hank Weston and Ted Owens were tasked to come up with an outlined approach, and that they did.  The meeting was held in a community workshop format with facilitator, lots of public input, and about a hundred people attending on a very rainy morning.  The Supes did a good job in reviving the effort during these hard times.

In this post I’ll try to give a quick summary of my takeaway and input to the BoS.  A more detailed input was submitted in writing to the BoS by Russ Steele (here) on NC Media Watch.

The bottom line, as presented by Hank and Ted, is summarized in their slide showing a new structure to ‘brand’ the county and organize its economic development efforts.  It consists of three major legs of 1) starting a new and improved Conference and Visitors Authority (CVA), 2) starting the NC Chamber of Commerce that integrates the efforts of the now separate city CoCs, and 3) maintaining the Economic Resource Council as the county’s new jobs developer.

The ‘New Model’ was introduced as a starting point that would elicit public comment from the county’s stake holders and serve as a concrete starting point for making definite economic development plan.  A lot of emphasis was put on the future incorporation of performance metrics into the plan.  The Supes wanted to make sure they could tell the taxpayers what they were getting for this $290K outlay for the first year which would be divvied up as shown below.

Everybody from holistic medicine through the arts community to agri-business got a chance to put in their druthers.  A continuing theme was that the plan would be inclusive – Ted Owens of Truckee made a big point of this – so that east county would not continue to be relegated to Placer County’s Lake Tahoe district, or worse, wind up as the high altitude adjunct to Reno, Nevada.  Notably absent from the public input were what’s left of our development and contracting enterprises, industry, and traditional retailers.  I hope their absence was not because they were too busy making plans to shut down and/or move out.

When it came my turn to speak, I brought up the county’s retirement community that no one seems to recognize as perhaps our single biggest cash importer – it most certainly was not in this plan.  Our retireds number about 35,000 and many of them are ‘equity refugees’ from the larger metropolitan areas of the state.  At about 1.5 per household (HH) bringing in an average of $60K/HH, we get $1,400,000,000 – a very large number.  On the back of the envelope one can do the simple calculation shown below.  Even after quibbling up or down with these numbers, the answer is huge.

The reason I continue to harp on this cash importing cohort is that it is a fairly cohesive group as far as its impact and needs are concerned.  The retireds’ dollar is totally spendable in the county to the extent that the county can provide the goods and services required by our older population.  The economic multiplier of these dollars is much higher than, say, the equivalent revenues from a business, because most of those revenue bucks go back out to pay for raw materials or cost of goods sold.

The retireds don’t look for a reason to leave the county to do their shopping.  They’re here because they like it here, and they like their needs satisfied nearby.  They invite their kids and lots of lifelong friends to come up and visit them here, thereby bringing in more spendable dollars.  They all wind up dying sooner than later, and on the road to their final reward they change homes (acres to condos to rest to hospice) and consume a lot of restaurant food and healthcare services.  They don’t pollute and they don’t have to put young kids through the school systems, although they will continue to educate themselves, join local organizations, and generously fill the local philanthropy coffers.  And yet they are the 800 pound economic gorilla that is always ignored when we plan our local economy.

Jo Ann and I spent four days in the LA area a couple of days ago.  As lifelong residents of the region we have many friends there, and therefore spent time eating and drinking and talking about life and the country.  The greater LA area has over 15 million residents, and boils off about 500,000 older people a year who seek greener pastures elsewhere.  To them, and other such areas, Nevada County is a black hole, totally invisible.  Along with tourism, providing an environment for retireds is the surefire strong suit of our beautiful county.  We are so close to so many things the retireds like to do – from trips to SF, Sac, wine country, mountain lakes and streams, Tahoe, and the show and gaming tables of Reno. 

Before we continue to ignore this billion dollar golden goose, let’s take another look at that big dollar amount above and ask what else we have here that comes close to it.  And finally, when we attract new retireds, we get fast dollars that can start coming in within six months or less.  We already know how to provide for these people because we’ve been doing it, and today we need to start doing a lot more of it.  We truly can become the Carmel (substitute name of choice) of the Sierras.