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The Voice of
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There's nothing I have less patience for than blue ribbon commissions. In my experience, they are announced by a marching band, suck up inordinate amounts of resources, then issue reports that collect dust on a shelf somewhere. So what am I doing in charge of one? Last month I joined Gov. Jim Hunt, Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight and House Speaker Jim Black in announcing the N.C. Rural Prosperity Task Force. I agreed to head it because I think it will be different, and I think it can make a difference on a subject that matters. The Task Force is a bipartisan group of 25, representing a good cross section of the state, including bankers, economic developers, educators, entrepreneurs, environmental experts, farmers, foundation heads, local elected officials, professors and small business people from urban and rural areas. This task force has one thing in common – a commitment to helping rural communities find ways to grow and prosper. This is a critical time for our rural communities. By the year 2000, more than half of our state's population is going to be centered in just 15 urban counties; our state's record growth in the 1990s has mostly been focused in the areas along our interstate corridors. At the same time, we have never been more interdependent as a state; those of us who live in cities depend on our rural communities for scenic beauty, food, air quality, water, wood and good workers. If rural North Carolina fails, we will all feel the pinch. Our state's economy is in a significant transition, and that transition is challenging rural communities in unprecedented ways: u Labor intensive manufacturing companies are increasingly moving out of the country. In the first six months of this year we have lost more than 20,000 jobs due to permanent layoffs and plant closings. We are replacing them with more capital intensive companies, companies that pay fewer people with greater skills higher wages. We can't stop this change, and in many ways we shouldn't want to, but it presents a particular challenge to our rural communities, who are more dependent on traditional manufacturing jobs for people who have been laid off. u Total farm income in our state was down more than 13 percent in 1998 versus 1997, and experts estimate we won't see a recovery for another 18-24 months. Prices of what is now our biggest agricultural product – hogs – are down 40 percent. The impact of falling prices for hogs, milk, corn, soybeans and cotton ripples through our rural agricultural communities. u Tobacco prices continue to languish, with falling quotas and production. A recent study by the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center estimates job losses resulting from the tobacco settlement to be anywhere from 14,000 to 26,000 jobs. This “triple whammy” is having impacts across our state, but the impacts are most significant in our rural areas where the manufacturing base is less diverse and where farm income is a critical part of the economy. What can a task force do to help? Before I outline what we will be doing, let me tell you what we won't be doing. We won't be a bunch of “suits” sitting inside our offices saying “You oughta” and “You gotta” and here's some more money to throw at the problem. We won't be issuing a report full of pie in the sky recommendations. And we won't be telling people that what works in Robbinsville will work in Robbins. We will be listening. Over the next five months, we will tour the state, listening to the concerns and commitment of people across North Carolina – the high school student who is planning to move away because she can't find a job in her home county; the laid off textile worker who needs retraining for the high tech textile plant that's coming to town; the farmer who can't make ends meet with rock bottom commodity prices; the rural entrepreneur who can't find the start-up capital to get a great idea off the ground; the small business person who can't locate the facility in a rural community because of a lack of skilled labor and physical infrastructure, including bandwidth. In addition, we will hear from working groups focused on key issues we know to be critical to the success of rural economic development: Infrastructure: Improving water, sewer and natural gas service, building roads and rail, improving the availability of information technology. Education: Helping rural schools get the tools they need to prepare students; training and retraining workers, studying innovative regional cooperation efforts. Economic and community resources: Finding new ways to encourage small business and tourism growth; recruiting new businesses to rural areas; increasing the capacity of rural communities to make change. I won't pretend to be an expert on rural North Carolina. But I assure you our task force will be good at evaluating ideas and setting priorities. And with the diverse skills represented in the members, I'm confident we will come up with a series of achievable, real world recommendations. But ultimately the most important things won't be the changes that occur on the books in Raleigh, but on the backlots in rural North Carolina. Some people from rural communities have told me they don't want to change. They don't want their towns to lose their warmth, their scenery, their natural beauty, their community spirit. Ultimately, I hope this task force, by working with communities, can discover some of the tools they need to become what they want to be. No task force should presume to make that decision without them. The remaining task force meetings will be held from 7:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m. on the following dates: Sept. 10, James Sprunt Technical Institute, Kenansville; Oct. 29, Tyrrell Center, Columbia; Dec. 3, Raleigh. Erskine Bowles is managing director of Carousel Capital in Charlotte. He is a former head of the U.S. Small Business Administration and former Chief of Staff of the White House.
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By Erskine Bowles