De-industrialized, out of work, on our own

Andy Grove, late founder, CEO of Intel wealth” policies, and seek examples of innovative economic growth strategies beyond our region.

Here are two ideas for using assets we already have at hand.

Recruiting and retaining high quality law enforcement officers is a perennial problem given the comparatively low salaries we offer.

The city owns multiple properties in poor and neglected neighborhoods. As neighborhoods with concentrated poverty always are, they are nurseries of crime and hopelessness. Expand and remodel these abandoned properties, offering home ownership in the compensation package of officers, EMTs, teachers, and firepersons willing to live in these neighborhoods. Provide below market mortgage interest rates, partial down payments, and cover closing costs, enabling city/county employees to build equity in their home.

It would improve city/county employee recruitment, retention, and begin rejuvenation of neglected neighborhoods. Better neighborhoods — less economically and racially segregated — will improve schools and reduce crime. Costs originating in those areas will decline over time.

Go Green. Re-power our schools with solar energy. North Carolina offers incentives to establish public/private partnerships installing solar energy arrays on schools. School district/ local government/private sector partnerships in Charlotte and Durham have designed financing options for districts, accumulated expertise in energy needs assessment, solar array construction, and operation.

The results would be reduced energy costs, living wage jobs, and development of a skilled population at the leading edge of sustainable energy technologies.

A successfully completed Floyd/Rome “Re-powering Our Schools” project is an opportunity to establish a private enterprise re-powering schools across Georgia and the Southeast.

Individually, local government incentives to community growth such as these are not silver bullets, but they are the start of a different approach to community growth.

Franklin Roosevelt was not an economist. He was a pragmatist. He tried anything that had a chance of improving the lives of ordinary citizens. A poster from his first term shows President Roosevelt in a speeding airplane with the stick in his hand and the well-known grin on his face. The caption read “Action! Action Now!”

His spirit of optimism and his focus on fair wages for American workers is needed for the struggle to raise our standard of living in a de-industrialized 21st century Rome and Floyd County. The alternative is Andy Grove’s collapse of the social contract, class conflict, and loss of self-sufficiency.