Let’s not just think outside the box; let’s break the box!

Andy Grove, late founder and CEO of Intel

AProviding below market mortgage interest rates, partial down payments, and covering closing costs, enables city/county employees to build equity in their home; an attractive enhancement to our relatively low salary scale. Better neighborhoods — less economically and racially segregated — will help to improve schools, increase upward mobility, and reduce crime. It is a win-win.

Local government could enhance our regional visibility and nurture high value added jobs by funding new public solar installations. For instance, thirty Electric Vehicle charging stations on and around Broad Street would attract “downsizers” looking for a walk-able neighborhood. This would support the apartment and condo development funded by the state’s Main Street tax credit program. “Downsizers” are likely to be purchasers of the $32,000 Chevy Volt, whose tires I kicked a few days ago at a local dealer.

Re-power our schools with solar energy. North Carolina offers incentives to establish public/ private partnerships installing solar energy arrays on schools. You can read about the School District/Local Government/Private Sector partnerships in Charlotte and Durham here. They have designed financing options for districts; accumulated expertise in energy needs assessment, solar array construction, and operation.

A similar project in Rome would reduce energy costs, create living wage jobs, and develop a niche skilled workforce 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.

Rome needs a wind turbine! For several years I lived near an electricity-producing wind turbine, more commonly known as a windmill. On frequent bike trips to its scenic location, I always stopped to hear the gentle “whoosh, whoosh” of its large blades. It was a lone demonstration windmill constructed by the state to provide power for a technical school. It is another opportunity to nurture a high-value added industry with living wage jobs in our county offering a future to our youth.

Government is the only institution large enough, durable enough, and focused on the public welfare to jump-start the transformative projects we need to avoid being a casualty of world-wide disruption.

Franklin Roosevelt was a pragmatist. He tried anything that had a chance of improving the lives of ordinary citizens. 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.

There are brains and money enough in the educational, medical and industrial organizations in Floyd to go beyond “thinking outside the box”; we can “break the box.” Floyd could be a model to other localities for sustainable energy, worker rights, high quality of life, and general population health. Only imaginative leadership with unshakable commitment to public welfare at the head of a strong local government and increased tax revenue from those who can most easily bear the burden will make that possible.

The alternative is Andy Grove’s collapse of the social contract, class conflict and loss of self-sufficiency. In other words, to remain “flyover territory.”