Since 1999, Virginia has doled out $400 million in tobacco settlement funds with the ostensible purpose of rebuilding the economies of the Southwest and Southside regions.
The report card just arrived, and the marks are mediocre.
“Despite this spending, population in the region continues to decline, wage rates still lag behind the rest of the state, there is persistent high unemployment and poor educational attainment is still endemic,” a Blue Ribbon Review Panel report on the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission states ominously.
The panel recommends a number of changes, many of them procedural. But its key recommendation is a whole-hearted shift in focus – to education rather than traditional economic development activities. We agree.
The region’s future depends on its ability to cultivate and retain an educated workforce. The region won’t be a major player in the information economy when just 17 percent of the workforce has a college degree or when dropout rates still loom around 1 in 4 in some counties.
The blue-ribbon panel completed its work in April. The panel’s findings leapt from obscurity to public attention with the publication of a Richmond Times-Dispatch news series this weekend, and they are now the talk of the Virginia political blogosphere.
At least one seasoned political commentator, Jim Bacon, a former editor of Virginia Business magazine, is ready to write off Southwest and Southside Virginia – in part because of this report.
“Even if the Commission followed the advice of its blue ribbon study group and invested more heavily in education, it wouldn’t make much difference,” Bacon opined in a column for his Webzine, “Bacon’s Rebellion. “Tragically, the vast majority of newly educated residents of Southside and Southwest simply would emigrate to metro regions where they could better utilize their skills and make more money.”
Obviously, we don’t share Bacon’s gloomy views of the region’s future – or lack thereof. The region faces enormous challenges, but opportunity for improvement still exists.
Importantly, the Tobacco Commission’s investment in broadband Internet throughout Southwest Virginia is beginning to pay off. The town of Lebanon has become a high-tech island of hope in the region – landing both the state’s backup data center and CGI-AMS, a software design firm. The challenge is to build on that success.
The blue-ribbon panel shares this glass-half-full perspective of Southwest Virginia’s future. The panel wants the Tobacco Commission to invest in education to a far greater extent – from preschool to college – and to target economic development funds to industrial prospects large enough to create ripples through the regional economy.
The Tobacco Commission can no longer afford to hand out money to small fish in the economic pond – like companies with a handful of employees. Similarly, the panel warns that spending on lawmakers’ pet projects, some of them related to tourism, isn’t likely to bring signficant return on investment.
The Tobacco Commission, which meets July 31 in Bristol, needs to seriously ponder the panel’s suggestions, then act on the best of them. It’s too early to throw in the towel on Southwest Virginia.
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