LEBANON, Va. – To bring more jobs here, Virginia needs to be more competitive with other states to attract industry, gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe told Russell County leaders during a visit Tuesday.
“Those should’ve been our jobs,” McAuliffe said of recently announced energy projects that will be located in Mississippi and Tennessee. “We need to be aggressive about bringing business in.”
A Democrat and Northern Virginia businessman, McAuliffe said, in what he called an economic roundtable, that he’s not satisfied with the prospect of budget cuts or tax increases. His solution to the state’s recent economic troubles is simple, he said: Grow the economy.
McAuliffe is one of four candidates – three Democrats and one Republican – seeking to be elected governor this year.
Participants in Tuesday’s meeting addressed the region’s heavy-hitting issues: prescription drug abuse, health care, job creation, transportation and coal.
“I want Virginia to have the cleanest coal in the country,” McAuliffe said when asked by Russell County Supervisor Ernest Kennedy about his view of the fuel that provides half of the nation’s electricity.
“That ought to be our goal … a lot of livelihoods are depending on it, and I’m never going to throw someone out of a paying job … you don’t play politics with people’s lives,” McAuliffe said.
Russell County Administrator Jim Gillespie said most localities in the region are concerned about transportation, adding that residents show up at every Board of Supervisors meeting wanting to know when their roads will be paved.
McAuliffe said the commonwealth should develop passenger and freight rail systems to get cars off the road and provide opportunities for job creation in transportation-related industries, such as the efficient movement of freight inland from the Virginia coast.
Sheriff Steve Dye said the state needs a central database to track prescription medication dispensed to individuals to help law enforcement agencies control the problem of prescription drug abuse, particularly here in a region with a high rate of overdose deaths.
“Sometimes I think I’m a social worker with a badge and a gun,” Dye said.
Shannon Blevins, economic development director for UVA-Wise, said the state should help to bring broadband infrastructure to rural homes and communities to encourage entrepreneurship opportunities.
Jerry Stallard, international auditor-teller for the United Mine Workers, said health-care quality and access in the region need to be improved.
Steve Banner, chairman of the Russell County Democratic Party, said farmers are struggling and need help developing new technologies in their industry, which he said is big in Virginia but often overlooked.
McAuliffe took the opportunity to talk about one of his signature issues: chicken waste.
He said all the chicken manure the state produces could generate 40 megawatts of power, along with useful by-products. Bureaucracy often is the only thing standing in the way of developing such home-grown technology, he said – and he wants to change that.
“We’ve had this technology for a year and a half. Now, West Virginia has leapfrogged ahead of us because they wouldn’t give this guy a permit,” McAuliffe said of a man working on creative ways to use the waste. “That’s the kind of stuff that drives me nuts.”
dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701
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