Resolve To Be Prepared For Change

Contributed by Mark Mitchell

Dear fellow agents of change in Southwest Virginia and East Tennessee:

You’ve no doubt started to hear about $800 billion economic stimulus package headed into America, but have you stopped to contemplate what it really means? How do we position our businesses, our neighbors, ourselves to take full advantage of this opportunity?

Let’s start by pulling the parts of the Obama-Biden plan out that can directly influence our opportunity.

The support of rural economic development will certainly include many of us.

We all will likely support modernization of rural telephone services to promote affordable broadband Internet service.

Most of us will support quality of life items, such as combating methamphetamine, improved health care and improving education.

Please refer to http://change.gov/agenda/ for more details and start telling you local officials your priorities.

May I suggest some points to get our discussion started? I agree with the rural broadband Internet need, but we have to understand how this technology can put more money in our pockets.
How many of you know how to get right-of-way agreements to bury the lines?

How many of you own ditch diggers and how many of you can hot-wire the system? How many of you know how to use e-mail, can design a virtual store, know how to set up a WiFi information kiosk at interstate exits?

In short, how many of you have a product or service to sell over the Internet?

What about logging into a library to read a book or to complete a homework assignment because it was a snow day? I think we need to teach ourselves what opportunities broadband access makes available. Maybe you don’t know how to use it, but you know it is needed, like the insightful Sen. Philip Puckett, who said: “I’m not quite sure what I need it for, but I do know that my grandkids need it.”

We have to do a little homework to take advantage of these opportunities. In fact, I challenge the Bristol Herald Courier to publish a series of articles through 2009 on this very subject.

After-school care and programs dig deep into our wallets. Closing school due to weather hurts families and local businesses to the tune of millions of dollars per day.

So does closing schools for election days.

The school systems are one of our largest employers and a great deal of our local economy is tied to the schools.

Even if we make the simplest change of moving polling stations out of the schools and keeping the schools open one more day per year, it would save our local economy millions of dollars.

We need to talk about these issues much more. Start this debate with your friends – better yet, make a new friend and discuss it.

In fact, many of the mechanisms that are designed to address these problems are already being carried out all around us.

Community development block grants, mentioned in the Obama-Biden plan, are already being used, but we need a plan to keep more of this money in the region.

A typical grant will include money for design and engineering of a project – how are we going to make sure a local firm is ready to win this contract?

What about the construction phase? How are we planning to make sure local firms are ready and able to do this work?

We don’t want to wind up with a new bridge designed and built by outside firms, with little financial benefit to local people.

We need to start now, developing the necessary support so that local businesses, not out-of-state engineering firms, are involved in carrying out the Obama-Biden plan.

This needs to include know-how and loans and a little regulatory influence that would give local businesses a scoring preference for being local during the selection process.  In the funding world, they call this “capacity development.”

I am carrying out more than a local call for change; I have started to advocate for a change in the national Farm Bill.

A great deal of America’s agriculture commodities are used as tools of foreign policy. I have written a new section for the Farm Bill that would allow the harvest of farm families to be sold on the international markets, but instead of that money going to pay for some other country’s development, it is returned to help our neighbors.

The next Farm Bill will go through major changes, and our community needs to participate.

In summary folks, you need to get ready for change.  Know and understand that you are going to be asked to do something different in 2009.

Mark Mitchell is a small business owner who lives in Damascus. You may reach him at .