Community Enrichment

If I had a dime for every meeting I have covered where the topic was economic development, I would be a far wealthier poor slob.

Just the words, economic development, can seem so theoretic or abstract.

Until, that is, it impacts your family.

By the time this is read my child and her children, my grandchildren, will be heading out of town to a new destination, Tallahassee, due to the lack of employment opportunities that will maintain a family of four in some semblance of solvency.

They will be packed and moving over the weekend, my son-in-law's job prospects compelling them to pick up stakes and move when it is the last thing they, their mother or I would like.

Economic development will never sound quite the same as the words pass through my ears destined for the gray matter - and no, not my hair.

And certainly our family joins many others in this community, where too many mothers and fathers must say goodbye to their grown children and grandchildren because there simply aren't the kind of jobs available to sustain a livelihood for a family just starting in life to thrive.

This is not a pity party, but the observation of a growing club that threatens to undermine the very fabric of this very special small-town community, from Wewahitchka to Howard Creek to White City to Port St. Joe.

A club that needs to stop adding members drafted against their will, a club that grows in proportion to the sagging fortunes of the local economy.

In part, there is blame on the broader economy, which seems in shambles and sitting precariously on a cliff.

But something more fundamental is being lost when young families - the future of any community - are forced to look beyond county lines to put food on the table and a roof overhead.

This was the most compelling argument the school district offered as it sought voter approval for additional operating revenue - the loss of jobs, the loss of young blood the district and community could ill afford to shed and the loss of young professionals attempting to establish roots in the county.

While many voters likely had to hold their noses as they filled out their ballots, the outcome of the referendum was in significant measure predicated on a belief that additional unemployment, additional loss of young talent, was not a way to go about enriching a community.

Much of the onus for this is on elected officials and more importantly the newly-constituted Economic Development Council.

Economic development must stop being treated as a hobby, dollars and directions provided on whims, leadership changes coming every few years as if the warranty on their usefulness had expired.

Because those expiration dates are the product of governing bodies riddled with personal agendas and the need to scratch the right backs at the right time to ensure the public's dime winds up in the right pocket.

A city commissioner once stated that the need for the community was to rid itself of the "operators."

The operators who point every infrastructure project or development to the same companies with the proper name or proper connections, or kiss goodbye a hope of quick and clean approval by local governing bodies.

The operators out to ensure that when government does business it is consummated with the correct companies, in part to ensure easy approval when the obligatory change orders and additional expenses emerge.

The operators who seek to keep in place the proper pecking order in the private sector, fomenting not just an uninviting atmosphere, but an openly hostile one for businesses wishing to relocate and provide new jobs and opportunities.

The operators who don't have the community, but their own bottom lines, as a top priority and who see a diverse and broad-based economy as a threat to their wallets rather than a foundation for a thriving community.

We can look back at the history of this county and see what such a community can look like.

When the paper mill dominated the manufacturing sector, the retail and business sectors thrived. People had decent jobs, decent wages and the added attachment of small town life.

That life, though, is doomed to a steady, painful demise unless the EDC and other economic development agencies and the county's governing bodies get serious about developing an economy of diversity and decent-paying jobs.

An economy not beholden to a port or a hospital, but one in which a port and hospital are building blocks for the future.

As the declining enrollment numbers of the school district demonstrate, this community is at risk for losing young blood and talent it can not afford to see go. The fact that the population has remained largely static the past 10 years is another testament to an unsettling trend.

A trend that will count one more young family forced to leave what has become their home in order to survive.

Yes, in this case it is personal, but until economic development is more than a theory in Gulf County, too many families of similar demographics will leave what they considered to be home, forced away by a landscape not of their making.

And until that landscape is raked, until the gears of the operators are reversed, the fabric of this community will unravel, maybe not today or tomorrow but at some point in the future and when it does all the knitting in the world may not be enough to restore it.