Russ Steele
Dave Moller writes in the Union this morning, Flat growth for funding of business groups
Despite a recent report calling for county government to spend much more cash to spur economic development, Nevada County's general fund money available for business groups remains flat.
The County spent $50,000 on a seriously flawed study and when these flaws were brought to the Supervisors attentions, their answer was we need to ignore the details and look at the bigger picture. According to my discussion with the Supervisors, the take away message from the flawed study was that we have to change how we are doing economic development in Nevada County. So where is the change in this current budget?
In studying economic development funding there is a consistent trend. When the local economy is going well, no one sees a need for funding more on economic development. On the other hand, when the economy is in the tank there is not enough money for increased economic development. And, what little money is available is spread around to keep everyone happy, rather than decide what the highest priority is and put some serious money into that priority project. The real problem is we have no clue as to what that priority project might be. As a community, we have not decided what we want our economy to look like in five or ten years. Since we have no vision of where we are going, we have no way of defining the steps to success, nor a list of priorities to be working on.
Our highest priority today should be to define what we want our future economic engines to be and then craft a plan, with a list of funded priorities, to make that vision real. But, change is hard and it requires a visionary leader willing to step up and LEAD. That leadership is currently missing and unless someone, or some organization, is will to step up to the challenge we are doomed to just more of the same.
