The Inner Sanctum

Today WV is celebrating its 146th Birthday which the state celebrates it officially as WV Day.  Last year Jason Keeling started, with his A better West Virginia Website, a challenge to to get other blogger’s involved in defining obstacles  that hinder WV’s growth. This year he has extended that challenge yet again.

I think one of the problems that holds WV back is that we dwell too much in the present and the past and not enough in the future. I don’t mean WV’s diverse and historic culture but instead its inability to move into new realms of broadband and transportation infrastructures as well as economic development.

For broadband, we need to not only expand to rural areas, but we also need to look at ways of increasing bandwidth capacity statewide.  A lot of cities try to offer free Internet to its constituents but end up having difficulties maintaining that kind of infrastructure on their own.  Instead I think cities could provide incentives for broadband companies that  meet a certain baseline of requirements.  For example, imagine if a city would wave franchise fees and possibly provide subsidies if a broadband company met its requirement of having a free tier of Internet to anyone in the the company’s territory.  They could even set minimum speed and and service quality requirements.  This would allow WV cities to compete on the basis of broadband availability.  Imagine how much a small business would save in WV by doing business with free broadband.

Transportation is another factor.  Country Roads might take you home, but how long does it take you to get there and will they bring business to WV? The construction and expansion of roads in WV I see today are to meet the needs of Today’s traffic, and by the time they finished being built they’ll already be inadequate.  We need to start investing in construction that will make are roads sufficient for 20-30 years out.  Not only that we need to start investing in transportation projects that decrease the reliance on those roads.  Projects such as light and high speed rail systems to link our cities and their resources together. And create real jobs in the process.

For economic development, we need stop depending on our few natural resources to bring jobs and income to the state.  We need real and sustainable jobs that will last long after those resources are exhausted.  I think one major way of doing this is to create methods of encouraging small business to move or start in WV.  Far too long has WV tried to woo large businesses to come into the state with far too little success.  The Toyota plant is one example of such a success but at the same time other business have pulled out.  We need to come to the realization that WV isn’t ready for big business to come here yet. All large businesses started somewhere, small.  Wouldn’t it be wiser for WV to invest in a multitude of small businesses and help grow those businesses in to large ones?  To give it a gardening analogy, you can transplant a single plant but that’s all you have is the one plant to depend on or you can plant a bunch of seeds and soon have a whole garden of plants.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 20th, 2009 at 11:06 am and is filed under West Virginia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.