Taking A Stand: High-paying jobs what county needs
I must be a politician’s dream because I’ve figured out what the people of Warren County want and it boils down to three easy things: Family, Safety and Identity. In a departure from my regular format, I’m going to specifically break down these three areas in a three-part column which will extended over three weeks so to get it all, you’re going to have to read them all. The first topic is family.
Think about it. During the last county executive’s election, what was the overriding issue? Jobs. People were worried because Warren County was in the midst of a recession, just as was the rest of the country, and a lot of people were out of work. However, I believe the concern was more than just jobs in general. I believe it was the kinds of jobs we have here, leaving people with a sour taste in their mouths.
Face it, a young person who goes off to college to get a degree probably isn’t going to settle here after graduation because there are very few good-paying jobs in Warren County. That is, unless you want to work at Bridgestone which, although good-paying, can be tough manual labor. When you look at it, there’s not a lot of high-tech jobs here where a wide-eyed young graduate can envision having a successful career with some company which offers advancement.
Therefore, the highly educated youth of our community are moving away, leaving behind their family and roots to seek their fortune elsewhere. What this does, in turn, is rob our county of an entire generation of great minds and leaders and robs parents of having their children close. The entire idea of a core family is out the door, literally, when a child wants to better themselves, because, face it, the chances are few and far between that Warren County is going to offer a young executive any opportunities.
Why is this? Simple. It’s because we’ve been short-sighted. We’ve lived for today so long that we’ve forgotten to plan for tomorrow and now tomorrow is here and our children are leaving town en masse. Sure, the old factory jobs were good during the 1960s and 1970s when simply bringing home a paycheck was enough, but this is 2004 and even those jobs are drying up. Folks, if you continue to live in the 1960s, all you’re going to attract is 1960s people. If you want to attract and retain the modern person, i.e., our children, then we have to live in 2004.
I, for one, want to see Jack have the option to stay and prosper in Warren County. I don’t want him counting down the days until he can flee Warren County to seek his fortune, as many of our children are doing at this very minute. There’s no reason that fortune can’t be right here.
So what do we do? First, we get rid of leaders who want to live in the 1960s at our next election. Their time has passed. We don’t want silk mills and low-paying industry here that turns laborers into robots just for a puny paycheck. We must modernize by aggressively recruiting high-tech industries and doing what it takes to entice such businesses here, even if that costs us money in the short term. We must hire an aggressive recruiting team full of spit and vinegar who won’t just sit around and sip coffee with the old-boy network here.
These companies are out there, settling in other areas every day because we don’t have the foresight to bring them in.
The choice is yours. If you do the same old thing you always did, then you’re going to get the same old results. If you’re happy with the mass exodus of our children, then keep doing what you’re doing and before long it’s going to be just a bunch of old-timers sitting on the porch, wondering what happened to our county’s future.
(Duane Sherrill is a reporter for the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].)