It's time our eastern Kentucky business community became the leading voice in the debate about our future. The debate has revolved around the future of the coal industry and coal severance tax revenues, but really comes down to a debate about economic development in eastern Kentucky. Over two years ago, in a membership meeting of the Pike County Chamber of Commerce, our membership voted unanimously to transition into a regional chamber. Our business leaders understand that an economy does not follow political lines and that the chamber does not exist to serve a political geography, but rather the business community within that political geography. When they realized their business success depended on the success of the region, that’s when we took action and headed down this road of regionalism. Our concern is primarily the economy, not local politics. If we are going to debate economic development, we must begin by benchmarking ourselves against our competition.
Who is our competition? There are a total of 15 regional economic development organizations in the state of Kentucky recognized by the Cabinet for Economic Development. In the last two and half years, 71% of the KY Cabinet for Economic Developments announcements of new or expanding industry, have been in a county served by one of these 6 regional economic development organizations in the attached table. The cabinet made 781 announcements between January 2011 and July of 2013 with only 10 of those announcements in the service territory of our chamber. Contrary to popular local belief, this is not the state’s fault. It is our fault, for not dedicating a budget for economic development to create a system that can professionally handle the economic development process. We must build our credibility as a professional organization that has comparative best practices to other regions within our state.
For some reason our so called innovation of regionalism, although it has been the trend of successful economic development across the nation for decades, in eastern Kentucky has been confronted with a few detractors and naysayers. For example, in a meeting with InSite Consulting Group, a county judge-executive claimed that the chamber was breaking the law by getting involved in economic development. Or when a county judge-executive spends time debating the programming of a local television station, rather than entering into serious dialogue with the local business community about the dire state of our future economy. We will not let local politics and political turf wars hold us back any longer.
We keep asking why is the economy not developing? Why is it not diversified? Does Ford build a car and then keep it in a warehouse waiting for someone to call and tell them they want a car? Or do they invest in their dealerships that hire salesman, build websites, have signs, and know their product inside and out? Right now our local tourism commissions in our eight counties have a combined budget of approximately $3 million, but we have not been able to earmark and commit money to a program of work for economic development, while our competitors have. Visionary leadership from many individuals over the past 50 years has provided a solid foundation of transportation and infrastructure; the most expensive pieces of economic development, but a recent study by InSite Consulting group affirmed the belief that no dedicated program of work exists in our eight counties and that our properties and industrial parks need dire attention. The study also affirmed our belief that our chamber’s regional expansion was a move in the right direction and actually, they recommended an expansion of our efforts by adding a team of economic development staff to our organization. Their recommendation was an effort within our organization, driven by private industry, that would be fully staffed to be a champion for economic development and implement a brand of One East Kentucky.
Back to our first question, What is the future of eastern Kentucky? In the words of President Abraham Lincoln, the best way to predict the future, is to create it. Our future is not static, nor is it set in stone. Our future hinges on our ability to get in the game and compete; to be regionally strategic with our communities, and to have constructive passionate debate among our local leaders. We are talking about private industry investing in a program of work that will employ a staff to recruit new industry, retain and expand our existing industry and nurture a climate of entrepreneurship; a professional champion for economic development that has as its chief mission, the future economy of eastern Kentucky. The business community is uniting and no longer ascribes to the idea that we can aggressively wait for the phone to ring.
