Retaining Existing Page County Businesses

Today and in a few posts next week I’ll be reviewing the “business retention and attraction” section of the 2008 Page County Economic Development Plan. In the plan, the material regarding business retention is by far the shorter of these two goals, so we’ll start there today.

I am going to spend a little time on a web search before moving on to the business attraction area, not the least because in a cursory review this plan seems to vector to a perceived need to expedite the purchase of “ready-to-go” sites – a concept generating a lot of attention and controversy in the County just now.

Also, my family will be out for the weekend – staying at the River’s Bend Guest Ranch (http://www.riversbendranch.com ) so I am heading out to the Hawksbill Cabin today. I am looking forward to a bounty of new stuff to write about afterwards!

Now on to the review of the plan –

“In order to retain businesses in Page County, public education is needed to let firms know what resources (financial, information, expertise, etc.) are available to leverage their existing efforts and investments.” This quote is the sole reference to existing business in the 1.5 page executive summary of the plan. It is a distinctively noncommittal observation – “public education is needed” – no assignment of responsibility, no data, no performance metrics.

Further back in the plan, where the goal and objectives are listed, the four items listed for retaining existing businesses are basically a repeat of those found in the 2003 plan:

• Expand existing efforts to educate businesses…
• Continue to build relationships with existing businesses…
• Undertake a survey of local businesses…
• Identify companion businesses to those existing in the county…
  

The first three are given high priority, while this last is rated less important. All were to be done with current staff resources – Chamber of Commerce, EDA, or Board of Supervisors resources – and some with current funding. The middle two above – the relationships building goal and the survey – require program funds for implementation; which is the same status they had in the 2003 plan, if I recall correctly. One thing I would like to see is a status report, not just in this section but in all sections – going back to the old stratagem of “what gets measured gets managed.”

The plan includes a straightforward justification for these simple investments:

• “…existing businesses provide the greatest opportunities to provide new jobs and capital investment.”
• “…business retention is even more critical than business recruitment to the economic viability and growth of the County.”
  

These are strong statements – and their placement in the plan is significant, appearing as they do before the discussion of goals related to recruiting new businesses. There is a long history of businesses leaving the County or closing outright. And the data shows that more than 60 percent of Page County's workforce commutes to work places not located here. If I were an owner of an existing business in Page County, I’d be asking questions about this – and I’d want to know why, with this kind of wording around the goals, more hasn’t been done to support existing businesses.

It gets to the soapbox point: why all the fuss about a land deal that will cost a lot more money than the small outlay it would take to lay the ground work for future growth, based on what’s already here?

Seems to me, this is another case of low-hanging fruit, along with overlooking the tourist and agriculture sectors as possible investment targets, that was missed somehow by the Board of Supervisors and the EDA. I’d love to see a revisit of these items as part of the way forward for the County.