Lowndes County has all the ingredients to achieve “dynamic growth,” according to economic development expert Bill Fruth, who spent much of Monday touring the Golden Triangle and talking with officials at the Columbus-Lowndes Development Link.
Fruth is in town this week to share the findings he has gleaned from data gathered during his visit last fall. This morning, Fruth met with officers of the Link Trust. This afternoon, he will have lunch with elected county and city officials at the Link, then he will hold a question and answer session with the Link’s executive committee.
Fruth will unveil a detailed plan, with “reasonable goals” the area needs to achieve in order to reach specific growth levels, Wednesday from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. at Mississippi University for Women’s Nissan Auditorium. The presentation is free and open to the public.
The seminar, part of the Link’s “Feed the Fire” business growth series, will give two different scenarios for growth, assigning annual milestones in areas such as job creation.
Fruth said the community is well ahead of many when it comes to the five things every micropolitan must do in order to improve economic quality of life for its citizenry.
He praised Lowndes County’s abundant supply of “improved, approved” industrial real estate, as well as its abundant, inexpensive energy and access to a variety of transportation. He also praised the area’s higher education resources, saying it’s important for colleges to form links with the business community, making certain they’re producing a workforce trained to meet the needs of local industry.
But it’s also important to have “an active, well-financed, professional economic development program,” he said, citing the Link as a good example.
Fruth is president of Policom, a Palm-City, Fla.-based economic research firm. His firm specializes in ranking cities based upon growth rates, consistency trends, industry averages and other factors. He said while other economic experts offer their own rankings, his are different in that he looks at growth over the past 20 years, giving higher credence to the past 10 years.
Columbus currently ranks 57th out of 576 micropolitans (urbanized areas with a population of more than 10,000 people, but fewer than 50,000) — up from its 2004 ranking of number 374.
But why would a city care where it ranks on Fruth’s list?
He said the primary reason is so cities get a sense of where they truly are economically so they can get out of denial and take action.
“If they’re always at the bottom, the value is ‘OK, we have a problem,'” he said.
Lowndes County has had slow growth in terms of size, but quality growth in terms of wages, Fruth said Monday afternoon. He said his formula for success will show how to take the area’s economic quality of life to the next level, raising the overall earned income 1.6 billion more by 2025, achieving roughly $100 million more in taxable retail sales, bringing higher wages for local residents and more money for local government.
Of course, a lot depends on what happens nationally to raise investors’ confidence, he admitted.
“All the chess players are on the board though,” he said.
The biggest problem Lowndes County faces may be perception. He said Mississippi’s reputation, particularly in regard to tort laws, holds it back. The other issue is a perception that the state’s workforce “is terribly uneducated,” he said.
Fruth will hold a West Point and Clay County-specific seminar at East Mississippi Community college tonight from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. He declined to comment on whether he feels the Link made the right decision recently when it agreed to represent the West Point-Clay County Growth Alliance and hire someone to specifically recruit industry for Clay County.
He said the specifics of how communities choose to go about achieving the goals he sets falls out of his realm of expertise and deferred to Link CEO Joe Higgins.
The “Flow of Wealth” seminar Fruth presents to West Point and Clay County tonight will be the same as the one he presented to Columbus last fall. He said he will conduct an in-depth study of West Point and Clay County’s economy if he is hired to do so.
West Point currently ranks 406th out of 576 micropolitans — down from its 2005 ranking of 370, according to Fruth’s Policom survey.
Fruth, a native of Ohio, served as mayor of Tiffin, Ohio from 1980 to 1984. He is a former president of the Palm Beach County Business Development Board and has held numerous other economic development positions. He has studied micropolitans in 35 states.
Carmen K. Sisson is the former news editor at The Dispatch.
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