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About two years ago, on assignment for a Vermont-based magazine called Country Journal, I ventured over Independence Pass and through Aspen to Old Snowmass. There I turned up a side road to the Rocky Mountain Institute.
My assignment was to interview Hunter and Amory Lovins, who run the institute. It's a think tank in a highly energy-efficient home once featured on Sixty Minutes.
Since Amory's major work had been in energy policy -- in 1976 he wrote the influential book The Soft Path -- that's where we started. But we soon drifted to rural economic development. The institute is involved in several projects along that line; as a resident of a depressed rural town, I couldn't help but be curious.
Most towns are trying to hustle an industrial relocation, generally by offering free land, free utilities, tax abatements and various other bribes, all to have more money come into the community.
That's really a backward approach,
Hunter
explained, because there are only about 500 such
relocations every year, and 25,000 towns are competing.
Even the winners can be losers, because profits from an
industry with absentee owners don't stay in the community.
But there are things any community could do any time, at
minimal expense, to help its economy.
Amory drew an analogy. Suppose you're sitting in a
bathtub, trying to get clean, but you can't get enough hot
water. No matter how hard you turn the faucet and bang on
the pipes, the water flows out faster than you can bring it
in.
Now, the conventional solution is to go out and buy a
bigger water heater, which is costly to purchase and even
more expensive to operate. Doesn't it make more sense to
put a plug in the bathtub so you can make the best use of
the hot water you already have?
Rural communities, he said, are like that bather. We run around looking for bigger water heaters (generally in the form of a payroll coming to town) instead of looking for a good drain plug -- some way to make the best use out of the money that already comes into the community.
This goes beyond the shop at home
slogans that
infest small-town newspapers. He and Hunter cited Eugene,
Ore., which spent $30,000 to survey existing businesses to
find out what goods and services they purchased from
outside the community. That information was published.
It had two results, both beneficial. First, those in
Eugene that already furnished such goods and services now
had a list of potential local customers. Second, the
entrepreneurs of Eugene could look at the list and think
Gee, there's a $600,000 annual market here for widgets.
Let's start building some.
Eugene's economy has
benefited by $2 million annually in money that now stays
which formerly left.
When Steve Schuck ran for governor last year, I enjoyed
satirizing his let's run Colorado like a business
philosophy. But I'm developing considerable respect for
him.
After the Republican candidate lost in the primary, he stayed in public life. He's set up a program that encourages big Colorado corporations to develop rural suppliers. If there's something the big companies buy from fabricators in other states, and that product could be made in Colorado, then figure out a way to make it in Colorado.
US West, Mountain Bell's parent company, has agreed to give it a try. If just one piece of this program works, then the $10 million that now leaves Colorado every year for connection boxes would stay here. There's plenty more -- US West now spends about $2 billion a year for goods, most of going to suppliers in the East.
Steve Schuck is finding ways to plug the bathtub
by involving big corporations. Rocky Mountain Institute is
taking the same approach, but on a grassroots level.
This approach to rural economic development makes sense, because it relies on what is already present. It's within the control of people here.
The other approach -- the one followed by the boosters here and most other places -- reminds you of children that still believe in Santa Claus. They keep thinking that corporate Santa will land his Learjet sleigh and distribute presents, as long as the locals behave themselves, write sweet letters, and put milk and cookies, in the form of subsidies, on the table.
It's time we quit believing in Santa Claus. I hope that
Gov. Roy Romer, who was elected on a platform of economic
development, takes a good look at Shuck's work and the
Lovins' work, and then announces that henceforth his
administration will be devoted to plugging the
bathtub.
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