Finding potential

Surry County has an economic battle on its hands. We need to be open to possibilities.

It was the classic lemons-to-lemonade argument that a state economic development official put forward last week for Surry County's business community.

Patrick Woodie is vice president of the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center and spoke Thursday to the Surry County Economic Development Partnership.

It has been a rough year particularly for manufacturing workers. Employment in the county's industrial sector is down 1,700 jobs. It is an astounding figure.

Our situation is not without some modest gains in certain areas, but the overall picture could easily leave most of us nervous about the future of the local economy.

The gradual decline of textiles and furniture manufacturing over the last two decades and the last year in particular have left the county with vacant buildings and untapped water and electrical resources.

Woodie's thought is to use those realities to our advantage. They are not problems but opportunities. They may be lemons at this point, but we have the opportunity to make lemonade. We need to see them as resources waiting for someone, some company, some employer to use them. And we need to see and do the the things that will bring them together

Another reality is that some of the infrastructure is crumbling. Some of them currently are lemons. Hence the need for a grant from the Rural Development Center for improvements to sewage treatment facilities in the Tri-County Area. Hence the recent approval of Rural Development Center funding for architectural and planning studies to improve the Reeves Theater on Elkin's Main Street.

Apparently the funding agency, which has to be careful with limited resources, sees advantage in the heart of the Yadkin Valley and a regional sewer authority to support its growth. Apparently the money managers see potential in ideas devised by a group of Reeves Theater visionaries who believe they have found a good use for the historic downtown building that once was a center of the community.

For the Tri-County Area, Woodie sees potential in the combination of wine and tourism. It is not the only offering of the newly emerging Surry County, he says.

Surry and the entire Tri-County Area have advantages and resources to use. We have vacant buildings and available utilities. Woodie also mentioned the rural nature of the area, which is another attractive quality for expanding industry, offering a good place to live, low taxes and lower property costs than urban areas.

We offer good schools, close access to health care providers and beautiful countryside.

But any given area can have these things and still not be successful. We could all be sitting on a gold mine and not realize it unless we open our eyes to potential.

That is another good quality, Woodie attributes to Surry. "Surry County is one of the communities that really gets it," he told the EDP last week. In particular, it is one of the things that impressed the Rural Development Center that Surry is open to the potential of the future and what it has to offer.

"Really getting it" may be the biggest asset we have.