ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 25, 1996 TAG: 9608270057
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
VIRGINIA is on an economic-development roll. While Republican Gov. George Allen can't take all the credit - no governor could - he deserves a share.
In the past 2 1/2 years, by the Allen administration's count, companies have announced new investments in Virginia totaling $10 billion. That works out to an annualized average of $4 billion - or nearly four times the best single year before 1994. Partly as a consequence, the state budget showed a surplus of $83 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30.
Not everyone two or three years ago would have predicted the recovery. Defense cutbacks were worrying Northern Virginia and Tidewater. The western two-thirds of the state seemed mired in a no-growth economy. Yet today, the flower is back on the boom in Northern Virginia. Even here in the Roanoke Valley, far to the west of Virginia's growth-familiar Urban Crescent, the unemployment rate has dropped so low that any employer offering the minimum wage may have trouble finding takers.
True, Virginia's economic resurgence didn't arise from nothing, nor does it exist in a vacuum now. The policies of preceding governors helped lay the groundwork. The current robustness of Virginia's economic health is linked to favorable conditions nationally and internationally.
But Allen has done much. He clearly can take credit, for example, for bringing the state's economic-development machinery up to snuff. In a narrow sense, economic development at the state level means fishing for prospects, matching prospects to suitable sites, acting as clearinghouse and technical adviser to regional and local economic-development agencies, and in general working to make Virginia user-friendly for corporate-expansion decision-makers.
Before Allen, that machinery was atrophying. From the outset of his administration, Allen has made its rebuilding a priority, and to good effect.
To work well, though, good marketing must have a good product to market. For state government, economic development in the broader sense means contributing to what Virginia has to offer by providing high-quality public services, especially education and infrastructure, at reasonable cost.
On this score, Allen got off to a shakier start. His willingness to go further into debt to pay for prisons, and especially his undervaluation of higher education, would have hurt future economic development had his budget plans not been checked by the legislature. Moreover, his tendency to excessive partisanship and his attempts to politicize heretofore nonpolitical agencies threatened to diminish Virginia's good-government reputation.
Fortunately, Allen seems to have grown in office, or at least to have read the returns of last November's legislative elections. Since voters rejected a GOP drive to capture the General Assembly, Allen's partisan rhetoric has cooled and his relations with Democratic legislators have improved.
Simply making government work well, and building foundations of future prosperity by investing in human capital and infrastructure, are no less part of economic development than trade missions and the like. Even so, the governor deserves Virginians' gratitude for revamping the nuts and bolts of state economic-development efforts. His focus on recruiting jobs is paying off.
LENGTH: Medium: 59 linesby CNB