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Your Featured Economic Ideas:
May 2000
Congress recently appropriated $750,000 for converting the former Weston State Hospital into a Civil War Museum. A far better use for this building was suggested by Vince George. West Virginia is in desperate for specialized office space that would attract high tech companies. Akron, Ohio, has converted former rubber factories into such office parks. Why not Weston Hospital? This would be a large and attractive facility near the existing high tech corridor and a number of colleges and universities. It would be a much greater asset for our economy than a Civil War museum.
March 2000
Here's a water follow-up from Rick Eades, the H2O man:
Quarried limestone sells for $5 per ton. Bottled water can sell for up to $1,700 per ton. Which produces less dust, less noise, less aesthetic damage, less blasting, and more potential revenue to repair those roads traveled? Which can be produced at a steady rate forever, if protected? Which could offer more sustainable jobs for our future work force in a range of occupations including chemistry, biology, geology, hydrogeology, engineering, marketing, public relations, tourism-related businesses (trout ponds or farms, trout catch-and-release, spas)? If you had to protect one or the other, which would you choose?
February 2000
Like many economic development ideas, this one requires a clean environment.
Ecotourism has become big business in places like Costa Rica and the American southwest. Parts of West Virginia are also attracting this type of tourism, but those places are under threat from polluting industries. Nor does the state do an adequate job in taking advantage of the resources we have, or supporting those small business people who thrive from ecotourism. We can do better.
January 2000
In Ritchie County, a native son who built a billion-dollar satellite industry in Arizona is investing back home by building a factory for manufacturing satellite thermal blankets near Ellenboro. This brings up an interesting idea. So many of our most talented entrepreneurs have had to leave the state over the years. But as we all know, no place has a hold on its native children like West Virginia. How about recruiting our commercial successes to invest in the state as Ritchie County has done? After all, no one knows the value of West Virginia workers and communities like a homesick West Virginian. And who knows, some of these Mountaineers may come back home for retirement.
December 1999
Some folks in Roane County who are making a living as farmers and tofu manufacturers offer these interesting suggestions for developing new types of agriculture in West Virginia. In addition to locally-produced tofu, a soy product, the Roane Countians suggest elephant garlic, shitake mushrooms, cultivated ginseng, greenery for floral arrangements, and vineyards as crops well-suited to our soil, climate and terrain. These crops are money makers and would also do well in the southern coal fields if people can gain access to land there.
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