Editorial from the Asheville Citizen-Times:
There’s no rest for the weary. Or the successful. Just ask the Economic Development Coalition for Asheville-Buncombe County.
Back in 2010 Ben Teague, EDC executive director, laid out AVL 5×5, a plan with goals of 5,000 new jobs and $500 million in capital investment in the area over the next five year.
Editorial from the Asheville Citizen-Times:
There’s no rest for the weary. Or the successful. Just ask the Economic Development Coalition for Asheville-Buncombe County.
Back in 2010 Ben Teague, EDC executive director, laid out AVL 5×5, a plan with goals of 5,000 new jobs and $500 million in capital investment in the area over the next five year.
The plan did not meet its goals. It exceeded them. Indeed, on the capital investment front it doubled them. On the jobs front the tally was 6,385 direct, indirect and induced jobs. The temptation for many would be to throw a wrap party, pop the champagne and pat everyone on the back.
Instead, the new goals for 2020 are as ambitious as the original plan. Over the next five years the plan is to generate 3,000 new direct jobs paying an annual average wage of $50,000, along with new capital investment of $650 million.
We’re glad the EDC is not resting on its laurels, because the hard reality is that no one else is. Asheville and WNC are in the jobs growth game and playing it well. And now they’re planning to step it up a notch.
On the jobs front, the economy is recovering. However, even with the recovery there are far too many workers who are unemployed or underemployed. In this area there are far too many finding it hard to make ends meet or to make enough to stay in the area.
The AVL 5X5 Vision 2020 plan focuses on innovation and growth companies. The role of Venture Asheville, the high-growth entrepreneurship initiative of the Economic Development Coalition for Asheville-Buncombe County, will be to help facilitate 50 new high-growth companies headquartered in Asheville and $10 million in new equity investment by 2020.
OK, enough with the numbers. At the end of the day what does this plan mean in plain language?
It means making the right connections between employers and entrepreneurs to keep job creation bubbling here, creating a future where people living here can stay here – and so can their kids down the road.
It means making the connections that get the right kind of job training to match workers to the many existing good job openings. A note on that: There’s a bit of an impression floating around that workers who need job training are workers who aren’t smart or just can’t keep up with the times. In fact, it’s hardly surprising that a worker isn’t trained for a job that may not have existed a year ago. Training is essential, and in the world of rapidly-shifting technology we live in, it essentially has to be non-stop.
It means living up to an aggregation of community responsibilities. A good job base means well-paying jobs, which means a good tax base, which in turn means good schools, being able to address issues from housing to transportation, etc., which leads to a better quality of life, better health and a better place to live for all.
Beyond the numbers, that’s the real goal of AVL 5X5 Vision 2020. The very first words found at www.asheville chamber.org/economic-development/ avl-5×5 are “A strategic plan that unites our community…’’
We’d say this is a plan worth uniting behind. It’s certainly a community worth uniting for.
See the article on ACT.