photo by Hannah Reel

Left, Natchez Mayor Jake Middleton expresses his ideas during, right, Louisiana State University AgCenter Community Rural Development area agent Cynthia Pilcher’s program Know Your Region A Framework for Economic Development Strategic Planning to area community leaders Thursday at the Cotton Warehouse.

Area leaders learn to work together

By Vershal Hogan (Contact) | The Natchez Democrat

Published Friday, June 12, 2009

NATCHEZ — City and county lines don’t matter, and neither do state lines when it comes to regional economic development.

“Basically the whole can be greater than the sum of all the parts,” Associate Director of the Southern Rural Development Center Alan Barefield said.

Barefield was one of the presenters at the Know Your Region economic development workshop hosted in Natchez Thursday.

The goal of the workshop was to help local business and civic leaders to develop a regional mindset when approaching economic development.

When working to recruit businesses, regions need to work together for a greater good, Barefield said.

“Rather than everybody being stuck in their own little silo and competing across the river for one store, everybody needs to come together.”

One of the ways to do that is through industry clustering, attracting several related industries to one area to create a large job pool.

This was a model that worked in the Tupelo area, Barefield said.

“Now you have more jobs in Lee County than population in Lee County,” he said.

But getting that accomplished is going to have to take specific direction, said Cynthia Pilcher, LSU AgCenter community rural development agent and one of the workshop’s presenters

“If you are going to develop regionalism, you have to have the leadership to do it,” she said.

Throughout the day, the participants were presented with options about how to organize and lead the efforts for regionalism, how to detect the regional advantages and ultimately how to form and execute strategies.

The group also discussed challenges to the area’s workforce such as drug problems and parents who are not involved enough in their chidren’s education.

“We reviewed a lot of demographics and statistics, and (Adams County and Concordia Parish’s) trends are very similar,” Concordia Parish Economic Director Heather Malone said. “When one went up the other went up, and when one went down the other went down — success on one side is success on the other.”

Natchez Mayor Jake Middleton said he thought the day was very productive.

“It brought out some good ideas on how we can work together, and ideas on how to put together a team, what kind of players we need on this team and how to pool all of our resources together to offer to a business prospect,” Middleton said.

When everything was done, the host group offered to do a second summit, but Malone said she would want to take the second summit on if the group could address a specific problem for the region.

“I think I am going to talk with them a little more and maybe in the next couple of months we can have a common project for the Miss-Lou that we can work toward,” she said.

Middleton agreed that approach would be best.

“You can go and everybody can talk about it and everybody can get fired up about it, but you have to follow it up,” he said.

Thursday’s summit served as a good launching point, Malone said.

“The most positive thing was that we came together as the Miss-Lou region and talked openly with each other,” she said.

“That made me feel good and that we are really further ahead than some of us think we are.”