And so the news worsens.
Another 60,000 jobs will be lost nationally in the wake of a series of massive layoff announcements earlier this week. Smaller layoffs are trickling through the Valley to no less effect.
This prompts me, as we prepare for our second River City 2020 meeting tonight, to return to beating a drum into which holes have been worn already.
Layoffs and downsizing are beyond the control of any of us. Those decisions come from ivory towers in places where numbers fail to add up and bottom lines sag (insert additional gloomy cliches here).
What is happening here is what must not, which is to say little to nothing. In the business of newspapers, when economic clouds form and advertisers tell our sales representatives that budgets have tightened, the reflex response is to point out that difficult times are precisely when advertising is needed. That, among other things, is an action response rather than the preferred method of some to retreat into a far-flung corner and wait for the sun to shine again.
The same thinking applies to the city’s current state of affairs. Slashing spending wherever possible is a necessary task in times like these, both for businesses, government and the folks at home who are struggling to get by to the next paycheck. But smart businesses are concerned more with spending wisely, eliminating waste, than simply determining not to spend at all. And smart businesses know, above all, that now is no time to wait for business to come. Revenues must be sought doggedly.
So it is with this town. City officials cannot afford simply to wait for businesses to come, nor can it be assumed that those here will stay in perpetuity. Now is the time to attack, to vigorously pursue economic development, with the temporary hope being to ease the current economic sting and the more permanent hope to build an economy that can weather tough times in the way Waynesboro did during the Depression.
That’s why when I’ve been asked whether now is the time for an economic visioning forum like River City 2020 to be going to work I say now is precisely the time.
Join us in the effort. Don’t sit idly by while the city’s future slips away. Respond to this blog, e-mail me at , stop by our offices, contact your elected officials, make suggestions, demand action, raise Cain. Waynesboro’s past need not represent its best days. Those may yet be ahead, but not without the impetus of its people. That means you. That means all of us.