"Tax and spend" becomes "tax and lose"

In its 30th anniversary issue, the Roanoker magazine includes a summary of economic developments in the Roanoke Valley over the last three decades. The article, “Getting Nowhere Fast?”, contains some genuinely disturbing statistics. The population of Roanoke is stagnant. It is within 200 people of where it was 30 years ago; since then, the population of Virginia rose by nearly 60 percent. Wages in the valley are far worse than stagnant. Today, average income in this area is 19 percent lower than the state average; 30 years ago, the gap was only 5 percent.

Roanoke has difficulty attracting new businesses, and the valley’s young people are moving away. Again quoting the Roanoker, while nearly half the population of Virginia is between 18 and 44 years old, just over a third of our population falls into even that broad definition of “young.”

The magazine article offers some explanations, such as a city council with only one business owner. Even this one owner, Brian Wishneff, said, “[Roanoke] doesn’t have a natural driver of our economy. We don’t have a federal facility or a state facility. We don’t have a port and we’re not next to Washington, D.C., so nothing here happens automatically.” Wishneff, the former economic development chief for Roanoke city, does not seem to see much of a role for private businesses as economic drivers. The article also mentions the lack of a “four year university,” conveniently forgetting Hollins University, which evidently doesn’t count because it is private.

There is no doubt that the reasons for Roanoke’s economic doldrums are multiple and complex, but I believe that a series of articles in the Roanoke Times over the last few days provide some very valuable clues. Start with Nov. 19, when the following appeared in the Business section: “N.C. incentives, not Virginia’s, compute for Dell.” The computer company will build and open a plant in the Piedmont Triad, providing 1,500 jobs, and an investment of $100 million dollars.

Just in case Councilman Wishneff does not have his North Carolina map handy, the Piedmont Triad does not have a port either, and it is not next to Washington, D.C. So, we can scratch those excuses.

The Dell jobs and investment dollars could have come here, except that “[Virginia] officials weren’t willing to offer an incentives package comparable to North Carolina’s.” During the same week that Gov. Mark Warner suggested that perhaps the state’s $1 billion plus surplus would not be enough for everything he wants, his administration would not let go of enough money to lure jobs to our region. Mike Schewel, Warner’s aide for commerce, actually defended the job loss as a good thing, saying, “In Virginia, we have traditionally been a state with relatively low incentives compared to other states.” Companies locate here, he said, for other reasons.

Except that they don’t locate here, not anymore. And unless you define “traditionally,” to mean, “since Warner was sworn in,” Schewel completely neglects the aggressive efforts of the George Allen and Jim Gilmore administrations to keep Virginia “Open for Business.”

This brings us to Wednesday, Nov. 17, when we learned that the California-based Milken Institute ranked the Roanoke Valley 181st of 200 metro areas in the country for creating and sustaining jobs, only five steps up from Detroit. This appalling figure represents not only the shattered dreams of 30 years ago, but a staggering decline of 15 places just since last year.

At least Secretary Schewel still has a job.

Earlier in the week, the Virginia Employment Commission gave us the news that, during the past year, jobs in the Roanoke area grew at half the state rate. This figure might have been substantially better just with the investment from Dell. What the figure does not show is how many other businesses, representing how many more jobs, or how much more private investment, were scared off by politicians’ almost obsessive greed for more and more tax money.

Refusing to permit the taxpayers to have any of their own money back is bad enough. Refusing even to let go of some of it so that more taxpaying businesses can be produced is somewhere between bizarre and irresponsible.

Finally, we have the news that Roanoke city is not the only place where no one learns their lessons. The Roanoke County Board of Supervisors just published their annual “Wish List,” which they will send to the county’s General Assembly representatives. The first two items on the list are tax increases. First, the County Supervisors want the power to tax tobacco products. Second, they want “more power to tax more things.” They were not more specific about the list of “more things,” according to The Roanoke Times. (Perhaps they were trying to find something, anything, which is not already taxed to death!) The supervisors called their proposed tax grab “local revenue diversification.”

A better name for it would be, “Here we go again. Another 30 years of losing out to North Carolina.”