ED Solution: Attract People Instead Of Companies

This is a letter to the editor I submitted to the Dayton City Paper.

Dear Editor,

It’s always nice to see different opinions from your columnists. Mark Luedtke got my interest in his ‘Dayton Dies A Little More’ when he suggested government policies are the reason we lost NCR. Intrigued I read on hoping to see him address a variety of policies that may be crippling our region but all I found was a typical dump on the supposed high taxes of Ohio.

Emblematic of most that cite high taxes as a problem he offered no viable solutions. “Dramatically reduce the city budget…contract out all the services we can” sound good but our leaders are already doing this every day.

Dayton, Trotwood and many area communities are faced with revenue shortfalls and all I keep hearing is cut our tax rates. It’s a great sound bite.

If you compare the state budgets in 2007 by spending per capita, Ohio ranks about 27th. All those states with no income tax, are finding money through other tax sources. State and local budget funding has to come from somewhere, you just can’t will away the costs needed to provide roads, police, fire, and other important services.

I was hoping Luedtke’s column would dig a little deeper into specific ideas that could improve our ability to compete against other states. There are ways to save by identifying and combining redundant services and their associated payrolls. But more importantly we need to also look at the way outsiders see us and strategically enhance those areas they view as positive.

Those enhancements come in two categories, physically nurturing these assets and marketing them better.

Every state has shovel ready sites for development. Instead of dumping more investment into new Greenfield development why not invest more in our attraction assets such as the Air Force Museum, Riverscape, beautification projects, arts, entertainment and other quality of life projects. Instead of trying to attract companies concentrate on attracting people and doing things that make them advocates for the region. Then the companies will come.

Sincerely,
Bruce Kettelle