Mr Editor,
I am considered by the statistics to be a middle aged man. I’m just siting here thinking about how many jobs and businesses that I have seen lost in this area in just in my lifetime and it’s a lot. Some just closed while others just moved away. We had a vibrant downtown, a vibrant manufacturing base and now both are pretty much gone. During my lifetime we have lost 8 manufacturing companies that I know of that we have lost and there are probably more. Downtown has almost no what I call ” retail” stores now. We put in new sidewalks on Main Street for foot traffic and now there is no reason for the foot traffic. We had everything from five and dime stores to fine clothing stores. There were even places to grab a bite to eat at a lunch counter in some of the stores. Just about every kid in town had a wagon,a tricycle or a bicycle that was bought on Main Street and for the winter you could get an old fashioned sled there too. Use to be that you could get just about anything you needed for daily life somewhere in the immediate area but not any more.
We just built two new schools in Covington, we needed them and we will be paying for them for years. The County is spending millions for repairs at Alleghany High School and the fact of it is and will still be in the floodplain. It has happened several times before and it will happen again.
The problem is that we pay to educate the children and when we get them through school they leave because there are no jobs here. Those people are the population, shoppers and taxpayers we are losing as they grow into adults leave the future grandchildren of residents go as well. When you meet up with people and ask them where their kids are most will tell you that one or all of them are moved away from here and when you ask them why their answer will be that there are no jobs for them here and they had to leave to get a job somewhere else. Our youths are our strength to carry on and we are losing them to other areas.
Greenbrier County West Virginia is growing, Rock bridge County Virginia are growing and we sit right in between them with Interstate 64 running through here. Where is our economic growth?
We had a good industrial park in Covington until the City sold it off. It had pretty much every thing that a company would want in a manufacturing site. We had Lear there until the economy went sour but they are building a new plant in South Carolina right now to build products for BMW which is building a plant there also. Who knows what could have been but not now. I’ll take manufacturing over retail any day. Manufacturing brings in new money. The County started one and now years later say “oops” we need natural gas there when that could and should have been done along with the rest of the utilities were put in and it would have been at a much cheaper cost than now.
There is a person that is paid a good salary to do economic development for the area but I’m not seeing any results so far.
This area was built on manufacturing jobs and that’s what we need now. Make a product and ship it and bring somebody else’s dollars into our economy.
Jimmy Shiflett
W Park Street
Covington