The far western reaches of our great state provide perhaps my favorite bit of North Carolina trivia. If you’re in the town of Murphy, six other state capitals are closer to you than Raleigh, if you measure in a straight line.
That physical distance helps explain a metaphysical one — the longstanding, well-deserved gripe that the people running North Carolina don’t pay enough attention to what happens west of Asheville.
That is starting to change, albeit slowly. As we marked the second anniversary of Hurricane Helene, the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina released an economic recovery plan that tries to look beyond repairing the damage to building a stronger regional economy.
At the outset, the report says it draws upon the Marshall Plan, the one proposed in 1947 to help Europe recover from World War II — and prevent Soviet communism from spreading.
It’s not the most natural comparison. Yes, they’re both about rebuilding but in dramatically different scenarios. In the Marshall Plan, the early aid supplied food, fertilizer and fuel to a ravaged continent, followed by raw materials and machinery to get industrial production going again.
We’ve been doing some of that work already with the recovery money going into western North Carolina. There’s been real success reopening roads, though getting people back into homes has gone much worse.
This new report takes on something more difficult than restoring what was there. Britain and France had been economic powers before the war. Western North Carolina had serious economic problems long before Helene, and they’d still be there even with a successful storm recovery.
This plan is an attempt to address those problems, too.
What’s actually in here
The report is a bit of a hodgepodge. It talks about storm recovery, a few projects already underway, as well as ideas for growing the economy over the next decade.
The goals are mostly things every part of North Carolina wants: more jobs close to home, more housing, child care and health care. The idea is that you could grow up in a mountain town, find a decent job nearby and afford to raise your family there.
That’s harder than it sounds. Like much of rural North Carolina, the region has lost major employers and watched its population age. But many mountain towns also face pressures that some inland communities down east don’t — like wealthier retiree newcomers and vacation-home buyers bidding up housing.
The report is at its best when it stays particular to the mountain region. There’s a good bit of discussion of Spruce Pine’s quartz deposits and how they could support more manufacturing nearby. It also contemplates how more of the region’s timber and farm products could be processed locally, keeping more of the work and income there.
Put all that together, along with the housing and infrastructure work, and you’re talking about a substantial amount of money. The report doesn’t give a total, so I tried to put one together. My back-of-the-napkin estimate comes to about $25 billion over roughly a decade, including ongoing projects and private investment.
Some of that spending is already in motion. The plan includes highway projects around Asheville and farther west, as well as a federally supported manufacturing research and training center called the Futures Factory.
Others have a long way to go. For example, the plan envisions passenger rail between Salisbury and Asheville, with three daily round trips by 2035. While this has been a goal of the WNC Rail Committee for years, actually getting trains running remains a long way off.
Where I land
I don’t have the same ideological concerns I had with Stein’s statewide economic plan. That one seemed to assume the hard part of generating growth was behind us. This one understands how much work remains.
I suspect that’s because Sharon Decker, Pat McCrory’s former commerce secretary, led the effort. I got to know her as I wrote The Change Agent, and I give her credit for trying to put all this together.
My concern is more practical. Nobody knows what the economy will look like in 10 or 15 years, and there’s only so much a state-driven committee can do to shape it. The real recovery will happen town by town, and I’d rather see the administration spend its time, energy and money helping more towns carry out plans like the one Canton is working on.
Led by indefatigable mayor Zeb Smathers (my favorite Democrat in North Carolina by far), Canton is trying to figure out what can sustain the town now that the paper mill is gone. Redeveloping that property is a big part of its plan.
In a recent Kudzu Project interview, Smathers described his goal as building “the hometown of tomorrow,” where children and grandchildren have an opportunity to come back after finishing school.
That’s a big reason I like him so much. He’s thinking about whether the next generation will actually be able to make a life in the town he loves.
How to do that will look different in each town. A while back, I wrote about how Mount Airy is leaning into its Mayberry image to attract investment without losing what people like about it.
Other towns could use some help. The recovery plan highlights Spruce Pine’s quartz deposits, but as I wrote earlier this year, the town also has a $34 million downtown streetscape plan and an annual general fund budget of roughly $3.35 million. Helping the town figure out how to pay for its plans would be a useful place for the Stein administration to start.
That’s the part of the Marshall Plan I’d like to see us borrow. These towns have people who care deeply about their future. A little more help could go a long way.
