Meanwhile in Dublin and Laurens County, Georgia

Jerome Tucker mentioned that it was Willie Paulk who enticed MAGE SOLAR to Dublin and Laurens County, Georgia. She’s president of the Dublin Laurens County Chamber of Commerce. Here’s a writeup in GeorgiaTrend about what’s going on there.

Hm, instead of taking out $15 million in bonds to be paid back by the taxpayers, the community around Dublin joined together and made available just as much money:

Newcomers also will find a community eager to do business and endowed with something many don’t have these days – money to lend. Eight local banks recently joined an economic development consortium with combined assets of more than $1 billion and the ability to lend up to $15 million to companies seeking to expand or relocate. The funds are designed to support strong companies that want to grow, not an attempt at venture capital.
And they didn’t just use it to buy up land.

What else are they concentrating on? Education:

Another prime asset can be found in Laurens’ commitment to upgrading its workforce and ensuring that companies can find the trained employees they need, says Dr. Randall Peters, president of Heart of Georgia Technical College.

“When people are thinking about moving to a new town, they want to know about the education infrastructure, they want to know about the quality of the community, education institutions and that sort of thing,” he explains.

And look, they’re even studying development patterns:
“From the research that we’ve done, the baby boomer generation does not want to be grouped necessarily with an age group like your 55-plus community,” Best says. “They want the old traditional neighborhood. They want a small town. They want a place to walk. They are not going to quit working, so they are going to need a home office. They want to see young people too, younger and older people.”
It’s almost like monoculture sprawl isn’t the answer!

I’m sure Dublin and Laurens County and the surrounding aren’t perfect. But let’s look what we don’t see them trying to attract.

Instead they seem to be mostly going after clean industries that actually employ people. There’s an idea!

-jsq

One thought on “Meanwhile in Dublin and Laurens County, Georgia”

  1. Thank You

    Thank you, Mr. Quarterman, for following these kinds of stories. Dublin has about one-third as many citizens as Valdosta/Lowndes and yet they obviously have a much better grasp on how to ethically and responsibly attract clean and green industry. Maybe we could entice their leadership to re-locate to Valdosta once we get rid of the current Industrial Authority Board members?

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