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West Virginia needs ideas

Apparently, our state’s top leaders believe the only way to bring prosperity to West Virginia is to borrow $1.6 billion to build a lot of new roads, providing only temporary jobs, many of which will go to out-of-state residents.

And we wonder why so many of our fellow Americans think we’re not very smart.

Don’t get me wrong: I supported the so-called “Roads to Prosperity” bond issue voters approved a week ago. That was largely because a nice chunk of the money, around $300 million, will go to road and bridge projects in the Northern Panhandle.

But that’s not how Gov. Jim Justice sold the proposal. He marketed it as an economic development initiative.

Why, he said, it will create 48,000 new jobs. It may even be big enough to bring some people who have left our state back, he suggested.

Nonsense. Many of those jobs — and there won’t be 48,000 of them — will go to out-of-state employees of big construction companies. And all of the jobs will go away in a few years, unless, of course, the governor then can convince us to approve another road bond issue.

For several days before the vote last Saturday, Justice crisscrossed the state warning of economic doom if the bond issue was rejected.

One thing he said in a press conference the day before the referendum was depressing in the extreme.

Should voters reject the measure, Justice said, he would contact state Senate President Mitch Carmichael and ask what should be done next to improve West Virginia’s economy.

“He’s going to say the same thing I’m going to say if he asks me — ‘I don’t know.’ I don’t know, either … We’re not Houdini, here.”

Read that again: In effect, our governor was saying that no one in Charleston has any ideas to spur the economy. None.

Lay aside the tax reform initiative Republican legislators mounted, unsuccessfully, earlier this year. Is there nothing else we can do?

A friend, who didn’t support passage of the road bond amendment, told me he had better ideas for any $1.6 billion that happens to land in the state’s lap.

Why not spend some of it for a world-class magnet school, he suggested. Or why not a groundbreaking research center on, say, hydraulic fracturing? Or why not … you fill in the blanks.

I’ll bet you can.

Why not spend more on marketing West Virginia as a tourist destination? Or giving out-of-state visitors more of the amenities at our state parks?

Why not speculate on what the next big thing after the next big thing will be, and develop it here? For example, we know robotics and nanotechnology are the next big things. Is ultra-nanotechnology coming, and would spending a few hundred million dollars get us in on the ground floor?

Why not use West Virginia University to find a cheaper way of making gasoline out of coal, then build the plant here? Why not achieve the breakthrough scientists have searched for in developing a blight-resistant American chestnut tree?

Why not …

Apparently, because ideas and risk-taking no longer are in our West Virginia genes. That’s what the governor seemed to be saying.

Do we need to spend some money on our roads and bridges? Absolutely — and let’s not forget existing ones while we’re building all those new monuments to trust in government.

Do we need to spend $1.6 billion? Are all the roads on the state’s list important? Well, that’s debatable, but you do what you have to do to convince voters throughout the state to support your bond sale.

But here’s the bottom line: In five or 10 years, once all the money is spent, what will we have to show for it? At best, a handful of permanent new jobs and a lot of debt.

Surely we can do better.

Showing the world we can do something — just about anything — better than anyone else on the planet would solve our economic problems.

We’re West Virginians, for Pete’s sake. We can do that — unless we decide we’re whipped.

Myer can be reached at: mmyer@theintelligencer.net.

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