The proposed (certain-to-be-created) Henderson-Vance Economic Partnership has won the endorsement of the Henderson City Council, and the Vance County Board of Commissioners is sure to follow suit one week from today. So why are we still skeptical?
Is it the membership?
The men (and they’re almost exclusively white men) behind the partnership don’t exactly fill us with confidence. We have no doubt that they want the best for Vance County; after all, developers only make money when someone wants to buy what they’re developing. And men such as Sam Watkins and Eddie Ferguson have shown not only a desire to enhance our county, but a willingness to take chances to do so (Watkins with Embassy Square, Ferguson with Triangle North Corporate Park).
But they and others driving the partnership’s creation are basically the same people already involved with the Economic Development Commission. We’re not sure that dressing them up in new clothes will produce new leads or new ideas to bring good-paying jobs to the Henderson area.
Still, the partnership has new voices, particularly representatives of the city government, and it brings people to the table whom the EDC hasn’t heard from regularly, such as the schools superintendent and the tourism board. So the membership isn’t the main problem.
Is it the failure to put a commitment to openness into writing?
Every representative of the partnership has said all the right things about openness. The partnership will do as much as it can in public meetings, and the group has nothing to hide. We can’t fault the sentiment, and we don’t doubt the intent.
But history tends to counter all of those nice words. First, we have the example of the Embassy Square Foundation, another 501(c)(3) nonprofit group Watkins founded for the betterment of Vance County. That group’s board and executive committee never hold public meetings; we don’t even know when they meet. Old habits die hard, so you can’t blame skeptics who wonder whether Watkins and friends will slip back into a pattern of letting the executive committee make all decisions and keeping most of the board, as well as the public, in the dark.
It’s not a good sign that the partnership’s steering committee declined to include an open-meetings provision in the proposed bylaws. It’s not as if the issue didn’t occur to organizers until the public and the media started complaining in June. We have it on good authority that openness was a big issue during meetings of the steering committee, and Watkins acknowledged before county commissioners June 22 that Lynn Harper, picked to be vice chairwoman of the group, has pounded the drum for codifying openness.
We want to see a policy on open meetings and public notification placed into the bylaws as the first action the partnership board takes at its first meeting. Yes, we know the board could vote to change the bylaws at any time, and we know that as a private organization, the partnership won’t be subject to any penalties for ignoring its own open-meetings rules. We also know that the necessary exemption for discussions of specific economic development prospects could be stretched to close almost any meeting of a group devoted to economic development.
Something in writing, however, holds more weight than oral promises, which can be denied or interpreted in different ways. And something in writing puts the onus on the partnership to explain any closed meetings, any deviations from the policy and any changes. Chairman-to-be Bob Fleming has promised such a written policy, so for now we’re willing to give the partnership the benefit of the doubt on that front.
Is it the mystery about what exactly these 27 people and their professional staff will do?
Now we’re getting to the heart of the matter. All we know about the economic partnership is where the membership will come from, who some of those people are, where the start-up money will come from (Maria Parham Medical Center, Watkins’ and Ferguson’s companies, and a few other businesses), that the group expects someday to ask for direct public funding, and that the goal is to change the way we approach economic development.
We’re all for bringing everyone and anyone interested in economic development together around one table. We think the benefits of such a comprehensive approach already are showing through the work of the anti-crime Vance Organization to Implement Community Excellence. But VOICE doesn’t have any professional support staff and thus doesn’t cost anything beyond the salaries we’re already paying to the public employees involved. VOICE has no provisions to meet secretly. In fact, VOICE has no limits on membership; anyone is welcome to attend and participate in the meetings held on the first and third Wednesdays of each month at 10:30 a.m. at the Aycock Recreation Complex.
If the partnership’s goal is merely to get everyone around one table to talk, it could have gotten working with as little hoopla and money as went into the creation of VOICE. So there’s something more here. But what?
We know this group is needed because our current economic development efforts aren’t working; the partnership‘s organizers tell us so. What we don’t know is how this group will find more success, or even what it will do that’s so dramatically different. After all, each of the organizations involved in economic development, especially the Economic Development Commission, will continue to operate independently, and Fleming and Watkins have assured us that all decision-making power will remain with the individual organizations and the two governing bodies, the Board of Commissioners and the City Council.
So the partnership won’t have any power except to advise and support the existing organizations, yet it needs an executive director/chief executive officer and enough other professional staff to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. The proposed staffing we’ve seen (not in anything presented to the commissioners or council members) includes a grant writer, which is something desperately needed around here. But as far as we know, the purpose of that grant writer will be to win money to finance the partnership’s efforts, not to bring money to the local governments or other nonprofit groups.
Again, we’re left wondering what exactly the partnership will do with its staff, its money and its powerful board members. And we’re troubled that after the partnership made two presentations to the City Council, two to the Board of Commissioners, one to a commissioner committee and one appearance on WIZS-AM’s “Town Talk,” we still don’t know the answer. All of the important discussions about the partnership’s openness and membership prevented any talk about how this group will operate, beyond the possibility that the board will meet monthly instead of quarterly and that the executive committee won’t have any more power than the full board grants it. We haven’t heard a word about the staff.
So we await a full explanation of how the partnership will work and why it is the horse to which we should hitch our economic future. Maybe partnership representatives will send us a letter. Maybe they’ll explain themselves next Monday night before the commissioners. Until then, we won’t be cheering on the partnership, and we’ll count ourselves among the skeptics.