The wrong direction for East Tennessee city
The December, 2008 unemployment rate for the City of Kingsport was 8.4 percent. This rate is expected to go higher due to recent layoffs as the recession deepens.
Kingsport, as I have said many times needs to get industry to locate here that offer good paying jobs. More retail jobs aren’t needed. Get the good paying jobs first and then retail jobs will open up.
After giving it much thought, I have come to the collusion that the City of Kingsport, Chamber of Commerce, Networks, and Sullivan County are not capable of getting the type of jobs that the area needs. I’m sorry that those are strong words, but it is the truth. Look at the facts. Sure, there have been some gains, but these have been mostly in the retail area.
We need the involvement of the State of Tennessee to help get jobs here. The State was able to help Chattanooga and Clarksville get new manufacturing firms to locate in those cities and North Carolina was able to woo Google to locate to Lenoir, NC.
Kingsport has relied too long on Eastman and it is time to get other firms here. Get rid of the mindset that economic growth is retail and get new people in those organizations that can go after manufacturing firms.
The Higher Education Center is good, but I get the impression that the city thinks that firms will come to the city in droves because we have a bunch of smart cookies here. Upper Mississippi, I am sure did not wait to build a higher education center to attract car manufactures or did Lenoir, NC wait to have the type of employees that Google wanted trained before going after the Google business.
The time to act is now! The population of Kingsport has declined –1.6 percent from year 2000-2007. Having more educated people trained at the Higher Education Center and the lack of jobs that would be attractive to them will insure that the declining population will get worse as they look elsewhere for employment.