MUNICIPAL ASSOCIATION OF SOUTH CAROLINA

SPEECH BY
DARLA MOORE

February 26, 2003

  1. I am delighted to be with our landlord, the Municipal Association, today. I believe that you have a critical role in the development of our state, which I want to explore with you for a few minutes.


  2. I have a special place in my heart for small towns since I grew up in Lake City. But, to succeed, I had to leave. I had to find my opportunities outside of South Carolina.


  3. When I was able to return and, more important, to invest in South Carolina, I found a state not doing very well. More than anything else, this told me that our best and brightest, our young people, were being forced to seek their successes outside of South Carolina just as I had to do. This was simply not acceptable to me without at least an effort to change the direction of our state.


  4. Hence, the creation of the Palmetto Institute:
    • Single mission - increase the wealth of all South Carolinians.
    • Single standard of measurement - per capita income - not just capital invested, or as one of my consultants said, "nothing but tonnage" - not just jobs created, but a measure of the quality of life for our citizens through per capita income.
    • Policy positions will not be based on opinions and, by the way, we have an outstanding Board of business and community leaders with lots of opinions, but will be based on independent, solid, scholarly research.


  5. First Study - DRI-WEFA Report
    • Focused on the comparative position of South Carolina versus our neighboring states and some growth states,
    • Reviewed our portfolio of industry clusters, and
    • Reported on the current conditions of the state's economic conditions.


  6. Study concluded that:
    • South Carolina cannot compete vigorously in the new knowledge-based economy with the current mix of industries and the quality of our economic foundations, and
    • While we have been growing, we have not been able to close the gap with our neighbors or other leading growth states.


  7. Based these conclusions on findings that:
    • Our personal income was 18% below the national average,
    • The state's gross state output was 20% below the national average, and
    • The average manufacturing wages were 24% below the national average.


    Even more alarming, we trailed our neighboring states of Georgia and North Carolina in these categories, and the gap is widening.

  8. DRI-WEFA recommended a two-pronged approach to addressing our deficiencies:
    • First, we must continue to work to improve our economic foundations, especially education.
    • Second, we must move to diversity South Carolina's industries and to build upon our existing assets by establishing an industry clustering framework.


  9. We have been extremely fortunate in that the Secretary of State, Bob Faith, agrees with our industry clustering framework as a critical part of economic development for South Carolina. In fact, he has contacted Dr. Michael Porter at Harvard University, the leading expert on state competitiveness, to ask for his assistance. I mention Dr. Porter because his family comes from Chesterfield County. Jim Fields, the Institute's Executive Director, and, by the way, another product of Chesterfield County, and I have met and talked with Dr. Porter on several occasions and believe he truly can help us with our economy.

    So, the effort has begun but it will take the collaboration of all of us to make our state competitive with our neighbors. A key role of such an effort will fall upon the shoulders of our municipalities.


  10. I served on a panel last year to review a report produced by MDC, a non-profit research foundation in North Carolina entitled State of the South 2002: Shadows in the Sunbelt Revisited. The report assessed conditions in the South since a similar report by MDC in 1986. The study found far too many communities counting high school graduates as their biggest export. Left behind are people lacking education and skills sought by employers - high school dropouts, single mothers, and other adults - as well as people with deep roots who simply do not want to leave. These people and their communities face a litany of challenges - isolation by distance, lagging infrastructure, sparse resources that cannot adequately support education and other public services, social and ethnic divisions, and weak economic competitiveness.

I see these problems everyday in my hometown of Lake City. The Mayor of Lake City, LaRue Alford, who I think is doing an excellent job, is working extremely hard to bring our little town out of the shadows. As I said to open my remarks, our cities and towns must play a critical role in the state's economic competitiveness. Let me suggest some steps that you might consider making to help with this effort. I know Mayor Alford and I are working on these steps in Lake City:

  • Leaders will have to identify their communities' human, natural, and cultural assets to determine potential competitive advantages and to fashion a customized approach to take advantage of such assets. Make no mistake, if you cannot find or develop a competitive advantage, you will die on the vine. Find an expert through the Municipal Association or the Department of Commerce to help you. Develop a strategic plan to grow your competitive advantage. Recognize that you have to play a critical role in improving your economic foundations to be more competitive. Do not wait on others to make such efforts. As a church marker stated: "Ideas work only if you do. The key to the Kingdom is implementation."


  • Every study I have read makes this point very clear - You cannot do it by yourself. Towns and counties must see each other and their neighbors not as competitors (except maybe in Friday night football) but rather as partners in boosting their chances for success or, should I say, for survival. In particular, I believe rural/urban links are essential in creating regional vitality. For goodness sake, forget political boundaries when it comes to finding the resource and human capital to make your community a better place to live. Be friends, work together, pool your resources. Rural areas in this state cannot survive without a tie to a growing metropolitan area. Lake City must be tied to Florence for the very reasons I have just mentioned.


  • Your most important asset is not some industrial park that goes unused, it is your labor force. Pay attention to your labor force skills. Do not say that it is someone else's problem like the school district or the local technical education college or the Department of Commerce. Make it your problem. In the last two years, thousands and thousands of South Carolina workers have lost their jobs in traditional industries. I hate to tell you but no matter how much the economy improves or how long you wait, most of these jobs will not come back. That is why investment in job training, in improving labor force skills, and in building a solid local education effort is critical.


  • Continue to fight to get as much flexibility as possible in your tax systems. They must be modernized to reflect the change from a goods-based economy to a service economy.


  • Finally, we must overcome racial and ethnic divisions to work together to make communities successful. No one segment can do it by themselves. We need each other to survive. Several weeks ago, I met with 21 black ministers in the Lake City community. They are leaders of their church, they are dedicated to their congregation, but they are not collaborating. They are not working together. I believe this is a problem all through our state. You can change such attitudes but only if you want to make such an effort.

Thank you for inviting me today. Your association, under the leadership of Howard Duvall, is doing an outstanding job. But, just as our state, we must be smarter in our efforts -- we must collaborate with our ideas and resources. I assure you that the Palmetto Institute stands ready to work with you.

Thank you again.