Primary Industry

Last week I attended the Hernando Summit at Silverthorn Country Club. I wrote this article for my journalism class:

Primary Industry

The lack of primary industry in the county is cited as a major cause for the local economic downturn.

The biennial Hernando County Community Summit took on a somber tone Thursday as business and community leaders brainstormed issues surrounding the state of the economy with government officials. The positive community reports were overshadowed by the dire predictions of their guest speaker from an independent economics research firm. In his opinion, the chief reason for the local economic woes of the county stem from the deficiency in primary industry that serves to import money into a community.

“Primary industries are what cause economies to grow or fail,” said Policom Corporation President William H. Fruth who was the guest speaker. “The condition of your economy determines everything else.”

Fruth’s firm specializes in studying the dynamics of local economies. He has evaluated data for over 600 communities, in 32 states, over the past 10 years. In his presentation, he compared Hernando County to 363 metropolitan areas by population, annual wages, personal income, per capita Medicare and retirement transfers. Fruth’s hand-outs included a summary of the current economic climate in the county, along with his predictions for what lies ahead, and how Hernando County can best cope in the future.

“With the collapse of the local building industry, retirement is virtually the only primary industry in Hernando County,” Fruth said. “This will not cause economic growth in the future.” Fruth explained that there is no growth with a retirement based economy because the money just circulates within the system. Policom Corporation documents indicate that the quality of Hernando County’s economy declined due to disproportionate low-wage, service jobs created as a direct result of the increase in retirement population to the community.

“Local government and the community should make every effort to prevent this situation from every occurring again,” Fruth said when describing what to do in the future. “Hernando County needs to focus all activities on economic diversification, causing primary industries to grow in the county.” He finished his presentation by emphasizing that the community needs to invest $3 to $4 million dollars in future economic development to pull the economy out of the current quagmire.

Hernando County Business and Development Director Mike McHugh believes that a change in mindset with large, primary employers will need to occur to convince them to move their businesses from urban areas to where the workforce is located in Hernando County. “Businesses seek talent and the major conduit for this is the educational system,” McHugh said. “The new campus of Pasco-Hernando Community College, with the expanded 4-year programs, will be a significant business attraction.”

McHugh said “Our community must embrace business at every opportunity and provide what it needs to be competitive with other comparable communities,” when asked what it would take to attract light industry to the county.

“Incentives can play an important role in attracting new companies and should be viewed as a tool,” McHugh said. “They symbolize a community’s desire to attract business with their willingness to compete and can play a role in helping to restart the economy.”

BJH Construction President Dudley Hampton gave a community report about growth management within the county at this summit. In his opinion, Hernando County needs to market its opportunities to bring responsible industry into county.

“We need to match economic incentives to bring clean industry into Hernando County,” Hampton said. “If you look at our county, we are in close proximity to major urban areas like Tampa and Orlando.” In his presentation, Hampton said, “With major shipping points in Tampa, products from Hernando County can be marketed to the world.”

“In the short term there is nothing the local government can do and the federal stimulus will do nothing to revive the economy.” William H. Fruth said in his final comments. “We will get through this cycle regardless of what government does to us and business will crawl out in spite of government intervention.”