Hardwoods and Horseradish: By Brent Grafton, 5th Ward Candidate for City Council

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Hardwoods and Horseradish

By: Brent Grafton

For a company to get started and make it in today’s economy, it needs an edge. It needs to have something that the other guys do not have. That edge could be a technology, a location, access to a natural resource, cash, or one of a thousand other assets. If you have an edge then your intrinsic advantage will help carry you through the time when most businesses fail, the pain of start-up and growth.

This philosophy is also true for communities. If we are going to compete for other people’s money in this new world economy, we need an edge. We need a sustainable reason for people outside of our direct market to send us their money.

Economic development is simple, if someone else sends our community more money than we send them, then we show prosperity. If they get more of our money than we get of theirs, then we get a massive number of empty unused properties, a whole group of politicians that try to distract us with “entertainment” venues and a declining tax base with a higher percentage of our government budgets spent on public safety.

Every market has intrinsic advantages, when the world markets change, as they have in the last few decades, new opportunities arise that we as a community should be aggressively seeking out and planning to meet.

We need to be talking about what we do have and could have instead of all the great opportunities that got away.

We need to have a public dialog about who we are and how we can help each other to become a more healthy and prosperous community.

Years ago I was searching for a Habitat fundraising project that the west side church I was serving wanted to help build. In talking with a banker friend, who used to sell horseradish jelly through his banks teller window to support the local food bank, he told me that Evansville was centrally located in one of two growing areas in the country that put the perfect snap in horseradish. Who would have guessed? Apparently we grow a very desirable ginseng root as well.

Evansville’s first real prosperity came from the virgin hardwood forest up and down the Ohio River. We had many prosperous lumber mills and furniture manufacturers. The best lumber trees were cut and the worst were left in the woods to reproduce.

Purdue University has developed a Black Walnut veneer grade tree that matures in 35 years. By some reports, at maturity, each properly cared for acre would have 90 veneer grade trees with a potential value of $10,000.00 each. Instead of paying someone else to do a study and tell us what we lack, why don’t we just use the money to plant Black Walnuts on 550 acres of our 2,300 acre park system. In 7-10 years we should be able to bond the “crop” for enough to make a large down payment on our CSO repairs.

Other resources we might capitalize on… potable water, kaolin, bio-mass, aerated concrete, shale gas, plastics, coal, etc…..

We need to find our edge and sharpen it, economically, socially and politically…it is our future, we need to own it!!!!!

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

18 COMMENTS

  1. We need to get back to some semblance of the non war related manufacturing base we had in this city in the 1940s.

    We need to look at federal, state, and local statute to determine if that statute is hindering start-up ventures.

    I agree that we need more money coming in than going out, but somewhere along the line local citizens voted for going out. Now we are stuck with trying to plug that leak and the evidence of our failure to do so is all around us.

    http://youtu.be/7CZNuTeq9hs

    Sing it Rory.

    __

  3. “Other resources we might capitalize on… potable water, kaolin, bio-mass, aerated concrete, shale gas, plastics, coal, etc…..”

    Mr. Grafton, these are all great concepts (esp. bio-mass, I have a limited involvement currently in a project in GA). But instead of just listing the concept, many posters (myself included) would like to see your plan for moving these things from concept to in-place industries which will, as you say, bring more money here than we send there (good definition). Do you have a plan to take it from concept to reality ? If so, I (and others, I believe) would like to see that posted as well.

    • my wife and I have spent the last seven years putting one of these concepts into the real world… part of my motivation for running for City Council comes from my really good experience with the business community in this town and my not so good experiences with local government … so we try to be part of the solution and get really involved….

      • That is not, under any stretch of the imagination, ” a Plan”. You have shared a personal experience. Are you stating that you will spend your time, as a City Councilman, personally implementing these new businesses as you have your own ? where in the world would you find the time to do that ? Please prove me wrong, Mr. Grafton, but it seems , like several other of the candidates out there , you dangle the “concepts & buzzwords” out there so we’ll all think you are a good candidate, and yet you really don’t have any contacts, plan, financing, etc. to make these concepts you are promoting a reality ! Not trying to bust your chops, sir, since I don’t know you, but your very timid reply to the question about your plan leaves me wondering if you are ” the real deal” or not !!

        • My ” plan” as a City Councilman is to work to rebalance the checks and balances in our currrent local government which will involve a systematic line by line review of the laws that govern our lives and our commerce. My experience as a recent start-up business now employing 25 and shipping products all over the world will inform my opinion on what ordinances are good and applicable to all our citizens and businesses and which ones are only helpful to a select few of our Citizens. It is not the governments job to create jobs…. the government needs to provide a safe and efficient environment for our citizens to prosper. I would love to hear feedback from you on what asset we have in our town that we as a community could get behind and plan an infrastructure support system and etc… to move us forward.

          • Mr. Grafton: with all due respect, you speak only in the abstract, not in the concrete. ” . . . a systematic line by line review of the laws that govern our lives and our commerce” seems to be your plan. That should occupy all of your time until the 2013 election ! Your earlier post listed a half-dozen or so industries that you pledged to pursue if elected. Are you suggesting that if you rid certain ordinances with your review, that these industries will thus be stimulated to arrive here ? Also, your statement ” the government needs to provide a safe and efficient environment for our citizens to prosper” again seems like election-speak and totally in the abstract. I am not picking on you, Mr. Grafton (and I am not a 5th Ward resident), but until you get a LOT more specific I could not get behind your abstract reasoning. If your entire plan is to review all of the ordinances the City has, I think you come up far short of what is needed. Submitted in good faith and IMHO, The Biscuit.

      • As a businessman, what have been your negative experiences with local government. Can you list them in a rank from the most restrictive or negative impact to your efforts to succeed as a small businessman, please.

        • I would rather talk about the really good experiences we have had with our local business community…. that is something we can build a future on…

          • Let me clear it up that I wasn’t looking for specific instances with names and all. I was fishing for your list of reforms, like one stop permitting and so forth. I would like to hear your specifics on which redundant layers of city regulations you’d reduce or eliminate, and which specific city code regs you find particularly onerous to business development.

          • Mr. Grafton, you held out that you had negative experiences with the local government, and a poster asked you to comment on them. And now you state that you’d rather talk about the good experiences with the “local business community” ? If you are elected, and something comes up which is very negative, are you simply going to change the subject and dwell on the positives ! What is that song about ” accentuate the positive, ignore the negatives” ? That won’t work in trying to turn this City around, you have to “deal with it” on the negatives (and there are many). Please answer teapartyfriend’s question, or don’t claim that your negative experiences with local government will frame your tenure as a City Councilman.

    • BTW, the 1850 graphic shows most of the forest still intact. That same time period the east and the mid-west was suffering the effects of “the little ice age”.

      One has to wonder what effect the reduction in the forest between 1850 and 1920 had on temperatures in the United States.

  5. I’d like to know more about potential for mining kaolin. The only source I know in Vanderburgh County now lies under the residential development at the old brickyard on Upper Mt. Vernon at Tekoppel. Besides, do we really want open pit mining in Vanderburgh County? I think there may even be an ordinance prohibitting it.

    • I do like the idea of a small local industry to bottle artesian water. Wasn’t there a very productive source at the old Sterling Brewery? I know there are a few productive artesian springs in Scott and Armstrong townships too.

      • I would guess that the water we are pumping from the aquifer under Roberts Stadium is artesian quality … on the North side in Springhaven, springwater seeps through the roads.. …

    • the strip coal miners in southern In dig through seams of a variety of clays including Kaolin to get to the coal… as far as I can tell the clays are reburied after the coal is removed

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