Healthy economic future requires people, housing

The Greater Mount Airy Chamber of Commerce hosted an economic development Lunch and Learn event Thursday that featured keynote speakers Surry Economic Development Partnership President and CEO Blake Moyer and Jeff Sedlacek, Dobson town manager.

They discussed population trends, housing needs, and developmental goals that will help both Dobson and the wider Surry County community grow.

Sedlacek provided the luncheon audience with a primer in the town’s finances and strategic goals as well as the guideposts they will use to gauge success. “If we don’t know what success looks like, we don’t know if we’ve achieved it. We don’t know where we’re going if we don’t know the goals we are trying to achieve.

“We want to make Dobson a good place to call home... without losing the identity that Dobson has as a small town community. We also want to be mindful of cost deployments, not investing in things that aren’t going to yield positive community impact,” he explained.

He said the town prepares for investment in the community by leveraging four key areas of public policy: affordability, utilizing the tax rate, public infrastructure and public safety. “If we take this and break this down a little more, it falls into four key areas — looking at fiscal sustainability, looking at community development, community engagement and quality of life,” he said.

Dobson is doing a constant balancing act he said between the financial resources of the town with a $2.4 million budget and town leaders’ capacity to provide “high quality services” to their residents.

Growing the tax base of the town will help long term efforts he said. “Our natural growth in property taxes has been built from natural growth in the community...We are working on projects that generate investment in the community because in order to provide these services we have to generate economic development.”

One of the pillars of economic development he said is looking at ways to get people to come to Surry County to Dobson to live, work and play. Among the most significant projects in the coming year is developing a downtown strategic plan working with the Department of Commerce. “Over the next year, we will be engaging in a five-year strategic plan of how to build and invest in downtown Dobson.”

The public is invited to the Surry County Service Center on August 20 for a community engagement session he said, “ To really see how we prepare for that five-year vision.”

He was asked by those in attendance if more housing may be a part of the plan. “A part of our downtown project is going to be focused on building on the housing summit that the county and the EDP held... There’s a need for homes across all demographics, both from affordable housing to high income housing.”

Moyer pointed out that the county population is staying about the same, but is aging. “When you break down that population by 10-year segments, the lower numbers, the younger age ranges zero to 10 and up to 40, all those we are three or four percentage points lower than national averages.”

“When you go down that path a little bit and think about what that means for our community, if you’ve got less people in that 20 to 40 range, that means you have less people having kids — which is a problem we already have. Our natural population increases, that’s more births than deaths, well we don’t have more births than deaths in this community. That’s something that has long-term ramifications of our community, our business community.”

He agreed that housing is a priority need in Surry County and said that a search online would yield three apartments for rent — not three developments, three units. “Outside of the Spencer’s project in downtown Mount Airy, find a real modern rental place for a young couple in Mount Airy? You’re not gonna,” Moyer said.

“If you’re an employer like Altec or Insteel, really anybody that may employ somebody who’s not from here and bring them here to us, you would find that housing is a problem.”

Affordability is also a concern he said. “The average sales price I believe for a single family home last year was in the upper $200,000 range… which may be affordable to some folks, it’s definitely not affordable for the vast majority of Surry County’s workforce.”

He provided a tantalizing update on a neighborhood under construction in Mount Airy. “Projects like the Franklin Road project are really important in helping drop that number a little bit. The stated plan is for 100 new units of 1,200 to 1,400 square feet, and in the lower $200s (thousands of dollars). For us, that’s a big deal to have some houses in that price range that are three bedrooms, that’s gonna be big for us.”

The chamber and EDP, he said, both “showed up” for the Franklin Road project and showed the business community was behind the project. “If we want to be growing, if we want to naturally grow our community, we have to support new housing growth like this.”

Natural growth rate through birth, retention of high school graduates, and attracting new employees would keep tax revenues up while keep the area’s tax rates low. To that end, Moyer said Surry County should feel pride in the development of a pipeline of homegrown employees.

“We have the best pre-apprenticeship and internship program in the state and probably in the country in Surry-Yadkin Works. Crystal Folger Hawks and her crew are doing an awesome, awesome job. They literally are writing a book on how to do pre-apprenticeship right.”