Grantham discusses the Prescott lifestyle and possible changes that could occur over time.

This is Part 2 of 3. Here are links to Part 1 and Part 3 .

Charlie Grantham had just spent 20 minutes describing his vision for a new direction for Prescott in the area of economic growth. (See Part 1 of this series of articles.) But, new directions by definition require change. So, what kind of change would be needed if Prescott were to become a magnet community for a certain, targeted group of people; a group he called, 'Knowledge Workers'?

Grantham was asked, "You came here because you like the rural lifestyle, you like the community, you like the smallness of the community, and now you're trying to change it. And pretty soon..."

Grantham, anticipating the question., responded easily, "...what brought me here will go away. That's a good point. It isn't necessarily about growing the population in numbers, which puts a strain on natural resources and leads to traffic congestion and all those bad things that we don't want to happen, it's more of a focus on growing wealth. I'd rather have 200 software engineers move to Prescott with their wealth and their pocketbook than 2000 construction workers. So, it's shifting the mix, shifting the mix."

"Now, it's interesting that you mention that, because one of the prime concerns of this group of people are quality of life and environmental issues," Grantham said. "So these are the kind of people that come to town and say, 'Where's the bicycle path?' These are the kind of people that come to town and say, 'Where are the electric car recharging stations?' So, they're not going to be bringing the two Hummers, and they'll have a smaller impact on the environment because they want to preserve this quality of life issue."

"Which," he admitted, "leads to some disruption in a traditional economy."

And, what part of the Prescott lifestyle is likely to be disrupted? "Prescott's known for the World's Oldest Rodeo, for example. What's going to happen to the Rodeo under this scenario?" Grantham was asked.

His response was thoughtful, but frank. "There'll continue to be a segment of the population that's attracted to that, but I would submit that it's not a growing segment, it's probably a shrinking segment." He then turned his mind to another common activity in Prescott: golf. "I don't have the statistics in front of me, but I'm sure we could look them up. But I do believe the number of people who play golf is declining significantly, because it's a shift in demographics."

"These folks are going to be looking for different things: trails, camping grounds, things like that," Grantham postulated. "We can't ignore the history of Prescott, that's where we are. It'll be cool for some of these folks to go to a rodeo once a year, if they've never been, or something like that. But, that's not going to be the centerpiece from the draw, in the brand. It's going to be a part of it, just like our Victorian houses downtown, the Courthouse Square, and some of these other things that we've got. They're bits and things to a larger picture. They won't be "the" picture any more. That's scary to people, certainly."

Schools and Services

It would seem logical to assume that many of these people are going to want to live in newer houses, like the homes which will be built on the recently annexed Fann property, and that's just the beginning, as Grantham tells it. Schools and services will be scrutinized. He was asked if a school like Northpoint Expeditionary Learning Academy would be very attractive to this type of population.

"Oh, absolutely. They will demand a different kind and different level of service than has traditionally been demanded in Prescott," Grantham stated positively. "The example I could give you, and I can give you a number that you can call, is Route County, Colorado, Steamboat Springs. The wonderful Rockies, great skiing, somewhat isolated. Well, when hundreds of these people started to show up, and all of a sudden they were at school board meetings, wanting changes to the curriculum; suddenly they were at City Council meetings, screaming about the airport service; suddenly they were at the mayor's office, talking about more hiking trails, and what have you. And it really kind of put the community in a bad spot, and they're still trying to figure out how to deal with it, but they can't not deal with it."

Another example that came up was St. Helena, California. A small town in northern California, right in the heart of Napa County, St. Helena has a really, really stringent no-growth policy. And that growth policy has priced most families right out of town. Grantham compares St. Helena's situation to what could happen in Prescott.

"Let's pick on St. Helena for a while, because I know the example," Grantham said. "St. Helena's in the Napa Valley. They have very stringent growth... You can't bring a franchise into town. Or if you do, you can't advertise that it's a franchise. I think it's almost that you have to tear one building down to put another one up. It's pretty stringent. So, what they've done, is that they've stopped growth. And there's some physical limitations, so people like what we're talking about, what they've done is they've gone across the hill, and they're living in Sonoma Valley and Healsburg... The place of choice is Healdsburg or, north of Healdsburg - Geyserville, up in that area. [St. Helena has] effectively stopped growth, and it's preserved the old character, but it's totally unaffordable. Land is, if it's flat, it's $1 million an acre, because you can put a grape on it. It's part of why I left."

"So, you're not advocating no growth," Grantham was asked.

And Grantham replied immediately, "Not at all, I'm advocating planned, intelligent growth, and growth of wealth, not necessarily growth of numbers of people. A lot of economic development people often talk about rooftops. We've got to grow rooftops. If we do that, we've got customers for our WalMart, for our Costco, or wherever." He then contrasted the traditional approach of economic development to his personal vision of what needs to happen. "What we're trying to say, is that some of that's going to happen, but let's try to steer that in a direction where we're going after a market segment that's bringing more wealth in town."

Once They're Here, How to Support Them?

Grantham had said he wanted 200 software engineers who would make theoretically around $100,000-150,000 per year, with each spending about $4000 in the community. Doing the math, that equals around $800,000 annually, spent or donated in Prescott. Assuming that the City of Prescott doesn't care where they get their tax revenue from, Grantham was asked, "Will that amount of money spent in the community be enough to support the additional services needed?"

Grantham reworded the question. "Ok, so the question is, or one of the questions is, what can be done to support this market segment that generates revenue to for local government, other than retail sales tax?"

As the discussion continued, it centered more specifically on what can be done to support city services? Obviously, the City is still going to have to have police and fire services; roads will probably need to be improved. Basic services are not going to change.

Grantham agreed, "No, they're not. So, you're going to have to come up with some creative ways to generate other revenue streams for the City government. Let me give you a couple of examples. This idea of providing them with technology access - why couldn't we be working with private sector people who are providing people with that technology, with a user fee attached to it? So, you have a broadband high speed hookup with a $2 a month item - these numbers are coming from nowhere, but this is an example that feeds directly back to the city government."

In other words, a tax.

Grantham shook his head gently. "People today like to call them user fees."

Sure sounds like a tax.

Grantham continued, "And the same thing with air service. So, if you upgrade the air service to Prescott to give better access for these kind of people to L.A. or something, there's a surcharge on every ticket."

"Those are just two things..." Grantham pointed out. "This group of people are quite willing to pay for the services they get. It's not like they're expecting - they don't necessarily have a libertarian attitude that would say, 'I don't want to pay anything, and I don't want anything back for it,' they're more apt to say 'I'm willing to pay a reasonable price if I get these things in this quality,' and they'll write the check. You just have to find the mechanism to do that. Part of what I want to do with this committee, is to reach out throughout the United States and find other communities that have gone through this transition, or are going through this transition, and ask them, 'How the heck did you do this?' What was the mechanism you used to plumb this? How does that generate revenue back to you? Right now there's maybe a handful, a dozen or so communities in the US going through this, and if we can figure that out ahead of anybody else, we're going to get that palate here, because those people, (maybe not in 2008 because of the recession), are going to start making those decisions enmasse and moving. Baby boomers like myself, and we all know those demographics, next few years, it's just going to be an absolute flood. So, I hope Prescott can be ready ahead of other towns."

Grantham was asked if this idea of his was still in the theoretical stage. "It's moving from theory to testing different innovations and tweaking them, and then once that's been done, you figure out how to scale it up and then sort of perfect it. We're beyond theory, we're into testing. I'm working a project in Western Michigan right now along the same lines, and Western Michigan's economy with the downturn in the automobile industry and the furnishing industry is the pits. Folks around here think they've got problems, that is an absolute mess. So, we're trying things in communities there, some of them work, and some of them won't, but we're going to learn from them, they're going to happen very, very quickly. There are communities in California, in New Mexico, in Illinois, in Georgia and certainly in Colorado, that are all trying new and different things. So, we're beyond that, we're at the stage now where bankers are writing checks. Real estate investors are putting money into these things. Three years ago it was the theory, now it's starting to happen."

Training People Here to be Knowledge Workers

But, why import software engineers, to continue using Grantham's example; how about teaching people who are already here to be software engineers?

Grantham grinned. "Well, it turns out that the person who's co-chairing this community is a gentleman named Chris Hoy. He's retired, came from Nebraska, and his particular expertise and interest is entrepreneurialism. And how can we take people, who let's say are already here, and want to start a second career, or whatever, and help them gain the skills and the competencies where they can compete in this new world. And to me, it comes back to this center idea, this physical location, and we've had discussions with people at Prescott College and Yavapai and Embry Riddle about 'Oh, wait a second, maybe you folks, you're in the business of education, could connect with this idea and we could take people up to a whole new level, and they wouldn't have to leave town,' and then the infrastructure would be here so they could get online and say, 'Oh, Hewlett Packard, I'm about ready to finish my coursework in systems administration, or whatever, and I'm here, and I'm looking for something to do.' I can see those things being connected, I think they have to get connected."

Then Grantham was asked, "Why wait until college? Why not start teaching them sooner?"

"I would totally agree, we've got an issue, in my opinion, about changing the direction and the perspective of our public school system in this direction. I just don't see the American public school system producing the quality and amount of talent that's going to be required in the workplace of the future," Grantham stated. He then went on to offer further information, "Statistic: two years, the United States will be short 10 million people, knowledge workers, 10 million. There will be that many jobs in American companies that will go unfilled because the talent isn't there. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that we're not producing what we need. But, think about it, if we had this kind of base here, and kids in high school could mentor with somebody, and they would know where to go to get that done, and this would be an adjunct to the existing educational system. I go back to Sonoma County, before the dot-com bust. There were a couple of companies that had these mentoring programs that went into the junior high school and would pull students out and they would spend a day a week working with engineers in these companies. So, 'You want to know what it's like to be a software engineer? One day a week for a semester - you like that? You got some talent? Well, ok' and what the companies were doing were feeding forward into the schools the talent they needed. The schools were responding and by the time Johnny graduated from high school - that can be done. But that takes pretty large effort."

Grantham elaborated on how this could be incorporated into his vision. "The vision, what we call it, scrounge around on the web, you'll connect back to us - we call it Business Community Centers. They are physical facilities of about 10-15,000 square feet. They're primarily a place where folks like you and I could run in and run off something on a high speed printer, or spend two hours on a video conference. I have to fly tomorrow to San Francisco to participate in a 90 minute video teleconference with people in Boston and London. It's going to take me six hours to get up there, I have to stay overnight because of the time shift, we tape it early in the morning, and then it takes me a 12-hour day to get back. Why am I doing that? Why isn't there some place here in Prescott?"

Grantham continued, "But, to get back to the kids and this stuff, these centers in the communities are also a place where you could go, [and say,] 'I'm going to offer this class," and you may offer it under the sponsorship of the local college or you may just do it as a concerned citizen. But, you guys want to learn how to use text editors? Saturday morning at 9:00, I'm going to be sitting here, come on down.' That's what we're missing."

"That's where this town needs to go," Grantham concluded. "You cannot impede technology, it's just not going to stop. To try to put controls on it, we've all lived through that. I can remember the old mainframe days where people would go nuts about a department having its own computer and they wouldn't be able to control it. The world's going to blow up or something - just get over it."

Grantham and the Mayor's Advisory Committee on Economic Development

"I keep trying to retire, I would dearly love to work only two days a week," Grantham admitted, "But quite frankly, these ideas are catching on so quick, that the demand is... I wish I didn't have to spend so much time on airplanes, and maybe if we had a couple of these business community centers, I wouldn't have to, but I say I'm semi-retired, which means I only do those projects that I like to do with the people I like to do them with."

He was asked how much power he and his Advisory Committee actually had to bring forth these ideas in Prescott.

"Power? No. What I have with the community is a platform. It's a platform to bring ideas forward. The only thing we can do is recommend policy, decisions or policy changes or if the council or the mayor wants to consult with us, "Hey, what do you guys think of this idea?" That's what we're there to do. We're in a position, I think, to offer counsel and advice to decision-makers, but we're certainly not the decision makers," Grantham replied.

Could the Advisory Committee do such things as apply for grants, for example? Or would they need the Mayor and Council's approval to do that?

"We're thinking about doing that [applying for grants]. We have to explore a number of things, and all of this is fairly preliminary, and again, we're basing this on experiences we've seen in other communities, like how did they do it, how did they get this started? This is not a really good time to be looking for money to be doing innovations, so..." Grantham's sentence faded off. But, then he brightened up. "There's one avenue to do this at federal and state level. There are seed money grants to start innovations that are high risk, but there is some history to doing that. The project that we're working in Michigan right now is a federally funded three-year grant. If the mayor and the city council want to do this and pursue this direction, then we, the committee, will figure out a way to make it happen. We [the committee] still sort of testing, you know, "You want to do this, you want to do this? And at the first sign that somebody says, 'Yes, we want to do it,' we'll use our creativity and our connections to go make it happen. It's just a pity that we're in a pretty crappy economy this year, there's not a lot of free stuff floating around. Who knows, you know, maybe Google?"

Grantham was asked about his connections with larger, well known companies. "Do you have connections with Google, with Apple, with HP, with those companies?"

"Yes, those are the people that I deal with on a daily basis," he replied. "And the other people on the committee have their own little networks that stretch back into things. It's a network of networks, and what we're going to try to do is leverage that so we can come up with some creative ideas and we'll go to the committee and say, 'Hey, does anybody know somebody who can help us do X?' and there will probably be three hands and they'll come up and we'll say, 'Make a phone call, send an email,' and that's what we're trying to do."

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed