The recent articles published herein over the last few months about Greene County’s economic conditions and prospects, while not at all a shock to me, may have come like a bucket of ice water to others. Mike Belding and I have been talking about these issues for years. It was nice to see him call out the lack of past initiatives, poor leadership decisions, and the actual factors affecting our community: demographic decline, tax assessment-to-rate misalignment, and a lack of diversification of economic sectors. Yet I see this problem has deeper roots than believed, and it has impeded our ability even to begin considering the details that would move us away from the troublesome future.
As a people, we do not have a Vision. I recently saw the Greene County Commissioners develop one for their office, but we, as the People of Greene County, need a Green in Greene Vision for 2050, 2075, and beyond. We need to define what we believe will be the future of our rural American community, and how we plan to get there from here.
What is Vision? To start, let us show what it is not: a mission statement. A mission statement is what you tell the public you do. In basic terms, a grocery store would say, “We sell food.” More importantly, what do they tell their shareholders? Their investors? Marketing? How do they get people to want to be stakeholders in the enterprise? Leadership must sell the Vision to other people. What makes us different or better? Why should you choose to do business with us? The answers to these questions are what form our Vision Statement. If I were to take a first swing at it, I would say, “Greene County 2050 will provide our citizens the premier, modern-day example of an integrated living and working rural American community.” We would also expand to say how we would do it, in what sectors and how, but I will forego those details for now.
Our lack of a Vision is on a parallel track to what Mike Belding discussed. Mike speaks to why the plan failed; I talk to why we failed to plan. While other people are quick to say it was this democrat, or that republican, or this (insert random politician’s name here) I do not blame any commissioner, representative, or other elected official. No, I place that at the feet of We the People. The citizens of the county are responsible. This County does not want to change. It is stuck in the muddy field, laden with hay to feed the dry cash cow. We want to pretend like it is still the 1950s, while the human and economic means to keep that community together are being removed all around us. And we do not want to admit we are no longer a farming county. See the problem? Denial, or rather, should I say, Not Seeing (Vision) IS the problem? We ignored the issue, even though it had been right in front of our faces, thinking it was someone else’s job. It is not. Improvement happens one person at a time; it is grassroots, and is the most quintessentially “Pioneer,” rural-American trait.
I also see the issue from a different vantage point, or rather, as someone outside looking in, since my primary residence as a child was not in Greene County. I resided in the South Pittsburgh suburb of Brentwood, yet I constantly found myself at our West Greene farm. My grandparents had purchased the place out by Ryerson Station years before my parents ever met, so as far back as I can recall, memories of Duke Lake, Long Run Church, and the ever-coveted stop up to Burn’s Dairy Delite in Jacktown. This place was special to us, so much so that when WTAE interviewed my Marine Corps brother about how he survived being hit by a grenade in the 2004 Battle of Fallujah, he said he remembered our time as kids on the farm and knew he would see the farm again. After my own active service in the Air Force, I wanted to live here and then moved permanently to Greene County in 2011. All my time stationed around the Country and the world, and still I wanted to be back on the farm. That is what we Pittsburgh boys signed up to defend: the countryside of rural America, which stands as the testament to both who and what we are as a people. It goes without saying, then, that if this place was worth dying to protect, it is worth fighting to see it improve and prosper.
Mike made his case soundly for the reasons behind the need to change. I will not reiterate it. He is right. But that does not matter unless there are enough of us willing to take a hard look in the mirror and say, “Yes, I am ready to think differently about Greene County.” Until enough of us do that, we lack the agency for change, regardless of the efforts our elected leaders choose.
Many have asked (though some have already insinuated), is it hopeless? Absolutely not, and do not listen to anyone who says that it is. But I want to make the jobs of our leaders easier, building a base for them upon which they can stand higher and be heard farther away. We need to encourage the entrance of businesses, entrepreneurs, and people to make ourselves more productive; to make the soil fertile for the growth we wish to see.
My sales pitch is to be a part of the agency of change. Think about what might be something that we could do better here in Greene? What could we bring to make our community stand out differently? Or build better here? Ben McMillen cannot be the only person in the County with at least three crazily interconnected business concepts! Ben found ways to interconnect people and resources, building a value-added chain. He is an example of an agent of change. I think there are more people like him in Greene, and their ideas need to be planted in an economically green-in-Greene soil.
The particulars of my Vision for Greene 2050 will be saved for the second article. Let me foreshadow that it is a concept that incorporates ideas of reorganization I have seen while traveling both as an airline pilot and in the military, but most notably, it mirrors something unique to my personal situation: importing people like us from Allegheny to live in Greene County. Let Greene County show her style, spirit, and potential to others as she did to the Cranmers, thereby earning the reverent devotions of duty and loyalty, which build her into the status of the Vision for Greene 2050 and beyond.
Wes Cranmer is a commercial airline pilot and military officer who has served in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard and the U.S. Air Force. He has a Bachelor of Science in Business from Duquesne University and a Master of Business Administration from Waynesburg University. He and his wife, Kim, reside in Franklin Township.
