Murphy – Cherokee County’s newly formed Needs & Solutions Advisory Committee held its first regular meeting March 28, hosting guests who briefed it about the state of the county’s economy and the next steps following the collapse of a high school consolidation effort.
Briefing the committee were Paul Worley, chief strategic adviser and executive director for workforce and government relations at Tri-County Community College, and school board members Steve Coleman and Jason Murphy.
Worley advised that Cherokee County has been in a rebuilding mode since the loss of the textile industry in the early 2000s. His focus has been to recruit new businesses to the area and retain those that are here.
“The challenge right now is we don’t have the workforce,” he said.
Cherokee County has a workforce participation rate of 36 percent – in other words, just over a third of the county’s residents are actively working. A healthy workforce would be 40-42 percent, Worley said.
Quality of life as it pertains to services remains an issue for residents as well as prospective residents. Why would a young couple choose to live in a county where they can’t afford housing, where they have to leave the county to give birth, and where child care is difficult to find or afford, according to committee members.
On March 6, Pactiv Evergreen announced plans to shut down the paper mill in Canton, with the first layoffs to occur on June 9. Once complete, it will affect 1,100 jobs in the area, where the mill has been in operation for more than a century and has been the center of that town and region.
The impacts don’t end in Canton and Haywood County. Between chip mill production and trucking services, 200-300 jobs are expected to be affected in Cherokee County. The Valwood Corp. chip mill operation in Marble sends out truckloads of wood chips each day, Worley said.
“We will feel an impact with that closure,” he said, adding that any assistance packages established for affected plant workers should include affected Cherokee County workers.
The news isn’t all bad.
Tri-County Community College has been training about 200 equipment operators for a major highway project between Robbinsville and Stecoah called Corridor K. And the county continues to be approached by manufacturers seeking to establish or grow.
While one drawback about Cherokee County is that it is a two-hour drive from other major hubs, at the same time it is itself at the center of several major population centers including Atlanta, Charlotte and Knoxville, Tenn.
The committee also learned about a proposal to save education costs in the county by consolidating kindergarten through eighth-grade classes from six schools into two campuses, according to the two school board members who briefed the committee. They said consolidating the lower-grade schools is less expensive than a previous proposal to consolidate the county’s high schools.
The state provides construction funding of up to $30 million for elementary schools, $40 million for middle schools and $50 million for high schools. Cherokee County won’t be eligible for the $50 million for high school consolidation, but it might be eligible for $30 million for elementary schools and $40 million for middle schools for a total of $70 million, they said.
The proposal left committee members unconvinced, with some worrying about longer bus rides for young children and grouping such a wide range of ages into big campuses.
Member Sue Ledford, executive director of Four Square Community Action, asked whether cost/benefit and economic impact analyses had been done, saying such a project would cost more than $70 million. Coleman said the consolidation would take seven years to complete and would not affect faculty numbers.
The next Needs & Solutions Advisory Committee meeting was held after the Cherokee Scout’s press deadline Tuesday night. The committee of nine has a vacancy following the resignation of Mark Stiles of Murphy.
The committee’s first report to the Cherokee County Board of Commissioners is due Aug. 1, with a final report due Feb. 1.