Business Summit Momentum Must Continue for Positive Change

September 11, 2015

The West Virginia Chamber of Commerce Annual Meeting and Business Summit is behind us. This year’s event was buzzing with new ideas and new goals for West Virginia’s business community. Good. For years, our entrepreneurs and business leaders have needed to assert their voices in our political process. With a two-party system in place, they now have the chance. They must stand shoulder to shoulder and make our state a place where enterprises of every stripe feel comfortable investing and expanding. That’s an important point. The days of putting our collective eggs in one tiny basket are over. Hopefully, we will always have a thriving, growing energy sector. Coal, though waning now, will make a comeback. Natural gas has limitless possibilities and it behooves us to develop a resource with such amazing potential. But we cannot stop with what has worked in the past.

Boom and bust is always going to happen, but if you look at the United States as a whole, we have the world’s largest, most nimble, most resilient economy. Ups and downs are part of the dynamic, but we have learned that doing only one thing well is not going to get it. Here in the Mountain State, we need to embrace that idea. Investment can come in many forms and impact so much. Learning from our past means having the vision to move beyond our old ways and the courage to break new ground.

We heard that kind of optimism from the business community last week and now is the time to take that message to our elected leaders. Constantly repeating the fact that we are first on all the bad lists and last on all the good lists is not harping; we’re trying to show that change must happen. Our elected leaders need to retain the fight they showed during the previous legislative session and redouble their efforts to move our state forward — part of that means listening to the job creators and the business leaders to get an understanding of what needs to be done. Government attempts to create prosperity will not work, but legislation can level the playing field and put West Virginia on equal footing with other places.

We know we have the proper ingredients; mixing them just right will be key. There is no “magic bullet” and no one thing is going to create the kind of opportunity that brings our young people back and gives us all a chance at a better life, but clearly what we have done in the past needs to be left in the past.