Often in life we have to do things that are not exciting, but we have to do them anyway, just because they help us function. We have to eat our peas in order to get the apple pie at the end of the meal. Today’s column fits into that category of just do it because, it is good for you. In this case it is about something the county needs and, as good citizens, we must be informed about it.
I am talking about jobs and education and how the Workforce Investment Board (WIB) can help us achieve both. For example, your business needs technicians. You call in the WIB, which designs a program based upon industry certification and licensing requirements. After the training period, you hire the most promising out of the class of students. There can even be wage assistance for new hires.
Currently Cape May County taps the WIB for funding to address training for the unemployed and the disadvantaged; however, it could offer great value to our county for economic development with some needed restructuring on our part. Our freeholders have spent countless hours attending the meetings dealing with complexities which only lead to dark holes (See, everybody has to eat some peas).
The reality is we need our WIB interests overseen by professionals whose loyalties are to Cape May County. Currently, those loyalties are to Atlantic County, and we are getting the crumbs. The executive director is appointed by our neighbor to the north. It answers to their freeholders, not ours, and its offices are there. This leads to a greatly unequal disbursement of the millions of dollars of benefits. The bottom line is, we must push to be the driver for our own potential, and, to do that, there must be a Cape May County executive director of a Cape May County WIB office.
Let me draw an analogy to another formerly-languishing department: The Office of Emergency Management. We talked about centralizing communications for years, which expert consultants demonstrated would provide us with far greater safety in large storms, and be much less costly…but implementation of this modern technology languished. Why? We lacked an effective leader of the department to get it done. As a result, we are the last county in the state to reap those benefits. The freeholders made a leadership change there, and now we have a productive leader on the task. We are now making the necessary steps toward its realization.
To turn things around in economic development, we need to do with it what we did with emergency management in the past. In the past, the county hired people to push economic development, but without noticeable success. Two things, though, are different now. The county recognizes that the WIB is a mess, and the freeholders are working diligently to address the problem. Hopefully, as I already said, this recognition will lead to Cape May County again having our own WIB, with an executive director of our own, who knows the county and is driven to get the job done.
Secondly, we now have an extremely capable and well-connected freeholder overseeing economic development. With our own WIB and a competent, determined executive director, we can see the same type of turnaround in economic development as we now see in emergency management.
The WIB is vital because it empowers the small business upstarts, and small businesses employ the majority of Americans throughout the nation, as well as here in Cape May County.
Now that you have eaten your peas, you may proceed to the apple pie, which should be a healthier and more economically diverse economy in our lovely county.
Art Hall
PS: WIB discussions consumed much of the Cape Issues November meeting, and provided the basis for this column.
From the Bible: Give instruction to a wise person, and he will be still wiser; teach a righteous person, and he will increase in learning. From Proverbs 9
