Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Sullivan County has had a long love affair with large, economically muscular knights-errant who swoop down on the county with promises of jobs and riches in return for a few trifling concessions on the payment of fees and taxes. There was the Racino, and then the Native American casinos, and now there’s Louis Cappelli’s “Entertainment City” resort on the old Concord site.

Once again, it seems, we will be saved, and can scarcely give away the tax abatements fast enough in exchange for the privilege. Les Kristt, owner of Kristt Office Equipment Company in Monticello, seemed to express the feeling of those assembled at a recent public hearing when he said, “We’ve been waiting for a knight in shining armor for years to rescue us—he is here.”

We won’t deny that it can be a good idea to work with a big player to make a big dream come alive. Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is an example of a large-scale project that we believe has benefited the area. The renaissance currently occurring in Kauneonga Lake, which is clearly related to the establishment of the center, testifies to the benefits that can occur to the community as a whole when government cooperates in bringing a large business project to fruition.

But even Bethel Woods was not the one-shot-pays-for-all saving event that we seem to be looking for, and are sometimes over-eager to pay for. And without saying that we should stop trying to attract big businesses, we wonder whether a shift in emphasis might not be beneficial. What if we gave more thought to helping individuals who live here become successful entrepreneurs, as opposed to luring in giants from outside?

The success of the use of micro-credit in the developing world, while not conclusive—the environment is very different—provides some encouragement for this approach. The idea is that when you provide individuals with small amounts of money to become successful entrepreneurs, the resulting jobs, quality of life and even overall economic growth may wind up much higher than when big companies set up shop and employ thousands (frequently under poor working conditions).

Nor should the possibility of job creation by small businesses be underestimated. According to the federal government, small businesses provide over half the employment in the United States, and have created from 60 to 80 percent of new jobs in recent years. Unfortunately, the federal definition of “small” is fewer than 500 employees, a threshold that already counts as big in our area. But looking for a more meaningful breakdown, we found a study by the Center for the Study of Rural America showing that most of those jobs created by small businesses—as many as five out of six—are created by businesses with fewer than 20 employees.

There are already some local organizations, like the chamber of commerce, that are working to support the formation and growth of small, home-grown businesses—the Sullivan County Visitors Association stands out in particular. But compared to the money, the organization and the time that we spend wooing the big boys in the hopes of finding that final Mr. Goodbar, we could probably do a lot more to encourage the people who live here right now to form new businesses, and to provide the resources and comparatively small financial incentives that they would need to succeed. If by doing so we could create an ongoing, dynamic source of job creation right here at home, we might feel less compelled to accede to every demand from the big businesses we try to lure into the area.

Perhaps Cappelli’s project will turn out to be all that the county expects it to be, and he will bring the glory days back to the Catskills. But let’s not count on it, or hedge our bets solely by looking for other big businesspeople who might turn out to be the real white knight. If we focus inward, and think small, we might just find that we have already met that white knight, and he is us.

Also in this issue:

• This Year’s Fall Poem

Dr. Punnybone

A Guy on the Side