Second Part of McAuliffe's Business Plan, Southside Implications

Yesterday in Danville, gubernatorial hopeful Terry McAuliffe unveiled the second part of his business plan. The first part focused on the renewable energy and had implications for the Southside. The second part of McAuliffe's business plan focuses on creating jobs and growing the economy, also with Southside implications. From the Danville Register & Bee:

[McAuliffe] emphasized the need for tax incentives for industries to deliver high-paying jobs to economically depressed Southside Virginia, as well as strengthening existing small businesses.

“I will not be satisfied until every part of Virginia sees economic growth,” McAuliffe said.

The Martinsville Bulletin offered more detail on McAuliffe's plan for the Southside:

“The best opportunity to create jobs now is in Southside,” McAuliffe said in a telephone interview later Monday. “You’ve got the land; you’ve got the work force. I can do this faster in Southside than in any other part of the state.”

McAuliffe said the kinds of jobs he would bring to Henry County and Martinsville probably would be in the alternative energy field. He offered as examples factories to build wind turbines or hybrid cars.

Those kinds of jobs would be “good-paying jobs with health care and benefits,” McAuliffe said.

“Every job we get is important,” he said. But Southside’s soaring unemployment rates — unemployment in Martinsville hit 18 percent in January — and the availabilty of large tracts of land mean “we need and want to focus on bringing in new industry, new businesses where at least 1,000 jobs would come,” he said.

In both parts of McAuliffe's business plan, he recognizes the need to bring new (industrial) jobs to the area, and he believes that the Southside can be on the cutting edge of the new energy economy. I dig it.