From the Monroe (La.) News-Star:Northeastern Louisiana might have missed out on a Toyota Motor Corp. assembly plant and 2,000 jobs because of litter and a workforce that lacks basic skills, according to state Sen. Robert Barham.
Barham, R-Oak Ridge, said that he had dinner with a site selector for a major auto manufacturer last month who outlined the strengths and weaknesses of Louisiana’s Franklin Farms Industrial Megasite near Holly Ridge in Richland Parish.
Barham wouldn’t identify the site selector or the project, but Toyota announced last week that it will build a new manufacturing plant in Tupelo, Miss., that will employ 2,000.
“He was very open and forthright about the plusses and minuses of the site,”
Barham said. “There were two big negatives. One was a woefully unprepared workforce and the other was he said that he doesn’t know of a trashier place.”
Barham, who was attending the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry legislative luncheon at the West Monroe Convention Center, said that the site selector drove a group of Japanese auto executives from the Monroe Regional Airport to the Franklin Farms Megasite via Interstate 20.
“He told me that he could tell that when they saw the amount of litter they wanted to get back on the plane and leave,” Barham said. “Their thinking was, ‘If anybody can do this to the place they live how can we count on them to make sure a bolt is tight.’
“We ought to take this on as a project – make sure that the corridor from Monroe to Holly Ridge is Disney World clean.”
Tana Trichel, the local contact for the Franklin Farms site, said the unidentified site selector is on target.
“Our own national consultant has told us that litter is a problem,” Trichel said. “We need to have a huge beautification program throughout the corridor from our commercial hub of Monroe all the way to the site.”
Monroe Mayor Jamie Mayo said that the litter problem “is getting worse instead of better.”
“There has to be more pride of ownership by our citizens,” Mayo said. “It doesn’t do any good for a municipality to clean up a site when the next day it’s going to be overrun by litter again.”
TRASH-STREWN WASTELAND. Ill-educated, unskilled workforce. Broken civic culture. With what does one usually associate such things?
And why is such Third World civic dishevelment tolerated in the world's richest nation? After all, don't we spend billions of taxpayer dollars to alleviate such in various Middle Eastern, Latin American and African hellholes?
What? Is it not politically correct to demand of our fellow Americans what we aspire to achieve halfway across the world -- and then commit the resources and political will to help make it so?
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