From the Roundtable: Let's not miss new industrial, technological opportunities
The hits include:
- landing and retaining the University of Missouri and adjuncts, including the sprawling medical complex, a $1.8 billion enterprise with about 13,150 employees overall;
- landing and retaining the regional insurance companies State Farm and Shelter, with their extensive investment in our community and more than 1,000 employees apiece;
- ending up astride transcontinental Interstate 70 and U.S. Highway 63 as overland connection with the rest of the country.
But Columbia has also had its share of misses. The biggest might be ending up far away from mainline railroad and connected instead to snail’s pace branch lines. (That also begs the curious decision to site the community nearly 10 miles inland from the Missouri River.)
Aside from a shoe factory and a couple of other relatively tiny industries, the town fathers avoided courting so-called “smokestack” industries or, for that matter, any enterprise that might be described as “heavy” or seasonal as to employment.
Now rumors are abuzz of close-to-closing deals that would bring new industries to Columbia.
Shovel-ready sites are attracting industry scouts, particularly those representing data center developers and tenants. But there’s an even bigger fish that the city is either about to land or lose from the hook. We’re a finalist to get a company to occupy a vacant structure in LeMone industrial park — one that would initially employ 200 workers and eventually employ more than 800. Recruiters used several kinds of bait, including a huge local tax break for large electricity usage recently approved by the City Council.
At the same time, community-wide discussions are taking place about Columbia’s electronic accessibility and accompanying delivery speeds over both wire and wireless communications networks.
An entrepreneur friend recently spoke of Columbia’s relatively undistinguished status in terms of Internet connectivity and described disparities between upstream vs. downstream data transfer speeds. It reminded me of my earliest experience using the telephone here years ago.
Columbia had a dial telephone 80 years ago, but it was strictly a four-digit intermural system. I arrived here from the first community in the world to offer its residents direct distance dialing in 1951. I found that making a long distance call during much of the 1960s in Columbia could be a challenging exercise. With only a handful of wire-line connections to transcontinental cables in those pre-automatic equipment days, calling long distance via a limited number of operators was hardly an instantaneous procedure, especially on Sunday evening.
To most of us, the conventional telephone is an antique, retained by a diminishing number of us because its trail of wire still offers reassurance of reliability enforced through memories of clever advertising.
Columbia’s former shameful, ignominious status as a backwater of telephone service must never be allowed to resurface as it applies to current and rapidly evolving technologies.
Columbia must keep up with Internet development and connectivity. One positive action every resident could take: join the campaign to persuade Google to pick Columbia for its fiber-optic broadband trial program. Individuals can nominate Columbia by going to a local Web site, comofiber.net.