Tim Rogers: Making Dalton desirable

Good morning.

In the church that my wife was a member of growing up, there was a man who sold insurance.

He had a particular outlook on life that he shared with me when Deb and I were about to get married more than 20 years ago.

He had a simple philosophy, which he had shared with his children and their friends, and that, in general, he believed had served them well.

In a nutshell, it boiled down to this. You could spend your 20s finding what out what you wanted to do. If you tried a couple of different things that was OK as long as you were building your skills and learning something.

Once you became 30, however, you had to “get out there and sell something.” He didn’t specify what you should sell. For him it had been insurance. But his meaning was clear — play time was over and it was time to be an adult and build a career and provide for your family.

I think about that advice from time to time, and it causes me to smile and realize that those words could apply to just about anyone at anytime.

In fact, I was thinking about the need to sell as I sat in the audience Thursday afternoon to hear consultant Rebecca Ryan talk about Dalton and what it can do to become a more attractive place for young professionals.

Ryan’s message, which is explicitly stated by the name of her book “Live First, Work Second,” is that young people — whom she identifies as the Millennial Generation — think differently than their parents. These young people, the oldest of whom would now be 29, don’t automatically go where the jobs are. She says they look for cool places to live and trust that they will be able to find employment or create their own employment once they get there.

Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas, would be obvious examples of this phenomena, but there are other smaller towns that are benefiting from this trend as well. Ryan’s unspoken implication is that you don’t want your town to get caught on the flip side of this equation. All work and no play, apparently, make your town older and grayer with little chance of keeping those who grew up there once they are ready to fly the nest.

And she didn’t come to this conclusion by just sitting in some office staring at a computer.

Ryan is a dynamic person whose hour-long presentation was a study in constant motion. She and her firm claim they have done interviews, focus groups and surveys with more than 40,000 young professionals to try and get inside their heads and figure out what makes them tick. After watching her, I have no doubt that she alone has talked to at least that many people.

During her talk, which covered many of the demographic trends that have rolled across the U.S. during the last 50 years, she gave out one fact that I have been mulling over ever since and that I think is important to the future of Dalton.

Ryan said that for every 10 minutes of commuting that someone has to do, their civic involvement goes down by 10 percent.

In other words, the statistics tell us that people who live in the communities where they work are more likely to be little league coaches, United Way volunteers, PTA members and ultimately board members for nonprofit organizations.

At first blush, you would think that statistic bodes well for us. We are a small community. You can get almost anywhere in Dalton in 10 minutes and it isn’t much further to almost anywhere in the county.

Our problem, though, is that too many of the people who work here don’t live here.

It is tough to build a community when a sizable and seemingly increasing number of people view Dalton as an 8-to-5 place. They live in other towns and coach in those rec leagues and volunteer at those nonprofits and work for those schools’ PTAs.

Despite what you hear from many Chicken Littles in the community, there are ample reasons to be bullish on Dalton and Whitfield County. We still have an employment base that is the envy of most other counties in both the state and the nation. We have a terrific location that bodes well for future economic growth once the national economy gets moving again. We have good public schools, which is something every young family looks at. We are starting to come out of our self-imposed shell and actively think about what it takes to recruit people and businesses to come here.

But if we are to attract these 20-somethings who will most likely settle down as 30-somethings or 40-somethings, I think we need to frame the conversation around what we need to do to get them to live here.

We are already doing some of that, but I think that question needs to be pushed to the top of the list.

It isn’t enough to get a few 20-somethings here as a stopover place at the start of their work lives. We have to make them want to settle in Dalton.

I like it when I hear a problem framed in a slightly different way, and Ryan’s talk did that. We need to envision, and then create, a lively, engaging community that will attract young professionals while they are figuring out what they want to do with themselves and then keep them here when they are ready, as was posed to me all those years ago, to “get out there and sell something.”

In this time of fiscal crisis and belt-tightening budgets, sure it may seem impractical to invest in projects which make our community a “cool place to live.”

It is impractical, until of course you consider what our community will look like 10 years or 20 years down the road. It is impractical until you consider whether your children or grandchildren will want to settle here when they are young professionals.

When you consider that, suddenly frivolous starts to look downright essential.

Tim Rogers is editor of The Daily Citizen. He can be reached at timrogers@daltoncitizen.com.

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