All together

THE ISSUE

As new jobs come to the Shoals, new problems will arrive with them, including transportation, education and quality of life issues that will require a united community effort to address.

In the past five years, more than 4,000 new jobs have been created or are in line to be created, bringing a big sigh of relief to many in the Shoals area. Most of the jobs pay good wages, the kind that not only bring people back home but attract new

residents.

And with the new jobs come new problems. Elected officials and economic developers recognize the new demands that are about to be placed on roads, schools, medical facilities and utilities services, but whether they will pull together to address the problems as they have to attract jobs remains to be seen.

The SCA Tissue plant in Barton Riverfront Industrial Park expanded recently, and National Alabama, a railcar maker, will build a 1,800-employ facility there. The stress placed on U.S. 72, water and sewer, and other utilities alone in west Colbert County will be tremendous.

There is a Japanese-owned headlight assembly plant, North American Lighting, at a new industrial park in Muscle Shoals near Northwest Alabama Regional Airport, and word is that suppliers for Toyota, which has a Huntsville plant, are looking at the Shoals.

The Base Realignment and Closure Committee is moving more than 4,000 military jobs to Huntsville in the next four years. The Shoals is expected to get spin-off industries from that.

All these new jobs add up to growth in every sector of the community, from housing to schools to roads. Unless we are ready to accommodate the growth, we could be in for a rough ride. And if plans aren't made carefully to deal with the growth, the Shoals could find itself at a disadvantage in competition for more jobs.

Officials are beginning to talk about the need for assessement and long-range planning to keep up with and prepare for more growth, but it's not clear yet whether the discussion is about communitywide long-range planning or city-by-city planning. Certainly, each city has needs that have little bearing on those of the others, but if Colbert and Lauderdale counties are to successfully negotiate the changes that lie ahead, a coordinated effort that encompasses the entire area is mandatory. A good place to start that effort would be in the Metropolitan Planning Organization, which is housed at the Northwest Alabama Council of Local Governments. The MPO is composed of elected officials from Colbert and Lauderdale and focuses almost entirely on the transportation needs of the two counties.

Elected officials have broken old barriers to work together to make the Retirement Systems of Alabama partnership a success, bringing us a luxury Marriott hotel, spa and conference center as well as two internationally promoted Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail courses. They have also worked together to create a self-sustaining economic development incentive fund that is the talk of Alabama. Both these efforts were initially controversial, but elected officials kept their focus on the benefits they would provide the community in years to come, and not on short-term political consequences. That same spirit of cooperation is needed again.