A new Beaver resident wants that city to become a poster child for rural economic development in Utah.

Sen. Bill Hickman, R-St. George, has purchased a home in Beaver and told the Rural Development Legislative Liaison Committee on Tuesday that many small southern Utah towns are suffering while others along the I-15 corridor are doing well.

"It leaves the little community of Beaver that just doesn't seem to have caught on to what has been happening in all these other communities," he said.

But Hickman said he and Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. "agreed that we probably ought to take a hard look at maybe using — and I'll use his term — using Beaver as a poster child or as a model to see what can actually be done in rural economic development in bringing all the parties together."

Hickman said implementation would not be simple due to utility and natural-resource issues, "but rather than doing a shotgun approach and saying each community gets a little bit of something, we would like to concentrate on this particular one and then utilize it to support other communities in the development that can take place there."

The senator stressed that something needs to happen, and soon.

"I don't want us to go through this process and just create a lot of dust and then nothing happens. I want to see something happen. And we've talked about economic development, particularly in rural Utah, for a long, long time, and we just haven't seen anything but an awful lot of dust, in my opinion," he said.

Ed Meyer, the state's rural development director, said several tools are in place "to go a long way toward preparing the community of Beaver to compete more effectively."

However, such a move would require significant investment locally, a commitment to improving infrastructure, realistic expectations for results and a policy about replicating those results.

"Whatever we do with Beaver, we need to be prepared to do in every other community," Meyer said. "That means that while we might be able to do a pilot project in Beaver, we need to decide how do we choose the next community, and that will be a fairly controversial process. If we dedicate resources to Beaver, are we prepared to dedicate those same resources to every other community in rural Utah?"

As for expectations, people should realize that despite preparations and investments to lure companies to a community, "the truth is that these are going to be business decisions," he said.

"We believe there are some different things that can be done. We think that there is a model that can be developed and replicated, but we need to take the time to make sure that we design it in a way where it can be sustained over time, and not just for Beaver, but for the other rural communities."