No quick fix for rural Utah, panelists say

The Governor's Office of Economic Development Board is wrestling with how to best serve the needs of rural Utah.

But a variety of factors and characteristics make any blanket approach to rural economic development troublesome, board members heard during a meeting Friday. The discussion focused on whether the state should encourage more high-paying jobs or jobs with benefits or even the creation of any new jobs at all.

"My answer to that is, you can't paint rural Utah with one brush," said Gayle McKeachnie, GOED's rural affairs coordinator.

Some rural parts of the state have more job openings than they have people, while in other places "any kind of a job is helpful," he told the board.

"In most of rural Utah, you don't have a shortage of jobs. You have a shortage of people. If you look at (Department of) Workforce Services statistics, there are hundreds of jobs that they have a difficult time filling. ... The crisis right now is finding people who have skills in terms (of jobs) that are already there.

"You have to put into context also that there are some places in rural Utah who don't want to grow. They don't want more jobs. They just want better jobs. All of us don't want to turn into a new Washington County, but everybody wants higher-paying jobs with benefits that bring in a better quality of life than what you've got now."

Board member Gerald Sherratt, who also is mayor of Cedar City, said there are 350 jobs there "that we can't find workers for. And this is affecting our manufacturing plants that want to expand out, but they can't get the workers."

To fix the too-many-unfilled-jobs situations in certain parts of rural Utah, McKeachnie suggested an improvement in the education level — the percentage of people with bachelor's degrees is much lower in rural Utah than in the urban parts of the state, he said — and addressing infrastructure woes, such as high-cost or unavailable broadband, energy utilities and highway access.

"And we're way behind where we need to be," he said about the basics for a good standard of living. "That's it in a nutshell."

Another of those basics is housing. McKeachnie said housing is becoming too expensive for police, teachers and others in certain rural communities. "It's bad," he said. "The economy is focused and the real estate business is focused on the high end, the $300,000 and $400,000 houses, and for little towns, it's a big nightmare."

Sherratt said Nevada investors are buying property "at outrageous prices, sending up the cost of homes to the point where they're not affordable to workers anymore. We run the risk of becoming rural areas but for the wealthy."