More on National Alabama Corporation.

One of my friends said yesterday that a certain project he was working on might be bigger than the rail car plant. “Heck”, I said “ JJ's restaurant is bigger than the rail car plant.”

Alabama needs jobs. Production jobs that export product and import multiplier dollars. We need real careers that can become life's work for your kids and grandkids. Senate district six is at the top of the list only when it comes to people who are looking for work.

Now in fairness, Alabama has some high paying jobs in some areas. Aerospace in Mobile and Huntsville, Automotive manufacture in Montgomery and Tuscaloosa, and other smaller manufacturing facilities around the state. However, What we are seeing in the seven counties in Northeast Alabama is mostly rocks and trees. As my friend says “The end of the universe as we know it”. Northwest Alabama residents are driving to the diesel manufacturing plant in Columbus, Mississippi, the Toyota plant in Tupelo, Mississippi, the solar panel manufacturing plant in Senatobia, Mississippi. Most of them are looking for a home in Mississippi. (do you see a trend?) All of these jobs could have been Alabama jobs with the right incentives and leadership.

The official Alabama unemployment map has Winston county at 17% unemployed. It recently dropped but the population dropped at the same time. The unemployment dropped because the unemployed people just left. The other counties, Franklin, Lamar, Fayette, Marion, Lawrence, and Colbert are slightly less but I remind the gentle reader that if you are the one out of work your unemployment rate is 100%.

Personally, I am working on it. As a long time technical educator I have a vested interest in finding jobs for my graduates. I am tired of having to tell students who ask for employment advice to “Put your stuff on the back of your pickup truck like the Beverly Hillbillies and get out”

Two projects I am involved in right now have promise. I talked with Perkins Diesel last year, I talked with a couple of wood chip companies, and I am promoting residential solar like Wolverine. But the gap between what is needed and what is being done by our elected officials is as vast as the biblical great divide.

Which brings us back to Colbert County, and what was to be the mother of all career opportunities in district six. That rail car plant was supposed to be putting $150,000 a day in high powered multiplier money into the Northwest Alabama economy and it is Dead! Dead! Dead!

People as far south as Winfield have asked about it saying “ I put my application in and did the training, when are we going to work?” I have to say to these folks, “I don't know when you will go to work.” But somebody should know. And that somebody should tell us.

What I know, or think I know since this is all just whispered rumor around the coffee pot, is that the Alabama Bureau of Investigation was called in because money from was being funneled into private offshore accounts. This investigation resulted in the replacement of the local plant manager for National Alabama. (twice). So the rumor goes.

You have likely heard nothing about it. I have to assume that if something significantly illegal was going on somebody would have been extradited from Canada. I really assume that. I really do.

I know, or think I know, that CSX in Florida bought 750 rail cars on the pretext that National Steel Car had the production facilities to make them inside the United States. I know or think I know, that those cars are being manufactured in Canada and will be railroaded right past the Barton Plant.

We need jobs. We need new industry creation incentives like they have in Mississippi but the first thing is to make pay the investments we have already made. This half billion dollar job creation expenditure in Barton has become a “spec” building like the funny money building in Vina only 300 times bigger.

Speculative investment building with tax dollars? The very sound of it rolls off the tongue for me a little like bad cabbage. The people of Northwest Alabama deserve to read the reports. The people of Colbert county deserve something better than a sophisticated Ponzi scheme.

Like the song says, “ I could be wrong but I'm not”. I know something is fishy up there on the Pickwick lake. I think it's not the Bass Tournament because we lost that too.