Sun Editorial:

Vision of the future?

Texas community bets on a progressive way to jump-start local economy — and wins

Monday, Nov. 2, 2009 | 2:06 a.m.

A mayor in West Texas believes the way his city and the surrounding area approached economic development — resulting in ongoing revitalization — could be a model for all of rural America.

No, he didn’t snag a prison, chemical plant or landfill that urban areas didn’t want. The revitalization is owed to the recruitment of a wind farm that The Wall Street Journal describes as the world’s largest.

Completed just days ago in Roscoe, Texas, the wind farm occupies 100,000 acres and sports 627 turbines that can generate enough electricity to power 230,000 homes.

Greg Wortham, the mayor of nearby Sweetwater, the area’s economic hub, told the Journal that other rural areas in the country, which have plenty of open land, should also consider wind-power development.

The mayor said 20 percent of the jobs in Nolan County, where Roscoe and Sweetwater are located, are now related directly or indirectly to the wind energy industry. Many of the jobs directly related are exceptional, he said, with a base pay of about $50,000, well above the average for the area.

Executives of E.ON AG, the German company that owns the wind farm, have built a headquarters warehouse in Roscoe, and wind-energy service companies have located there, the Journal reported.

The head of the area’s economic development effort told the Journal that not all residents like the look of the turbines. Yet the Journal reported that other people are thrilled, because some of the turbines are on their property, bringing in royalties.

A Journal photo showed an array of turbines along a Roscoe dirt road. They looked like a sight people could get used to, just as everyone has gotten used to telephone poles.

The Roscoe/Sweetwater area offers a glimpse of what this country could be if it earnestly embraced clean, renewable energy right here at home, paying once for transmission lines instead of endlessly paying billions for dirty, unhealthy foreign oil.

We hope other rural areas see this potential and act on it.

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