Meeting April 14, 2009 at Bay College West

The Upper Menominee River Entrepreneurs and Inventors
Club is an organization supported by the economic
development organs of three counties, Dickinson in
Michigan, and Florence and Marinette in Wisconsin. I
am pleased to support their endeavors in trying to improve
the economic situation in this part of the world.

Their next meeting is in Iron Mountain on April 14, 2009.
I've scanned in their most current blurb and posted it at:

http://www.angelfire.com/planet/iron-river/e_igrp004.pdf

I am convinced that economics are regional, not local.
Unfortunately for those of us living in Iron County, our
Economic Developer, Julie Melchiori, believes that our
economy stops at the county border and said as much
in a public meeting I was running last summer. It might
be helpful if the local news media played to what Julie
and the Iron County Economic Development
Corporation actually achieved in the last six months
rather than replaying the old story of the Amasa
sawmill that took too long to bring on line and
repeating how wonderful the mostly minimum wage/no
fringe benefits "Call Center" has been for the community.
Aggrandizing the people in various county offices doesn't
do anything to help the situation. It would be far better
for all of us if our other media (that means besides this
publication you're reading right now) were critical of the
continuing failures instead of grasping on to every minor
straw of success that floats by and republishing those
stories again and again.

In the end it is up to us, individually. All that is really
available is self-help and the only idea machine in the
region seems to be, in my opinion, outside of
Iron County in the group I'm referring the reader to
in this article.

For some time I've been an advocate of an exploratory
discussion group that would discover how to go about
recognizing business opportunities that are available to
us without a major capital investment. I'm going to work
towards organizing something like that in the near future.

In the meantime, please attend the April 14th meeting at
6PM at Bay College West in Iron Mountain. Perhaps some of
your hopes and dreams of success can get a jump-start there.

Bill Vajk
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