Wait until you see who he comes up against:
"Revitalization of N.H. mill town takes unusual ideas" by Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff February 15, 2015
FRANKLIN, N.H. — On a summer night in 2013, Todd Workman marched into this city’s antique opera house.
Standing before members of a local booster club, Workman rattled off points at an intense clip, a new sentence beginning before his last was finished. His hazel eyes darted and his hands wove and cut the air like a conjurer as he explained that he wanted to do something many believed impossible.
He wanted, he said, to turn Franklin around.
And he had the key.
“Permaculture,” he said.
Eyes widened as Workman made his pitch. He wanted to bring ecologically balanced development to Franklin. He wanted to create a circular economy where one business’s output was another’s input. He wanted Franklin to be a small-scale model of sustainability.
For so long, the city of 8,000 had been hurting, its once-thriving mills giving way to vacant brick hulks and wind whistling down sidewalks where once there had been bustle. The city had tried everything to spur investment. Tax forgiveness and tax credits, redevelopment zones.
The proud city was going to crumble if someone didn’t do something.
Workman was an outsider. He didn’t live in Franklin. He was brash and dogmatic, an ideologue in khaki pants and a blazer. He was bull-headedly certain of his plan and himself.
Would it take a guy like that to save Franklin?
I'm sure no joke was intended.
A mill town in disrepair
Franklin sits in central New Hampshire at the confluence of two rivers, the Winnipesaukee and Pemigewasset, that thread together downstream to form the Merrimack. Industrialists in the 19th century harnessed the rivers for mills that churned out woolen cloth, hosiery, hacksaws, needles, and paper. A downtown of stolid brick buildings and a classical revival library courtesy of Andrew Carnegie rose.
Feel like we are back in those gilded days now, what with all the wealth inequality and us dependent on the generosity of our overlords.
Interesting side note: Carnagie was an alleged pacifist, yet his companies made the steel that helped create the U.S. Naval fleet that went to war in the late 19th, early 20th century.
Mill managers lived in turreted Victorians in the hills above town. Below, cheek-by-jowl New Englanders housed mill workers who streamed downtown on weekends to take in a movie at the Regal Theater or skate at Odell Park or eat at George’s Diner. On the west side, tourists meandered up Route 3, then the gateway to the White Mountains, making a stop at the historic Daniel Webster homestead.
That could be anywhere in New England -- or AmeriKa, for that matter.
Franklin was grand, and then, like so many New England mill towns, it wasn’t. Interstate 93 bypassed it, industries packed up and moved south. Big box stores were built in the adjoining town along the interstate some 4 miles away. It might as well have been a million. Traffic through town slowed to a trickle. The pharmacy closed, then the jewelry store and the shoe store.
From time to time, investors came through looking for a deal. A Montreal developer bought one of the mills in the 1990s, planning condos and offices. But he sold it a few years later after a market study showed the meager rents in Franklin weren’t worth the cost of renovating.
City officials convened intensive meetings meant to dream up the city’s future. Elaborate documents emerged. They sat on desks.
The city crossed fingers that a huge proposed Canadian hydroelectric project called the Northern Pass would materialize, but the project got bogged down in politics, and there was no telling when, or if, it ever would come to be.
Household incomes lagged more than 30 percent behind the state average. More kids than not came to depend on the city schools for lunch.
Poor kids.
More businesses left; a tattoo parlor moved in.
One worn storefront became home to the Twin Rivers Baptist Church.
Not the kind of economic development one is looking for.
********************
Outside perspective
In the nearby lakeside town of Gilford, Todd Workman grew up in a home without central heat in the 1970s. His parents were do-it-yourselfers, as he recalls, who cut their own wood, grew vegetables using discarded tires as planters, and drank unpasteurized milk drawn from the Weeks family cows up the street.
His father was a stern figure who put him and his brother to work hauling logs for the stove, he said. Fun was something for later in life. He remembers his mother having a free-spirited intensity. On a hot day, she was quick to skinny-dip in a cold stream...
Each summer, Workman watched his father, a teacher, reinvent himself to earn extra money. He rarely took the same job, preferring to craft a new identity — cutting firewood, carpentry, giving bicycle tours across New Hampshire. Workman thought of his father as a serial entrepreneur, master of any domain he set his sights on, and a man who wouldn’t be dictated to.
Funny.
After graduating from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in business administration, Workman took a job with Beneficial Management Corp. of America, a consumer loan company, working in offices in New York and across New England. For seven years, he jockeyed for commissions.
He did well, he said. But he felt like a hack. Anyone could do the corporate hustle.
Back home in New Hampshire, his family hadn’t been able to find a suitable facility for his ailing grandparents.
Workman bought one.
He moved his grandparents, his wife, and young sons into the 34-bed facility in Northfield, N.H. When his grandparents shifted to a nursing home, Workman sold the facility. He went back to loan-making, this time on his own, he said, and also bought vacation properties for rental and resale....
How many of us can do that? I just hope to hold onto the house.
One day, a friend loaned Workman a book, “Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual.”
The author, an Australian field biologist named Bill Mollison who studied deserts and rain forests in the 1970s, posited that civilization should be designed to mimic the self-sustaining ecosystems he observed in nature.
That sounds great, except that the idea has been perverted by certain intere$ts.
The concept, a mix of scientific principles, philosophy, and folk wisdom, first applied to agriculture, grew in popularity and was applied to landscape design, energy production, and transportation as its once-hippie-dippie appeal found a home among serious students of sustainability.
Can we do without the insults, please?
Related: Cuba All About Cargill and Other Food Corporations
Hmmmm!
Across the country, there were permaculture meet-up groups and conferences, neighborhood classes and college courses.
It was the idea Workman was looking for....
I'm $melling an agenda.
He imagined a city transformed, a self-contained utopia that thrived on its own resources: electricity generated by the river, local agriculture, fewer cars, artists and businesses flourishing on local trade.
What about foreign investment, because the lack of such things tends to drive wars.
“We are now living in a post-growth society, and a . . . way of life needs to be created as a viable alternative,” he later wrote of his vision.
I thought that was an important comment.
He couldn’t do it alone, though. He had done well financially, but not that well. He needed to convince others to follow his lead.
Building a movement
It turned out there was a wealth of literature about how to become a leader....
No jokes, please.
One day, he clicked open an online video. It was a TED talk called “How to Start a Movement.”
In the video, Derek Sivers, a serial entrepreneur, stands in jeans and an untucked shirt before an audience. Sivers points to an overhead screen. It shows a guy dancing alone on a hillside. The guy is soon joined by another guy because his dancing is easy to follow, Sivers explains.
“The first follower,” Sivers says with a broad smile, “is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.”
And I have 35 of you! I can't thank you enough!
Then along comes another dancer. And then some more. Dancing is no longer weird. It’s what everyone is doing.
“Now we’ve got a movement!” Sivers says to enthusiastic applause....
Sort of like 9/11 Truth!!
However, as the "project takes shape there is tension with the city, but by any measure, the grand vision of a sparkling, self-sustaining city was years, even decades, away from being realized, if it ever would be and despite any excitement Workman had managed to drum up, progress so far consisted mainly of pledges and promises. Even the seemingly simple project of the bike trail had yet to become anything more than a plan.
But....
Let's cut the negativity, yeah!
--more--"
