ShareThisan editorial/The Providence Journal
Friday, May 11, 2007
It's not only tourism that makes Savannah, Ga., so prosperous, though plenty of tourists are attracted to the city's oak-shaded squares and beautiful old houses. Savannah's preservation movement got going in the early 1960s, when a study showed that the squares and the houses that surround them -- largely derelict then but elegant now -- could be a "gold mine" for tourism.
But it took far more than a tourism-based economy to make Savannah's schools the beautifully landscaped and maintained edifices that they are, or to make the city's public services so efficient -- or to cause a townhouse in the city to fetch an eye-popping $7 million.
It also took the 25 cranes at the container port a mile upriver from the city. Last year they moved 2.2 million containers, to make Savannah's 1,200-acre port the fourth-largest in the United States, and second-largest on the East and Gulf coasts.
According to the Georgia Ports Authority, Georgia's deepwater ports and inland barge terminals in 2006 supported more than 275,968 jobs throughout the state and contributed $10.8 billion in income, $35.4 billion in revenue and some $1.4 billion in state and local taxes.
The port gives Savannah -- much of Georgia, really -- a solid economy. Because it is based on highly diversified international trade, this new economy is fairly recession-resistant. Rhode Island is still searching for a new economy. It has invested heavily in tourism but has discovered that tourism by itself is not enough. Despite high taxes, the state's public infrastructure is far from impressive. Somewhere along the way, the Ocean State forgot that it's essential to make money -- lots of it -- as it used to when it was a manufacturing, and before that, international trading center.
Savannah hasn't forgotten. One of Savannahians' favorite places for lunch is the Westin Hotel, from which they can look at their gracious old city on the opposite bluff across the Savannah River and, if they're lucky, happily watch a loaded container ship pass by.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
