Steve Sheppard reports to his colleagues on Williamstown's Economic Development Committee.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Economic Development Committee on Tuesday heard the results of a summer-long project comparing Williamstown with similarly sized communities.

 

Committee member and Williams College economics professor Stephen Sheppard supervised a pair of college students who compiled data from 12 towns and Williamstown, ranking the baker's dozen on a number of economic measures.

 

Besides culling data, the students interviewed officials in the 12 other communities about what has worked to help grow their local economies and what barriers there are to development.

 

"One thing we've learned is Williamstown is certainly not hopeless," Sheppard said. "We're in the middle of the group. That was, admittedly, by design, but still that's the case.

 

"Another thing we learned is there is always going to be some opposition to economic development, but it can be navigated."

 

Sheppard and the EDC's "best practices" working group compiled a list of comparable communities with a heavy emphasis on New York and the New England states. There were two geographic outliers: Granville, Ohio, and Davidson, N.C. The nearest town studied was Lenox.

 

The survey sample also had what Sheppard described as a "healthy dose of college towns," like Middlebury, Vt., and Waterville, Maine. But it also included "postindustrial" towns, which, like Williamstown, once had a thriving manufacturing base.

 

He presented the committee with a series of charts showing trends from 2000 to 2013, the last year for which most of the data were available.

 

The charts showed that Williamstown was at the extremes of the group in some areas: population growth, where it was 12th with a .69 percent decline, and real income growth, where median income in the town grew by 2 percent — more than double that of the second-place town, Granville.

 

Williamstown also ended up at the extremes of the survey group's demographic picture with the second lowest percentage of population 17 and under (15 percent) and the third-highest percentage of senior citizens (20 percent).

 

But when Sheppard ran all 13 towns through a "prosperity ranking" matrix that took into account population growth, employment growth, income growth and income level, Williamstown landed squarely in the middle — seventh out of 13.  

 

Perhaps not surprisingly for pessimists about the state of the economy in the region, the two best performing towns on the "prosperity ranking" scale were in Ohio and North Carolina. Granville earned 16 out of a possibly 16 points; Davidson earned 15.

 

Sheppard dove deeper into the numbers and sought to explain how drivers of the local economy (distance from urban area, proximity to a large hospital, income growth, education system, the relationship between housing prices and income growth, etc.) relate to outcomes (population growth, employment growth, income growth and income level).

 

Here, he found that the strongest correlation between drivers and outcomes came in two areas. Distance from an urban center negatively impacts economic growth; education (specifically graduation rates and student/teacher ratios) positively impacts the economy.

 

"You can see clearly the correlation between education quality and economic development," Sheppard said. "This community's prosperity is assisted by having a good public school system.

 

"We could flesh these [results] out in terms of an Economic Development Committee statement about the importance of education in the current situation with discussions with Lanesborough. I think that would be helpful communication."

 

Other steps the town could take, based on the data, include increasing the availability of broadband, creating an inventory of land available for development, fostering a regulatory environment where new business is given either "by-right" approval or speedy review by town boards and working to strengthen the "multiplier effect" by which increased spending by the town's main business directly impacts the local economy.

 

Right now, that multiplier is at the high end of the 13 communities studied, coming in fourth. Sheppard said that's good but indicated there always is room for improvement.

 

"We could encourage local networks," Sheppard said. "Anything we can do to increase the multiplier would helps.

 

"The [EDC's] business forum was very well attended. I could imagine a series of such events, maybe involving at each event a couple of business people saying, 'I need to make the following large purchases — so if you or someone you know could satisfy that ... ' "

 

Sheppard also said the EDC's current yearlong process itself could be a positive. Each of the 12 communities studied had a economic development plan, some dated as far back as 1994. Sheppard found a moderate statistical relationship between the age of the plan and positive economic outcomes — not as strong a relationship as that between education and outcomes, but not an insignificant relationship.

 

Sheppard cautioned his colleagues — both in the printed report and his Tuesday presentation — that the study is limited by the size of the sample for which he and his students were able to collect data.

 

"As an economist, I wish we had double the sample, but I think this was enough to inform our conversation," Sheppard said.