Local Farmland Viewed as Possible Industrial Site

The current issue of the Columbus Dispatch online has an article about the Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors giving their official support to a proposed industrial aerospace park on 2,500 acres west of the Golden Triangle Regional airport. It sounds like a good industry to develop, MSU has an aerospace engineering program, Columbus has an air force base and Eurocopter has a manufacturing presence near the airport. The plans will be presented at East Mississippi Community College on October 18th. My biggest concern is that it replaces farmland. All three cities in the Golden Triangle have industrial areas that could benefit from this development. It seems that instead of getting into a drawn-out battle over which city gets it, the organizers used a 1980s-era solution and decided to stick it into a rural area that is a ten-minute drive from everybody. What if we took a big picture approach? Give it to the town that needs it most. That would be West Point. I come from a "Triangle" myself: THE triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. We put a research park in the midpoint of our three cities in the 1950s and enjoyed a half-century of prosperity in the age of the automobile. With no mass transit system in place, however, some hard choices are going to be confronted by the denizens in the next half century. I say build the Global Industrial Aerospace Park in West Point, give that town a boost, and save the farmland.