Too good to be true? Too weird to be true?
This very long story is about Newport, VT, a poor city (yes, we call towns of 5,000 cities here) right on the Canadian border in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. The backbone of the story is the EB05 program. $600 million is a lot of dough. Maybe not at the federal level but for one town of 5,000, it is.
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Chief promoter of this land of plenty is Bill Stenger, president and CEO of Jay. He’s been utilizing the federal EB-5 program — which gives green cards to foreigners who invest at least $500,000 in economically depressed rural regions across the U.S. — to attract $600 million of development projects to the area.
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Stenger’s indoor water park is up and running, but Newport is waiting on Walmart; AnC Bio, a South Korean company that manufactures artificial human organs; a German window manufacturer; a hotel and conference center; and an expanded airport. Those developments are expected to create more than 5000 jobs, from high-level tech positions to dishwasher and construction gigs. In a city with fewer than 5000 residents, that’s a game changer.
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(yes, there are some neat things happening)
As recently as three years ago, Summer Street was known as a high-crime area, and residents hung out at all hours in the parking lot at its center. When Dreher suggested that the city try and turn that lot into a community garden, resident Jennifer Bernier was skeptical. “You’re insane!” she told Dreher, even though it bothered her that some people had begun referring to her neighborhood as “the ghetto.”
The city secured a municipal planning grant to cover some of the $15,000 cost, and donations from other local businesses — for things such as seeds, a shed and gardening supplies — flowed in. Two summers ago, the parking lot was removed and a 5000-square-foot garden took its place, filled with semicircular raised beds containing kale, carrots, lettuce and tomatoes.
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Newport now has six more gardens in reclaimed spaces throughout the city, and Bernier oversees them all. Last year those gardens produced 1700 pounds of vegetables. Some of the food also goes to Newport’s dynamic farm-to-school program, which operates a popular mobile truck called the Lunch Box van.
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http://www.7dvt.com/2013thirty-six-hours-newport-city-waiting-happen
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