It’s said that in life, everybody has a ‘go or no go’ moment.
That’s what moved a Wytheville businessman to write an eye-opening editorial for CNBC about problems he sees in his southwestern Virginia town.
It was part of a series on the ‘best states for business’ written by young CEOs around the country.
“When they asked me about doing a 'Best States for Business,' I said yeah, Virginia is a tremendously well-governed state. It’s a great state for business."
Richard Formato is founder and CEO of Sales Edge a commercial services company in Wytheville Virginia.
“However, I’m in the other part. I’m in the other Virginia. I’m in the Virginia that is beautiful by landscape but is horrible in terms of business. "
In the CNBC editorialhe wrote about how drugs have affected his workforce, company morale. 'We are tired of losing this fight,’ he wrote.
“I’ve been in the town a lot, going to Little League games. I see it in the meetings. And I also see a lot of young people in the rooms that are shooting everything in Wytheville. They’re shooting opiates, they’re shooting Oxycodone. They cook everything here."
Comments about the editorialon CNBC’s website were vitriolic, and though that’s not uncommon in these forums, the posts were ultimately taken down by a CNBC editor. But reaction from some quarters closer to home was also not positive. The Downtown Wytheville Inc. board of directors voted unanimously Formato from the volunteer body
“If you don’t believe in the in the mission or you’re not working toward the mission, or you’re working against the mission actively, which is what I would consider that commentary piece, you don’t belong to be one of the messengers.”
David Manley is Executive Director for the Joint Industrial Development Authority of Wythe County.
“We feel like its important to talk about the things that are good and that are growing here. By bringing more economic activity we can help squash out some of these problems too. Lots of these problems can be tied to poverty and we feel the better we grow our economy, the better our people will be in the long term. “
Manley points to several area revitalization projects now underway. He says 20 new businesses open here in the last year.
“We have among the lowest unemployment in the region and a drug-addled population can’t maintain that.”
Wytheville’s Main Street looks like many small towns, diagonal parking facing small shops, a pharmacy. On a weekday morning, one of the busiest is the Wytheville Pawn and Fire Arms. Shoppers browsing the isles, like 31 year Derek, who declined to give his last name, name say, sure there’s a drug problem
“I would say its no worse than some of the other small towns.”
Wytheville First Church of God Pastor Donn Sunshine says, “As a Pastor I see it in terms of broken people.”
Pastor Sunshine holds meetings called “Recovery Wednesday” in Wytheville. He didn’t know Richard Formato, but when he saw the editorial he called him to tell him he’d done the right thing by putting it out there.
“It’s nice to have a pretty main street but I’m just concerned about our side streets.”
Formato says he was simply trying to bring light to the problem on those side streets with his editorial called “The other Virginia. In a public letter, he apologized to the community for the way he said it, but not for what he said about the scourge of drugs on the local economy
“I am hanging a lantern on this problem,” he wrote “to shed light on the fact that in one of the very best economies in the world, we are dying."
