Quit bickering. Accentuate the positive. Re-invent the area. Get educated.

In a nutshell, those are some of the solutions offered by community and economic leaders who were asked “What can be done to increase the per capita income of Ashtabula County residents?”

Rick Coblitz, an Ashtabula business owner and Growth Partnership for Ashtabula County trustee, feels it starts with supporting the hometown businessman.

“We’ve lost a lot of business to outside the county via the Internet or whatever,” Coblitz says. “If the people of Ashtabula County would spend their money in Ashtabula County, that would allow businesses to be more profitable and be able to pay their people more.”

That’s a sentiment the executive director of the Ashtabula Area Chamber of Commerce, James Timonere, can concur with, as well. Timonere says there also needs to be a change of attitude on the city councils and school-boards, where bickering is at an all-time high. He says prospective employers and retailers pay attention to what’s on the front page of the newspapers, and, frankly, they’re finding the little wars tiresome and petty.

“We got to start making some intelligent decisions,” Timonere says. “We can’t be fighting these wars in the paper. The companies who are interested in coming in here don’t want to hear it or be a part of it.”

Ashtabula City Manager Tony Cantagallo knows of at least three industries in the city that are ready to exit because of the bickering. “Two of them pay a hell of a lot of income taxes,” Cantagallo says. “Two out of three of them have some of the highest paid jobs in the city. This is not a threat. People I do business with are saying ‘What are you doing there?”

“I think our community is in real trouble,” says Saybrook Township trustee Robert “Bob” Brobst. “Even though we have a Growth Partnership that’s working very hard to bring in business, I think a lot of (potential) business (investors) drive right through the area because they read about the bickering, drugs and crime going on here.”

responded to the series expressed similar concerns – the bickering and regressive mind-set of county, city and school boards is killing the community’s chances of progress. Readers say they are tired of personalties and personal business interests taking precedent over the good of the community when the same issues are debated, sometimes for years.

Timonere says one of the “intelligent decisions” that must be made to improve Ashtabula City’s economic climate is to re-instate tax abatement. He feels abatement is absolutely essential if the city is going to compete with other communities. “We’re competing with all the other areas around us, not to mention China, India and other places where businesses locate,” he says.

The pathetic state of the city’s housing stock, “Trashtabula,” is another issue that must be addressed. Timonere says visitors to the community don’t look straight ahead; they pay a lot of attention to the housing and commercial buildings that line the road. Those structures reflect the low per capita personal income and self-image of the city.

“You’re not going to get the high-end people here if that lifestyle is not here,” Timonere says.

A change of attitude about ourselves is in order, says Steve Sargent, executive director of the Samaritan House Homeless Shelter.

“We cannot change our image to outsiders until we change it for ourselves,” he says. “We have to see it as it could be and do everything in our power to get it there. We have to dream and then work to get it there.”

Coblitz says the community has got to pull together rather than keep ripping itself apart.