One of the most important keys to winning any competition is first, knowing your strengths and weaknesses and second, enhancing the former while mitigating the latter.

The ongoing effort by the Union County Development Board and Duke Energy to develop the proposed Allied Industrial Park is designed to increase this county’s opportunities to successfully compete for new industry. Located at 1088 Gaffney Highway, Jonesville, it would be the county’s third certified industrial site joining the Trakas Industrial Site and the Sams Industrial Tract.

This process has been aided greatly by Duke Energy’s Site Readiness Program. The program identifies, assesses, improves and increases industrial sites in counties Duke Energy serves in North and South Carolina. The goal is to increase the inventory of industrial sites and advance their state of readiness.

Union County’s participation in this program has eliminated two of the four steps required by the state’s certification process, hastening the day the park becomes a reality. This is another example of how cooperation between the public and private sectors can benefit our community.

The collaboration between the development board and Duke Energy has also produced a list of the proposed site’s technical and marketing strengths and weaknesses. On the technical side, strengths include 82.8 acres of land available for development, adequate natural gas and water infrastructure on site and being located just 42 miles from the GSP International Airport. Weaknesses include being located 17 miles from I-85, a lack of zoning in the jurisdiction and being located 1.7 miles from municipal wastewater treatment infrastructure.

From a marketing perspective, Union County’s strength is its strong manufacturing base. It’s weaknesses are an unemployment rate higher than the state average and a lower rate of high school diploma and bachelor’s degree attainment.

While I-85 can’t be any closer, Union County’s other weaknesses can be addressed in such ways that they are ameliorated or even eliminated. First, Union County Council can — finally — pass a land use planning/zoning ordinance. Such an ordinance would provide industries with the assurance the values of their properties would be protected from unwanted adjacent development.

Second, wastewater treatment infrastructure could be provided either through reactivating a treatment facility already on site or the extension of sewer lines from the Town of Jonesville. These options, however, limit the kind of development that could occur because neither the on-site facility nor Jonesville’s system can handle heavy industrial waste. Only the City of Union has that capability and the sufficient capacity to do so.

The best solution would be for Union and Jonesville to link their systems and collaborate on the installation of the necessary infrastructure and to provide the required treatment services. This would enhance the park’s attractiveness to a wider range of industry and help open up the rest of the upper end of the county to industrial development.

Third, the county can begin lowering its high unemployment rate by raising its high school diploma and bachelor’s degree attainment rate. It could be argued the county is already doing this through the Union County School District’s Adult Education Program, USC-Union and the Advanced Technology Center.

Today’s employers want an educated workforce that has not only successfully completed high school but also college and/or technical school. Such a workforce has acquired the habits and discipline of learning and study and is therefore able to quickly absorb on-the-job training and adapt to the changing needs of the workplace.

Adult Ed provides men and women with a second chance to achieve what they should have in high school. USC-Union is a magnificent institution of higher learning while the technology center provides the technical training today’s workers need and today’s employers want. We’ve already seen what the technology center —in cooperation with the private sector — can deliver in the form of the 20 newly-employed workers at Gestamp.

Education is the key to a lower unemployment rate and better job opportunities for our community but only if the people of Union County take advantage of it. It is we the people who have it within our power to mitigate and even eliminate the weaknesses holding our community back while increasing the strengths that provide the foundation for a better future.

We must demand of our elected leaders they do their part — land use, infrastructure, industrial parks — that will make us more attractive to business. We must then do our part by making continuing education an integral part of our lives so when industry comes looking it can see this is the place it wants to do business.

If that happens Union County will not only go from weakness to strength but to strength for generations to come.