Taking a Risk for Rural Economic Growth with Dante Pittman

Danny Caine
According to the Center on Rural Innovation, disparities in social and economic outcomes between rural and non-rural communities have been well documented for decades. The rise of the knowledge economy and its concentration in big cities, in addition to the decline of traditionally rural industries like small-scale agriculture, have only made these disparities worse. Further, by 2022, 63 percent of rural counties had fewer jobs than they had before the Great Recession, even though most, if not all, non-rural counties had already exceeded their pre-recession employment. Ultimately, about 80 percent of counties with long-term persistent poverty are rural. However, none of this is to say that there aren’t rural counties who are figuring it out. Some rural counties are bucking the trend with dynamic leadership leading to innovative change and positive economic growth. Despite the trends, there are parts of rural America where innovative and forward-thinking ideas are creating positive economic outcomes.

Wilson County, North Carolina is one of them. Wilson County and the city of the same name have been pursuing these innovative ideas for decades. From a nation leading municipal fiber broadband network to a celebration of local folk art, Wilson has become a site of innovation and growth in Eastern North Carolina. Perhaps nobody knows this better than newly elected State Rep. Dante Pittman.

Born and raised in Wilson, Pittman has been a first-hand witness to the county’s dynamic leadership in the implementation of their forward-thinking ideas. He is my guest for this episode of Building Local Power, and he is here to share dispatches from on the ground in Wilson to explain just how these forward-thinking ideas have made his district a thriving county in the rural South.

Representative Dante Pittman, thank you so much for being on Building Local Power. It’s great to meet you.

Rep. Dante Pittman
It’s a pleasure to be here.

Danny Caine 
First, you know, I like to ask people about their journeys to start off. So tell us about your political journey. How’d you get interested in public service? How’d you get involved in politics? And what did your journey to the North Carolina State House look like?

Rep. Dante Pittman 
Well, certainly, you know, I was someone that just growing up, I took an interest in civics and history courses. And I’ll never forget that when I was in high school, missed a day of school to make sure I was out on election day, passing out information for President Barack Obama in 2012. So that is a fond memory that I have. I went back and told my teachers that I wasn’t there and I had a few of them tell me that’s fine. We wanted you to be right where you are. So I always had that as a memory.

I’d gathered during that time in 2012 some of my friends and we went knocking on doors throughout the weekend to try make sure that folks not only knew that there was an election but wanted them to know where we stood on it. And then in 2014 when I high school went on to do the same thing for Senator Kay Hagan who was a great senator from North Carolina making sure we were knocking on doors that we were getting the word out about that important midterm. So that was really my introduction to getting out, getting involved in a campaign. But you know politics is something that I’ve always thought really important. You know, Wilson County is home to North Carolina’s longest-serving governor, Governor Jim Hunt. that is pretty much in our DNA. So we believe public service is something that everyone ought to be involved in.

Danny Caine 
I love that even before you were old enough to vote, you were out there knocking on doors and getting involved. pretty inspiring.

Rep. Dante Pittman
Well, I appreciate it. I figured I couldn’t vote myself, but I could influence other votes, and that might be more valuable.

Danny Caine 
before we started recording, you mentioned that in Wilson, there’s always something going on. seems like a really interesting place based on my can you, for our listeners who haven’t been there, just describe your district for us.

Rep. Dante Pittman 
Well, My district is North Carolina House District 24, which is all of Wilson County and then a small sliver of Nash County, one precinct in Nash County. so my district is encompassed of a rural county primarily in Wilson County. But in that rural county, the center of it is the city of Wilson, which is sort of the hub and the most populated area. So we find ourselves just in a really fortunate position because we have some of amenities that come with having a city that’s growing, businesses coming to see and Johnson new minor league baseball team is coming to Wilson, but we also still maintain our history and culture as a rural county, making sure that agriculture is still a vital part of our economy. And industry that we really still encourage our students to get involved in and to look into.

So I think we have the best of both worlds. I mean we are really the entrance way to Eastern North Carolina. We find ourselves 45 minutes from Raleigh and 45 minutes from Greenville, North Carolina. So we are just fortunate in where we are, but what makes the district special is really the people and the connections. Even though we’re growing, we still have that small town, hometown feel.

Danny Caine
I love it. It sounds great. And I’m going to ask you a couple of specific questions about Wilson in your district. At the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, we really focus a lot on small businesses. One of our major initiatives is small businesses in the face of corporate monopolies. And on your campaign website, you said you focus on small businesses as a key to your district’s economic development. So why are locally owned small businesses important to the communities in your district and how do you plan to help them from your seat in the North Carolina house?

Rep. Dante Pittman 
Yeah, like I was saying is that Wilson is growing and we are seeing some really incredible companies that are coming here and are looking to come here. And we encourage that industry, but make no mistake about it. What has kept Wilson afloat and kept Eastern North Carolina afloat during the good times and the bad times are local businesses or small businesses, the ones that, you know, contribute the local nonprofits, the ones that make sure folks have jobs when it might be easier to cut in lean times. So I think that those local businesses are the ones that are at the heart of our community. We’ve got to make sure that we protect them and we know how important they are. Not too long ago, was talking the president of our local Chamber of Commerce and I was talking to him about how we’ve got to make sure we keep balance in this thing. We don’t want to see folks turn off the spigot in terms of companies coming here, but we got to make sure that we find a room and that we promote those local businesses that are here. And that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. When we are inviting folks to come in from out of town, I will take them on a tour and we will take them through some small businesses to make sure that those dollars make it to our local businesses. When I’m radio stations and TV interviews, we are promoting our local businesses and we want to make sure that when we’re talking about our tax policy here in North Carolina, that we are keeping the small local businesses in mind and not just big corporations.

Danny Caine
you’re from Wilson, right?

Rep. Dante Pittman 
Born and raised.

Danny Caine
What’s the first time or an early time you really realized the importance of small businesses in building this We heard your origin story for politics. What’s your origin small businesses?

Rep. Dante Pittman
So I will tell you for me, it actually is really tied up in my family. I was, you know, young, four or five years old, I remember going to the barbershop growing up. I come from a mixed race family, and so I had my grandfather, who was also born and raised in was a white man that would take me to the barbershop, the Black barbershop downtown, and I just remember the relationships, the respect, that feeling of community when we would go and you know it wasn’t the most natural place for him to take me but it’s where I needed to go and I will never forget how they would roll out the red carpet at that barbershop and make sure that he was just as included as every other person in there and that’s the kind of thing that small businesses do for our there to help bring people together and make sure we remember that a community is not just one group of people but we can reach across the we can reach across different communities and we can bring folks together.

Danny Caine
I really love that story. That’s a great story about the barbershop. What a great memory. Okay, so specifically about Wilson, I saw one story that was super interesting to me. we’re, like I said, at ILSR, we’re interested in strategies for creating and building resilient and vibrant downtowns, by small businesses and other things. In Wilson, there’s a really interesting effort to do just that with folk art sculptures called whirligigs

And you’ve been involved in that effort as a board member in the past. So can you tell us about the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park and how has the effort to preserve these whirligigs benefited the city and the county of Wilson?

Rep. Dante Pittman
It really is a remarkable situation that we’re in. So I remember when I was growing up, a small town in Wilson County to the south and a little bit to the west of the city of Wilson, this town called Lucama. It’s a very rural area. And that’s where the man, Vollis Simpson lived, where he would put all that…

It’s basically, for those that don’t know what it is, you have a pole in the ground and then you go up a few feet in the air and then you have some art that is spinning based off of the wind. And this was his hobby. Well, I had a friend of mine who lived out in Lucama a couple miles down the road from Vala Simpson. And I remember going there as a child riding by this and thinking it was just rusted junk.

And if you would have told little Dante that that would be the crown jewel of our community and sort of the anchor of this economic development, I would have thought you’d been drinking. But that’s exactly what we find ourselves in the middle of, is that we have had a group of folks a few years back now, over a decade now, that saw that art and said that is something different that’s happening in Wilson we just unfortunately, we just lost in Wilson one of our community giants, Henry Walston, who was a community and business leader who was at the forefront of making sure that Whirligig Park got established and actually later on today I’m going to be recognizing his memory on the house floor. So we had a group of folks that got together that realized that this was something unique and they pushed to establish this Whirligig Park and quite frankly folks in Wilson many of them thought what are we doing? I mean this is just something that you don’t build around a community around but

That vision that folks have, that our leaders have, like Henry and our former city manager, Grant Gullwings, has truly just paid we are now in a situation where we are seeing our downtown boom. I mentioned earlier, Minor League Baseball is coming. The Carolina Mudcats have transferred from Wake County. They are coming to downtown Wilson. They’re going to be the Wilson Warbirds. There’s a brand new stadium that’s being built right beside the Whirligig Park. We’ve seen restaurants and businesses move to downtown and it is all centered around this folk art that you were talking about, whirligigs, and that’s what makes us unique. And as we’re growing in Wilson one of the things that we are determined to do is make sure we don’t lose our culture and who we are as a people.

Danny Caine
There’s just so much I love about that story. I’m a huge fan of folk art. I actually remember seeing one of the whirligigs at the Folk Art Museum in Baltimore. For our listeners, you probably can’t imagine how huge and colorful these things are. So we’re going to put a link to some information in the show notes so you can have a look. Listening to Representative Pittman, it seems like the conventional wisdom is that rural areas of the country, especially in the South, are having trouble with economic growth.

Wilson, it sounds like, has figured something out with the thriving downtown and the folk art and the baseball team. So how are you kind of bucking conventional wisdom and finding economic growth I think a lot of people would argue that small towns in the South are having a rough time?

Rep. Dante Pittman
Well, one of the things that I feel just so fortunate to be from a place, my family to be from a place that is forward thinking like Wilson. I mean, we’re talking about the Whirligig Park. You know, we have community broadband in Greenlight and this was a fight that was taken on over a decade to go to make sure that we had public broadband. And right now we also have, this is only a couple of years old, but we have a rideshare system that the city operates, basically acting as a public Uber. These are things that you don’t typically see from small cities, not even just in the South, but across the country. So the leadership that we have had to be forward thinking, had to be willing to take a risk in search of finding better solutions for our people. That has been the key. And I’ll also say that, you know, we’re just fortunate in where we’re situated to. We find ourselves in Eastern North Carolina, but also with close proximity to the Triangle Region, which is just booming. So what we’ve decided is that we’re going to do all we can to benefit from that without letting it change who we are.

Danny Caine
I love that forward thinking leadership. Those are great ideas. I didn’t know about the public Uber.

Rep. Dante Pittman
I was just gonna tell you that the funny thing about that is that I was working for the city of we were transforming from our public bus system to ride share system and I have the title of being the last person in Wilson that visited every bus stop to make sure we got the word out. So that is something that I will have always and forever.

Danny Caine 
Every bus stop in Wilson, I love that. I want to ask you about Greenlight broadband actually, because another focus area of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance is community ILSR over the years of that fight has worked really closely with Wilson to help get that set up and navigate all of the legislative challenges to get that going. Now I was talking to some folks on that team and they say that Greenlight broadband in Wilson is one of the shining examples nationally of community broadband.

So how do you see your constituents benefiting from that, from locally owned fiber internet? And why is it important to the life of Wilson and the county?

Rep. Dante Pittman 
Yeah, well, you know, I don’t like too often to go back to the times of the pandemic, but take that for instance, when, you know, we’re talking about schools being closed and parents having to figure out how they’re going to get their children educated. Having Greenlight as not just community broadband, but having that entity be a part of the city of Wilson, it allowed partnership from day one. So we were able to make sure that students could get online, that we could, that they could continue their study, to do their homework. We were able to do it quicker than so many other places because we had that entity housed within the city of Wilson. So it has just been an incredible, incredible thing that we are so proud of. And my only wish for other places is that they would have the opportunity to do just the same thing that we’ve done because we’ve seen the difference that it has made in our community and access for folks.

If you go to downtown Wilson right now, you will see that in our downtown zone, that there’s public Wi-Fi. And we’re able to do that because the city of Wilson is a true partner in this. So you can be on the library lawn in Wilson and be accessing the Wi-Fi, getting work done, having meetings, whatnot. And that’s another thing that sets our downtown apart from so many other places.

Danny Caine 
And I’ll just mention you know, according to folks who know much more about this than me, the service is cheaper and much better than the major telecom monopolies as well.

Rep. Dante Pittman 
Well, one of the things we often get in terms of feedback is we’ve had folks that have moved to Wilson whose business is primarily online because we have the type of service that you cannot get in other parts of the country. Can’t find it really anywhere else. And that’s a reason that folks have moved here and brought their business to Wilson. So we are so proud of it because that gives us an edge to some of our competitors.

Danny Caine 
I love that. another innovative and forward thinking way to create economic growth in Wilson. our listeners who are interested in learning more about community broadband, in the show notes, I’m going to put some links to some resources from ILSR about Greenlight, including a major report that they wrote about the fight to get this created, about big telecoms resistance to it, and about its benefits to the community of Wilson.

Okay, so. Earlier, a couple of weeks ago on the podcast, I had a really interesting conversation with a couple organizers at the RDU one warehouse, Amazon warehouse in Garner, which is very, it’s in the Triangle area. It’s close to Raleigh, maybe an hour from you there in Wilson. They just had their union election since we recorded and released this episode, they had their union election. They lost the election by significant margins. They talk about Amazon’s union busting and they also talk about the difficulty of organizing in North Carolina, which is kind of notoriously difficult to organize labor in and is a right to work state. So wondering, I know it’s not your district, but you’re close by, how do you see labor organizing as a part of the project of building stronger communities and what challenges does it face in North Carolina?

Rep. Dante Pittman 
Yeah, well, when I ran, one of the things that I talked about in this sector was the need for balance. We want to continue to be a state that’s open for business and a state that can attract the top tiers of business while making sure our small businesses are looked after. But you can’t run a business without having workers. You need that workforce. So we need to make sure that we have a strong and a secure workforce that has confidence that they’re going to be taken care of.

And that’s what I’m hoping we can do the coming months and years here in North Carolina is create more balance in the situation. We don’t want to see North Carolina be turned into a state that isn’t business friendly, but we know that for our businesses to be successful and more importantly to take care of our people in the communities that our people live in, we’ve got to have a strong workforce that’s protected.

Danny Caine 
Great, thanks for that. Let’s do two more questions. You’re new in the State House, you’re a fresh arrival, this is your first term, but it still looks like you’ve been busy looking at your website and what you’ve been working on and looking at the bills you’ve introduced or co-sponsored. It seems like veterans are a major concern of yours and you have experience in the National Guard. Can you talk about how your military experience informs your political philosophy?

Rep. Dante Pittman
Yes, I’m entering into my ninth year in the North Carolina National Guard, now serving as a captain. And one of the things that I just truly believe in is that military service has the ability to bring people together that otherwise would have no reason to come together. And you see that not just in folks that are actively in the military, but also in veterans. And so one of the things that I am passionate about is to make sure that North Carolina continues to be the most military friendly state, but that also means taking care of people after they’ve exited the military. I want folks that have served to know that we have not forgotten them, that we are thankful for their service, and we want to do all that we can to make sure we keep them here in North Carolina. So I’m working across the aisle on a few pieces of legislation to make sure that even if it’s just tinkering around the edges sometimes that we can make it just a little bit easier to retain those veteran voices that we have here in this state.

Danny Caine
And best of luck with that effort. Okay, to wrap up, I just want to ask you about your inspirations in the political sense. Where are you seeing really great work happening? people or cities or counties or states are doing work that’s inspiring you as you kind of take on your first term in the North Carolina State House?

Rep. Dante Pittman
Well, I’m gonna look local. We’ve been talking a lot about the city of Wilson, but actually within Wilson County there is the town of Stantonsburg and I believe in the next five to six years you are going to see a transformation of that small town in Wilson County because they are planning for growth. They are looking forward. They are working on getting their water systems improved. They’re working on their small downtown being better developed and I think that kind of forward leadership with partners in the whole county of Wilson and in the state of North Carolina and focusing on those fundamentals. And when I talk about fundamentals, looking at what people need and how do we meet those basic needs and how do we continue to fuel that inspiration they have to build and to grow. That’s what is a key to success in my opinion. So I think the town of Stantonsburg and Wilson County, North Carolina, if you keep an eye on that here in the next few years, you’re going to be impressed.

Danny Caine
Great, it really, it truly seems like there’s some really interesting things going on in Wilson and Wilson County. And it’s so interesting to talk to a son of the county who is now the North Carolina State House. Thank you so much for coming on Building Local Power. It’s been a real pleasure to talk to you.

Rep. Dante Pittman 
I’ve enjoyed it. Thank you for having me.

Danny Caine 
Talking to Representative Pittman really did make me want to visit Wilson County, but for now, I’ll have to settle for virtual exploration. I’ll share resources to do just that in the show notes. There, you can find information about the fabulous whirligigs and how to help that project cross the finish line. You can also find information about Wilson’s municipal rideshare system.

Finally, please do have a look at the ILSR Community Broadband Team’s report, Wilson Hits a Fiber to the Home Run with Greenlight Municipal Broadband Network, where you’ll find a lot of context about how municipal broadband has helped Wilson grow, in addition to a deep exploration of the massive challenges they faced in implementing it, thanks in large part to organized and vicious opposition from telecom monopolies.

Here, at Building Local Power, we’d love to invite our listeners into the conversation. If you have thoughts about this or other episodes, ideas for future guests, or if you just want to get in touch, send me a note at [email protected]. And as always, if you like what you hear, please like, subscribe, review, and share with your friends. This episode of Building Local Power was produced by me, Danny Caine with the help of Reggie Rucker. I did the editing with help from Téa Noelle, who also composed the music. Thank you so much for listening, and see you in two weeks.

• The Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park
• Wilson’s Public Rideshare Program
• ILSR Report: Wilson, N.C., Shows What’s Possible When a Broadband Network Puts Community First