You can have positive growth or negative growth, but you will have growth. And political leaders and business executives need to work to make sure that growth is positive.

That was one of the messages Dalton Utilities president Don Cope gave to some of Whitfield County’s young business leaders on Monday. The Young Leaders Society of Northwest Georgia gathered at Dalton Utilities as Cope delivered a wide-raging speech.

At one point, Cope asked the group why immigrants had been willing to move to Dalton to take jobs in the carpet industry when American workers from parts of the country seeing economic decline had not been willing to move here.

“We recruited?” asked one person.

“Nah!” said Cope.

“It’s mostly my fault or my predecessors,” he said.

That brought laughter, but Cope went on to talk about how in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s Dalton had been a “boom town.”

“We were a little town with a big tax base. But the workers were from Cleveland, Tenn., Copper Hill, Tenn., Murray County, Ellijay, Walker County, Dade County, Bradley County (Tennessee). They came in here during the day, and this place expanded to 150,000 people, and they went home at night,” he said. “That created a high tax base, high incomes, ownership in the community, and the work force lived somewhere else, and we didn’t have to pay for their young ones to go to school.”

But eventually those same sort of jobs sprang up in Tennessee and other parts of Georgia, and those workers didn’t have to drive 40 or 50 miles to Dalton to work.

“Who filled the void? The people that would live in the conditions that we created here because my utility didn’t expand water and services outside the core city of Dalton because all we needed to worry about was supporting the core city of Dalton because that was where all the manufacturing was and that was where all the owners and managers and leaders lived,” he said.

Developers couldn’t build housing for workers in the rest of the county because of the lack of water and the fact that the soil didn’t support septic tanks well. That meant the people who came here had to be willing to live in the high-density areas of the city.

“We’ve gone from high tax base, low utilization, to stable and decreasing tax base and extremely high utilization. We’ve got to turn that around. We’ve got to find a way to grow,” he said.

Cope also updated the Young Leaders on the drought. He said all of the rain in March had helped, but the area’s underground aquifers still have not been fully recharged and the forecast is for a hot, dry summer.