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And if Washington makes Lake Providence part of an empowerment zone, what would it do for the town? Drawn from ideas submitted by average citizens, the plan is an ambitious mixture of the grandiose and the mundane. It envisages using federal tax breaks to attract a factory that could employ hundreds of unskilled workers. It proposes making Lake Providence the economic hub of the entire region by creating a "one-stop capital shop," a lending office where small businesses from across the country could apply for federal loans. It also foresees using the area's proximity to the Mississippi and many beautiful lakes as the basis for tourism.
These ideas strike local skeptics as overly ambitious and doomed to fail. "Just wait until the mosquitoes start bitin', and see how many tourists you get," scoffs Wyly. Emmanuel Osagie, the Southern University economist who drew up the proposal, believes that such objections are beside the point. "I don't think that in an area like this you can raise people's expectations too high," he says. "We know that the empowerment zone won't solve all our problems, but it can be a start. The problem here is to get people to believe that things can really get better. People here have been looking down at the ground for so long that all they can see is their feet."