How Port Angeles is pointing the way for rural America | Op-Ed
A generation ago, some folks wrote off the timber towns of Washington’s North Olympic Peninsula. Far too many of the mills that anchored paychecks and Main Streets for a century were closing. The story people told about places like Forks and Port Angeles, and hundreds of rural communities like them across the country, was a story of managed decline.
That story was wrong. Today, with AI poised to reshape the job market, communities here are dedicating local resources to new use and preparing people for the jobs of the future.
This week, we are visiting Port Angeles and Forks, alongside colleagues from across the country, as part of The Brookings-AEI Commission on U.S. Rural Prosperity. We’re not coming to dispense answers. We’re coming to listen, understand challenges and identify lessons for other rural American communities.
We come at this from opposite ends of the political map and opposite ends of the country. One of us is a Democrat who spent years representing the Peninsula in Con…