A new batch of Census 2000 numbers is out. It’s a house-by-house tally of each congressional district of all those things – population growth, income, educational attainment, use of public assistance – that tell the residents of each congressional district how well they’re doing. If you live in the second of Maine’s two districts, the northern one, you don’t need Census 2000 to know the answer to “how well” is “not very.”

Also this week, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. news program “Fifth Estate” aired a documentary called “Hillbilly Heroin” about the rampant abuse of opiate-based painkillers, OxyContin being the most infamous, in depressed rural regions. Although I wasn’t able to receive the program, transcripts on the CBC Web site indicate much attention was paid to the devastation, in terms of addiction and addiction-supporting crime, this has caused not just in the Maritimes but also in Maine’s Washington County, one of the very first places where this scourge came to what is now international attention.

But you’re probably tired of hearing about the decline of northern Maine and the freefall going on in Washington County. I sure as heck am. And, judging from the comments state officials offer on the subject lately, a lot of them are utterly exhausted from trying to fix it and now only have the strength merely to describe it. There’s even a new element of blaming this victim of decades-long neglect for its chronic unemployment and subsequent social decay. It’s all too depressing; let’s move on.

(First, though, I can’t resist a couple of parenthetical observations. One – During a recent visit to the Washington County town where I used to live, I ran into a former neighbor in a store. I asked how he’d been. Not bad, he replied, but it’d be nice to leave the house without junkies always breaking in and stealing stuff. Everyone else in the store, the shopkeeper and all the customers, nodded knowingly, like they’d all been there. Can it be that a place that ought to be able to offer, if nothing else, peace and quiet now can’t do even that?)

(Two – A news story couple of days ago on the dispute over how the proposed extension of I-95 should be routed told how the citizens of one Aroostook County town are in a white-hot fury because an official of another Aroostook County town called their town a dead end full of tree-huggers. Just a few weeks earlier, by contrast, a news story on the dispute over whether an new border crossing should go through Calais or bypass it by eight miles told how the state transportation commissioner said the people of Calais “live in paranoia” – as if caring for their city was a form of psychosis – yet I’ve heard not a peep of protest. Can it be that a place once famous for its white-hot furies is so dispirited it will take such a thumb in the eye without a whimper?)

Anyway, too depressing; moving on. I was talking with Gov. King the other day about the above and he said, quite out of the blue, that he’s thinking about getting a resort built in Washington County. Offer up some of the gorgeous real estate the state owns out there to a developer who’ll put up a first-class, upscale vacation destination – golf, fine dining, the works.

Some of you, especially if you’re in the Legislature, already may be thinking, “There goes Gov. Laptop again with another harebrained idea.” Personally, I think his idea to put the Internet in the hands of every school kid in Maine is the best one he’s had in seven years. (Incidentally, I also think it’d be nice if some members of the Legislature weren’t so prone to base important policy decisions on what their grandpas did or did not have when they were kids.)

This is his second best idea. Most importantly because big resorts create lots of jobs, many of them rather good ones. UMaine Machias and Washington County Technical College have some dandy programs in tourism, recreation and especially (at WCTC) culinary arts. A swanky resort won’t keep every bright, motivated kid out there from leaving, but it will give some a reason to stay.

Look at other big resorts – the Samoset, Sugarloaf, Sunday River, the Algonquin in New Brunswick. Notice how they’re all ringed by scads of small, locally owned inns, cafes, shops, outfitters, amusements, all enjoying the traffic the main attraction creates. Everybody I know in those types of businesses in Washington County says the only problem they have

with tourists is that there’s not nearly enough of them.

Washington County needs to be visited by the sort of people who come to big, expensive resorts – successful people. You know how MBNA first came to Camden? The head guy, Charles Cawley, vacationed in the area as a kid, which led to holding executive retreats at the Samoset in Rockport as a CEO, which led to opening shop and bringing in lots of money and people. There’s no guarantee a big resort would brings lots of money and people to Washington County, but it’s an absolute certainty that the current state strategy – wishful thinking – isn’t.

Washington County also needs to shed a unique status it holds when it comes to the way the state evaluates economic-development projects. Everywhere else, investments in things like modern highways, passenger and freight rail, telecommunications and utilities upgrades, are judged on their potential to create growth. There, such projects are judged – it happens repeatedly – on current conditions, making the conclusion foregone. Creating growth to justify investment that can create growth might seem like an extra step, but nobody said building an economy from scratch would be easy.

Finally – for now, because I come up with more reasons this is a great idea every time I think about it – it’s about time the state did something useful with all that land out there conservation groups have cajoled it into buying as protection from development that never occurs, to offer recreation opportunities for visitors who never come. Unless, of course, you want to count Census takers and junkies.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.