NORWAY – Economic change and leadership is going to have to spring from towns and cities in Maine, according to University of Southern Maine professor Charles S. Colgan.

Colgan, professor of public policy and management and an economic advisor to the governor, told a group of nearly 50 at Harper Conference Center in the Ripley Medical Building Tuesday that although Maine is inextricably tied to the larger national and state forces of the economy, the heart of change lies locally.

He said Norway and Paris are going to have to take the lead in the Oxford Hills area.

“Anything that talks like an urban place and functions like an urban place has to take the leadership role,” he said.

He said he is a proponent of regionalization and that rural residents are going to have to take a hard look at making some changes in the future that they may not like.

“There’s a hundred creative ideas out there,” Colgan said. “There’s no one model for every place. It’s the community leaders’ job to decide.”

Colgan said Mainers buy a lot of government, so they must like it.

“We have one general purpose unit of government for every 4,000 people in Maine,” Colgan said. “There are city blocks in New York City with more people than that.”

He said having town offices on every mile of the roads is convenient, but soon the question, “How much convenience do people want to pay for?” will have to be asked.

Colgan said Maine held up well compared to the rest of the country in terms of employment in 2001, but then had some hits in 2002. He said the weakness of the national economy caught up to Maine, especially in manufacturing.

He showed a chart of the U.S. job growth that had dipped below being flat.

“Quite frankly, that’s where Maine’s problem is. We’re flat and that’s probably where we’ll be for the rest of the year,” Colgan said.

He added that he did not expect national and Maine job growth rates to get back to pre-2001 rates until 2005.

Colgan said the creation of the Western Maine University and Technical College showed the Oxford Hills area was on the right track because it would be crucial to ensure the workforce is prepared for the coming jobs, many of which would require new skills.

He also said Maine needed to change the fact that demographically it’s a state of older people. He said the loss of young people was not the reason Maine seemed proportionately older; it was because the state did not attract younger people in the ’90s.