MATTERS AT HAND: Success does indeed have a thousand parents

Success has a thousand parents, so they say.

And so it seemed on Monday last week, after the Federal Aviation Administration announced that Grand Forks would be one of six test sites for unmanned aerial systems, otherwise known as drones.

Within minutes of the mid-morning announcement, the Herald had calls from a large number of people who'd been involved in the effort to win the test site. So many were they, in fact, that I considered rummaging our files to find editorials in which we endorsed the idea so that we at the Herald could take some credit, too.

Perhaps, as cheerleaders, we deserve some.

For it is true that success has a thousand parents.

Grand Forks would not have won the site had it not been for cooperation at every level.

Every level: the city, the county, the state, the congressional delegation, local colleges and the university, business leaders (including the Economic Development Corp. and the Chamber of Commerce), as well as the media.

The list is a long one.

In some ways, the announcement last week is a culmination of a process that's been developing in Grand Forks for a long time -- since the flood, in fact.

Before the Flood of 1997, Grand Forks was a rather complacent place, confident in its position as a regional shopping and medical center, secure in its institutions, including the university and the Air Force Base, and generally pretty satisfied with itself.

Business leaders had reacted against this attitude even before the flood, my predecessor at the Herald among them. Publisher Mike Maidenberg joined efforts to jump start economic development in the region and, with Randy Newman of Alerus Financial -- known as First National Bank then -- he helped put together a business group that sat down regularly with city leaders to press for business-friendly policies.

Out of this grew what is today called the Business, Government and Education Alliance, a kind of roundtable where ideas are vetted and concerns are raised.

But it was the flood that drew the community together in ways that hadn't been imagined before. And the city and the region have benefitted from this new spirit ever since we all resolved that flooding wouldn't defeat us and the city would be greater than it had ever been.

That's what the drone test site promises.

Here, businesses and government agencies will be able to test prototypes that might do any number of things. They'll be able to figure out how drones and the old-fashioned kind of aircraft, the ones with pilots on board, will maneuver in the same space.

Agriculture is expected to be an earlier adapter of drone technology, since these unmanned vehicles will be able to collect data about field conditions day and night and pretty much regardless of weather conditions. This will make it possible for growers to react to specific situations rather than making decisions based on the view from the windshield of a pickup.

Of course, there are many other possibilities. Drones almost certainly will have applications in environmental protection. For example, drones might have been used to take samples from the plume of smoke that arose from the train derailment at Casselton, N.D., only hours after the test site announcement was made.

Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, has suggested that drones could actually deliver packages. Amazon, of course, has had a presence in Grand Forks since just after the flood.

It's not just the test site designation that fuels a sense of optimism about the future of drone technology here. Earlier, the county negotiated what's called an "extended use lease" with the U.S. Air Force. This makes about 200 acres on Grand Forks Air Force Base available for development.

The idea is to bring companies interested in drones to a place that has room for them to test their ideas.

This is the so-called "Grand Sky" initiative.

Like the drone test site, Grand Sky had a thousand parents, especially including the lead local government entity, the Grand Forks County Commission.

These developments could remake Grand Forks and the region. Sen. John Hoeven has suggested that as many as 5,000 jobs might eventually be created.

That's an end state, though. If it happens -- when it happens -- that success will have 10,000 grandparents.