Photo by Nathalie Désirée Mottet / Unsplash
Rome is marketing its rivers as the engine of a recreation-economy future — while the Coosa tests PFAS-positive at 84% of sampling sites and displaced manufacturing workers have nowhere to land in the new labor market.
On December 31, 2023, someone clocked out of the Summit Hill Foods plant on First Avenue for the last time. We don't know their name. The Rome News-Tribune covered the closure but not the workers — the eighty people who had been processing food inside a building that had processed flour for decades before that, under a different company name, on the same downtown block, steps from the place where the Etowah and Oostanaula rivers join to become the Coosa.
The building itself carries a long industrial biography. It was Southeastern Mills before Summit Hill, part of Rome's manufacturing identity — the kind of employer that didn't require a degree, didn't require you to speak a certain way, didn't ask you to present yourself to a hospital hiring coordinator or a university HR department. It asked you to show up. To work the line. To not fail the drug test. And for a long time, that was enough to live on.
Walking out of that plant on New Year's Eve, crossing First Avenue toward the river, you might have passed one of the banners Rome had recently started putting up. The outdoor destination messaging. The trail graphics. The kind of civic branding that appears when a city has decided what it wants to become and is working backward from the logo. The Coosa was right there, as it has always been — moving south, flat and steady in winter, framed by the Ridge and Valley topography that makes Rome look like somewhere you'd want to kayak through on a Saturday morning.
It's a beautiful river. It has always been a beautiful river. The problem isn't what it looks like. The problem is what's in it — and the larger problem is that the jobs Rome is building its future on don't reach the people whose jobs just ended.
Eighty workers received roughly three months' notice before the new year. The closure was announced in October. By January, the Rome-Floyd Chamber job board had posted forty-one open positions — "a low in recent months," one local outlet noted. The two facts sat next to each other without comment. Nobody wrote the story about the gap between them.
The mechanism in Rome is a five-step structural chain that the city's official planning documents describe in pieces, never assembling the whole picture. Read together, those documents tell a story the planners almost certainly did not intend to tell.
Step one is baseline deindustrialization. Rome's manufacturing base — textiles, food processing, industrial goods — began contracting in the 1990s as carpet production concentrated in Dalton and global competition eroded NW Georgia's mill economy. The legacy is visible in the building stock: large industrial structures, some repurposed, some not, distributed across a downtown that was built around factory employment and is now being asked to function as a destination economy. Bureau of Labor Statistics data extracted in March 2026 shows Rome MSA manufacturing employment at 6,200 jobs and declining — down 4.7% year-over-year as of November 2025, with consistent quarterly contraction across the prior twelve months.[1]
Education and Health Services has overtaken manufacturing as Rome MSA's largest employment sector, accounting for approximately 11,500 jobs — roughly 24% of total nonfarm employment — growing at +1.8% annually (BLS, March 2026). This is not a Rome-specific story; it mirrors regional patterns across non-metro Georgia. What makes it a signal here is the speed of the credential gap: healthcare and higher education require qualifications that a twenty-year manufacturing workforce does not hold by default, and Rome has no documented reskilling infrastructure at scale.
Step two is the opioid compounding effect. In the workforce vacuum left by manufacturing contraction, the prescription opioid crisis has hit Northwest Georgia with unusual severity. The NW Georgia Health District — which includes Floyd County — leads all eighteen Georgia public health districts in opioid deaths per capita over a five-year period. Logan Boss, spokesman for the Georgia Department of Public Health's Northwest District, stated plainly in March 2023: "We have by far the worst opioid death rate in the state."[2] In March 2023, fentanyl was documented inside Floyd County school buildings. The Rome City Commission and Floyd County Commission both formally voted to join national opioid settlement agreements in April 2023 — an institutional acknowledgment, in legal and bureaucratic form, of epidemic-level damage to the county's human infrastructure.[3]
This matters for labor supply. Deaths, disability, and drug-testing failures reduce the effective workforce pool for manufacturing employers who might otherwise consider Rome for investment. The trap is self-reinforcing: fewer stable industrial jobs increase precarity, which increases substance dependency, which makes workforce recruitment harder for any industrial employer considering a Rome location. The city's own 2024–2028 Consolidated Plan identifies substance abuse services as one of its top unmet community needs — not as a social concern separate from the economy, but as a condition of the city's day-to-day functioning.[4]
The City of Rome's 2024–2028 HUD Consolidated Plan documents a public housing waitlist consistently at 500+ people, with the Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) waitlist carrying 800–900 families. The city's median household income is listed at approximately $37,733. Floyd County's poverty rate sits at 16% — roughly 15,300 residents below the poverty line in a county of 95,600. These are not background statistics. They are the material conditions of the population Rome is asking to participate in a recreation-economy transition that requires discretionary income, physical mobility, and credential investment.
Step three is the pivot narrative itself. Rome's response to deindustrialization is not unusual: lean into physical assets, rebrand around place. The city has legitimate assets — the Coosa, Etowah, and Oostanaula rivers converging at the geographic heart of downtown; Ridge and Valley topography; a walkable historic core; Berry College's 27,000-acre campus on the city's edge. Tourism revenue reportedly reached $149 million in 2025. The city joined Georgia's Economic Placemaking Collaborative in 2026. The 2024 Comprehensive Plan explicitly calls for "creating a new network of trails, expanding community gathering spaces, developing recreational opportunities along the rivers, and creating new parks to make it a place everyone wants to be a part of."[4]
Step four is where the pivot meets its structural ceiling. The Coosa River — the centerpiece asset of this outdoor recreation brand — is contaminated with PFAS chemicals. A summer 2023 sampling campaign conducted by the Coosa River Basin Initiative and Coosa Riverkeeper tested sites across the Coosa Basin and found PFAS present at 84.62% of sampling locations. Lucas Allison, Field Manager for Coosa Riverkeeper, stated: "The data speaks for itself. PFAS contamination remains a critical public health concern across the Southeast that is seemingly overlooked by our state and federal agencies."[5] PFAS are synthetic "forever chemicals" — persistent in the environment and in human tissue, linked to cancer and endocrine disruption. The upstream Dalton carpet manufacturing corridor is a nationally documented PFAS source region, though specific discharge attribution to individual facilities has not been confirmed in publicly available records reviewed for this signal.
Step five is the gap crystallization. Rome has rebranded its assets faster than it has resolved its liabilities. Tourism revenue and education-sector growth are real. They do not translate into wage-equivalent replacement for the manufacturing cohort — nationally, hospitality and food service average roughly half the hourly earnings of durable goods manufacturing — and they don't reach the 500-person public housing waitlist at all.
Rome is not unique. The outdoor recreation pivot is one of the most legible economic development narratives in non-metro America — a form of placemaking that travels well in grant applications, planning documents, and Chamber of Commerce presentations. The formula is consistent: identify scenic assets, build a trail system, revitalize downtown, recruit remote workers and weekend visitors, watch the tax base diversify. It has worked, with genuine specificity, in certain places: Bentonville, Arkansas; Salida, Colorado; Brevard, North Carolina.
What the formula rarely accounts for is the distribution question. A 2021 analysis by the Headwaters Economics think tank found that communities undergoing recreation-economy transitions experience gains concentrated in amenity-seeking in-migrants and remote workers — groups with higher baseline incomes — while legacy working-class residents face rising housing costs without commensurate wage growth. The mechanism is not unique to recreation economies; it is the standard pattern of any amenity-led economic transition applied to a place with a pre-existing low-income population.
Rome's own planning documents confirm the preconditions for this outcome. The Rome Floyd 20/20 Comprehensive Plan, cited in the city's 2024 HUD filing, documents that Floyd County is "losing its younger subset of populations due to larger cities that can provide the housing, employment, and infrastructure they need to be successful."[4] This is a standard indicator of amenity economy risk: the residents most capable of participating in a higher-skill, higher-income economy are already leaving. What stays is the population least equipped to absorb a transition shock — older, lower-credential, higher-need.
The PFAS problem adds a layer that most recreation-pivot analyses don't have to account for. The Outdoor Industry Association estimates that outdoor recreation generates $788 billion in consumer spending annually in the United States — but that number depends on the premise that the rivers and trails being marketed are safe to use.[6] A city that markets itself around water access while 84% of its river basin test sites show contamination is not just facing a public health liability. It is building a brand on an asset it cannot fully deliver. The reputational risk, once the contamination data becomes public knowledge, is not recoverable through trail signage.
National opioid research confirms the workforce dimension. The National Bureau of Economic Research documented in 2017 that a 10% increase in opioid prescriptions in a county was associated with a 3.6 percentage point decline in labor force participation among working-age men — a figure that compounds across years of high-prescription saturation in regions like Northwest Georgia.[7] Applied to a county already running the state's worst per-capita opioid death rate, the workforce erosion effect is not marginal. It is structural.
The broader implication of this signal is precise: a recreation-economy pivot cannot substitute for industrial workforce policy in a community where manufacturing erosion, opioid mortality, and water contamination are operating simultaneously — and where the pivot's primary asset is the same waterway that industry spent decades degrading.
Rome's total nonfarm employment rose from approximately 44,300 to 47,800 between 2022 and late 2025. Education and health services are growing. Tourism revenue hit $149 million in 2025. The Georgia Economic Placemaking Collaborative designation in 2026 signals institutional recognition of Rome's trajectory. One could argue that the gap between aspiration and outcome is simply a matter of timing — that credential transitions, housing market adjustments, and sector growth take years to register in population-level indicators, and that this signal is documenting the lag period of a successful pivot rather than its structural failure. This is a legitimate reading and should not be dismissed. Where it weakens: Rome's Consolidated Plan documents housing waitlists and poverty rates that have not materially improved alongside the headline employment growth, suggesting the gains are not distributing to the population most exposed to the manufacturing contraction. Sector-level growth does not automatically translate to income-level gains for legacy residents.
PFAS contamination in river basins is widespread across the eastern United States — it is present in the majority of major river systems tested by EPA-affiliated monitoring. Tourists and recreation users do not, in most documented cases, factor PFAS data into weekend trip decisions; the recreational risk from incidental water contact during kayaking or paddleboarding is not equivalent to drinking-water exposure risk. One could argue that the contamination finding is a public health concern that will ultimately require regulatory action but does not meaningfully impair Rome's near-term outdoor recreation brand. This alternative holds some weight in the short term. Where it weakens: PFAS contamination creates ongoing regulatory and legal exposure for the city and state; enforcement actions, drinking water advisories, or media coverage of contamination findings can rapidly and irreversibly damage a recreation destination brand in the social-media information environment. The reputational risk is asymmetric — upside from the river is incremental; downside from a contamination story is categorical.
What is not known: The specific industrial discharge sources for PFAS in the Coosa Basin have not been confirmed in publicly available documents reviewed for this signal. Dalton-area carpet manufacturing is the nationally documented upstream source region, but attribution to specific facilities would require EPA or Georgia EPD permit review beyond what is available in the CRBI press release. This distinction matters: if a specific point source is identifiable, the legal and remediation pathway is different than if contamination is diffuse.
Worker outcomes gap: No follow-up reporting on the ~80 Summit Hill Foods workers laid off December 31, 2023 was found. Their employment status, sector placement, and income trajectory twelve months post-closure would directly quantify the transition gap this signal describes structurally.
Opioid data tier limitation: The "worst in state" opioid mortality claim is Tier B — a newspaper citing Georgia DPH. The underlying DPH county-level mortality data (OASIS database) was not directly accessed for this signal. A direct data pull would upgrade the opioid-workforce mechanism from inferred to verified.
What would change the signal direction: Evidence that Rome has a functioning, scaled reskilling pipeline connecting manufacturing workers to healthcare or education employment — not aspirational, but documented by enrollment and placement numbers — would reduce the workforce gap component significantly. Evidence of active PFAS remediation planning with a regulatory timeline would reduce the contamination ceiling on the rec economy pivot.
[1] Bureau of Labor Statistics. Economy at a Glance: Rome, GA MSA. March 2026 extraction. bls.gov/eag/eag.ga_rome_msa.htm
[2] Rome News-Tribune. "Northwest Georgia health district leads state in opioid deaths per capita." March 2023. northwestgeorgianews.com
[3] WLAQ / 1031 Radio M. "Rome and Floyd County Commissions Approve Resolutions Related to National Opioid Settlements." April 12, 2023. 1031radiom.com
[4] City of Rome, GA. 2024–2028 Consolidated Plan and 2024 Action Plan. HUD CDBG. romega.us
[5] Coosa River Basin Initiative. "PFAS Contamination — Coosa River." Press release, January 25, 2024. coosa.org
[6] Outdoor Industry Association. Outdoor Recreation Economy Report. 2022. outdoorindustry.org
[7] Krueger, Alan B. Where Have All the Workers Gone? An Inquiry into the Decline of the U.S. Labor Force Participation Rate. NBER Working Paper. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2017.
[8] Rome News-Tribune. "Summit Hill Foods to close First Avenue plant, lay off all 80 employees." October 2023. northwestgeorgianews.com
[9] Data USA / U.S. Census Bureau ACS. Floyd County, GA. datausa.io