By RICHIE DAVIS

Recorder Staff

The silver lining in the elimination of hundreds of high-paying Vermont Yankee jobs in the region may be the collaboration that’s come from Franklin County working with its two neighboring counties to the north in an effort to shore up their respective economies, say planners who are beginning to see how the economic strengths of the larger region overlap.

The loss of roughly 1,200 jobs and an estimated $90 million a year across the three-state region because of the closure of the Vernon, Vt. reactor — with more than 100 of the plant’s workers in Franklin County, and a majority of its spillover activity in neighboring Windham County, Vt. — may outweigh the effects of planning for future economic development here, in Windham County and Cheshuire County, N.H., certainly in the short run.

Part of a $265,000 U.S. Economic Development Administration grant to Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation is aimed at getting the three neighboring counties to work together to see where their economic development strategies overlap.

With $10,000 of that designated for Franklin County planners to collaborate with their counterparts in the two counties to the north, the Franklin Regional Council of Governments is launching a six-month process with the Windham (Vt.) Regional Commission and Southwest (N.H.) Region Planning Commission, to find where their comprehensive economic development strategies have similar goals, objectives and employment sectors and can be aligned to draw additional federal grant funding to bring more jobs to the region, says COG Executive Director Linda Dunlavy.

The first sector, focused on green-building technology, has already been identified as part of a broader, $530 million Southern Vermont economic development strategy that also includes a “Southern Vermont Business Innovation Accelerator” segment over the next several years.

Dunlavy said she hopes that the Franklin-Hampshire Regional Employment Board and Greenfield Community College, with its Renewable Energy/Energy Efficiency concentration, can be part of the planning effort to enhance the appeal of the three-county region to build on the efforts that are already at work to bring additional jobs to the region.

While Franklin County is used to collaborating with Hampshire and Hampden counties, as well as Worcester and Berkshire counties, on economic development projects, and it’s also worked with its northern counterparts on defined efforts like Scenic Byways planning, this marks the first time it’s doing so with Windham and Cheshire counties on shared economic development strengths, said Jessica Atwood, the COG’s economic development planner.

“It’s kind of an artificial boundary,” Atwood said, and it doesn’t mean much to businesses and people who cross the state border regularly. “But for agencies like ours, this is an opportunity to transcend that. We’ve started seeing that we have the same issues, and this is an opportunity to learn from each other.”

Just as with strong renewable energy and energy efficiency sectors, the three counties may also share potential strengths in agricultural and food-processing as well as precision manufacturing. But it’s too early to know that for sure, said Atwood.

Similarly, with work on the green building cluster already launched last month, she said, “We hope to look at how we can make it a more robust collaboration” as part of the tri-state planning effort.

What’s more, Andrew Baker of the Franklin-Hampshire Regional Employment Board said he hopes that the green-building cluster can also tie in with research and innovation at Greenfield-based Northeast Sustainable Energy Association as well as other nonprofits and higher education in Hampshire and Cheshire counties as well.

“There’s a green energy network up and down the Pioneer Valley,” said Baker, adding that he’s hoping to do a “relaunch” of the Green Building Cluster Study in Greenfield in April to make connections with the Western Massachusetts Green Consortium, Go-Greenfield and the employment board’s Regional Clean Energy Workforce Partnership.

You can reach Richie Davis at rdavis@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, Ext. 269