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The annual State of the Community luncheon tomorrow will unveil a new format.

Instead of the traditional speeches from business and elected leaders, this year we'll be treated a panel discussion including the school board chairman, the county commissioners chairman and the mayor.

It's a welcome new wrinkle that ought to add more life and spontaneity and get some folks talking to one another who need to be talking more to each other anyway.

Plus, the speeches tended to veer at times into less-than-compelling territory.

For instance, Kirk Perkins, bless his heart, thanked nearly everybody in the Triad his speech when he was commissioners chairman, including his wife (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Current commissioners Chairman Skip Alston has been quoted as expressing some suspicions about the new format as a way to put him on the spot.

Actually, the format plays to his strengths. Alston is very good on his feet.

Plus, the luncheon comes at a time when has some very intriguing topics to address, including a proposed new county incentives policy.

Conceived primarily by commissioners vice chairman Steve Arnold, the policy extends tax breaks to nearly all businesses that invest in capital expansions.

It is smart and visionary, and well worth trying, if it passes legal muster.

And Arnold has pitched it as a countywide concept that he hopes the High Point and Greensboro governments also might adopt.

Our editorial board has given both Alston and Arnold grief for the havoc they wreaked in county government in recent months.
And they deserved it.

But they may be on to something here.

And the potential to use the policy as a branding mechanism for the county and a means to get local governments working more cooperatively is promising.

Even if the policy doesn't pass legal muster, Arnold and Alston deserve credit for trying.

And they should keep trying.

Arnold shocked us a couple of weeks ago by dropping by unannounced and making an impassioned case for the policy.
Arnold, who at times in recent years had seemed bored and aloof as a commissioner, was open, visibly excited, even effusive.

I felt for a moment as if I'd been transported to an alternate universe.

But it was real, and encouraging.

I don't excuse Arnold and Alston for the sweeping changes they've made, for better or worse, with little openness to the public or the media.

But I also bellieve in giving credit where it is due.