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A new plan to transform the Piedmont Triad’s furniture industry for the decades ahead is a good one, High Point’s mayor says, but it doesn’t reach far enough in asking for help.

Becky Smothers said that the plan, which was sponsored by the Piedmont Triad Partnership, the region’s economic development group, initially started as an effort to provide local help for the High Point Market.

Now, the partnership’s home furnishings task force wants to hire a high-powered executive advocate for the industry who can operate a furniture industry center based at the partnership’s office in Greensboro.

And though the new plan is emphatic about promoting the furniture industry statewide, Smothers said the entire effort belongs at the state level, not the regional level. The N.C. Department of Commerce might be a good place for such an agency.

“This is a wonderful opportunity to go for the gold,” Smothers said. “I just don’t want us to settle for bronze. We watched hosiery pretty much dry up. We managed to legislate tobacco pretty much out of the mainstream and it would just be a shame to lose an industry where there is still so much creativity and design and art and a product that you can proudly say was made in America.”

The partnership’s report suggests a more gradual approach to boosting the industry that contributes $9 billion to the Triad economy annually.

“It seems only logical that the region must organize to help itself before reaching out to other sources,” wrote Jeff Holmes, the consultant who produced the report.

But the chairman of the task force, Greensboro’s Jim Melvin, a former mayor and president of the Joseph M. Bryan Foundation, stressed that the effort is a work in progress, and that the report has not even been approved by the group of executives that has studied the industry for the partnership.

A statewide focus is a major part of the program, however, Melvin said.

Money for an executive’s salary and other expenses will come from private sources, and not from tax money, Melvin said.

That simplifies the process of raising money, he said, compared with asking public bodies to chip in.

“This is an economic development strategy — this isn’t quasi-political, one city versus the other,” he said.

That doesn’t mean the job of raising money will be a cinch. Task force members will have to pitch economic development groups in 12 Triad counties to raise the money they need, he said.

The months-long study process has included leaders from most of the region’s major communities, but clearly some economic development officials are not yet a part of the process.

In Winston-Salem, for example, Kelly King, BB&T’s chief operating officer, Don Flow, the owner of Flow Motors, and Mayor Allen Joines have attended task force meetings.

But Bob Leak Jr., president of Winston-Salem Business Inc., and Gayle Anderson, president and chief executive officer of the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce, said Thursday they were unaware of the report.

Smothers said that’s a sign that other leaders need to be in on the process. Several major furniture executives were interviewed for the report, but, said Smothers, few industry executives are on the committee.

Smothers, who also served on the study group, said she is not entirely happy with the report overall.

She declined to cite specifics, other than to agree that what started as research on the market suffered from “mission creep” that has now engulfed the region.

Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard.barron@news-record.com