Credit Noelle Short for this idea. The Long Lake Central School superintendent, who worked as an Enterprise reporter right out of college, said it in a recent Brief Bio profile in the Adirondack Explorer magazine several months ago.

One of the Brief Bio questions is always about what the subject would do if he or she ran the Adirondack Park. Noelle said she would not only promote the area to tourists, but to new residents as well. Don’t just visit, she would say — move here.

We agree completely. Tourism is great, but it doesn’t help Adirondack communities suffering from an acute shortage of families with children. School enrollment has shrunken to drastic levels in some towns — Long Lake is a good example. Districts such as Newcomb import foreign students just to keep the doors open, and others are forced to contemplate merging with neighbors. Class and extracurricular opportunities shrink because they can’t be justified with so few students.

Meanwhile, houses sit empty, in need of renovation, unwanted by second home buyers but perhaps just right for energetic new families.

Vermont is dealing with the same kind of issues, and it recently got a lot of press for offering $10,000 to move there. To qualify, you have to work full-time for a non-Vermont company, you have to work remotely, and you have to move to Vermont full-time in 2019.

Telecommuting can be good for rural areas because a community without a lot of jobs to offer can still add members who want to live there for the quality of life.

We don’t need to bribe people to move to the Adirondacks, but it’s worth asking them, and giving them some good reasons why they should.

Noelle’s idea is actually very doable. Every county here collects an occupancy tax from visitors who spend the night at hotels, bed and breakfasts, or vacation rentals. That tax revenue is used to promote the region to tourists and to provide visitor services once they get here. In Essex, Franklin and Hamilton counties, the agency that gets the “bed tax” and does the promotion is the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism, known as ROOST.

ROOST and county leaders could take a portion of the bed tax revenue and dedicate it to promoting the idea of moving here full-time and becoming part of the Adirondack Park’s communities.

This wouldn’t be hard. ROOST has plenty of staff, and they all live here. They apparently love the area, and their promoters spend a lot of time writing about how wonderful each part of it is. It’s no great stretch to promote why people who live here love it, how they make a living, what they like to do with family and friends, and how they do their part for the community by volunteering.

Maybe we could help. We tell those kinds of stories all the time here at the Enterprise, Lake Placid News and Adirondack Living magazine.

Sure, a “Move to the Adirondacks” campaign could be problematic if it got slick, silly, cliched or unrealistic. But it could also be very good, tasteful and real, and local people could put pressure on ROOST to make sure it stays that way. This would be our pitch, really. After all, we wouldn’t just have to put up with this campaign’s customers for a few days; they might become our neighbors for life.