The Carbon County Chamber of Commerce held its reorganization meeting last week. Dawn Ferrante, the executive director of the Carbon County Economic Development Corporation, was named the new chairman of the Chamber.

It's a good choice.Ferrante has held the Economic Development Corporation position since February 2009. She is responsible for supporting local businesses, attracting new business, and developing entrepreneurs in Carbon County. Her full-time role is a perfect match with her Chamber position.Prior to her role in Economic Development, Ferrante was a business and technology consultant and was a project manager on large implementations for Verizon, AT&T, and many other Fortune 500 clients for more than 17 years.This background is very compatible with the Chamber.Prior to working in the corporate world, Ferrante owned her own business in San Francisco for five years and participated in an Entrepreneurship program that gave her training and financing to get her business going.Besides having the background, Ferrante has proven to be a hard worker in her position.With Ferrante at the helm, we can only envision growth and cohesiveness within the Chamber during the next year.On another Chamber note, the organization has been working on a consolidation of the regional organizations that go by various names (some refer to themselves as Chambers and some as Councils) for the past year. A deadline has been set to bring together the regional organizations by October 1, 2012 under one organization name, the Carbon County Chamber of Commerce.The regional groups will then exist as Committee's of the CCCC, a model common in other Chambers of Commerce.This will be good because as it is now, the names are confusing. For example, what was the Lehighton Area Chamber of Commerce now refers to itself as the Lehighton Council of the Carbon County Chamber.Therefore, referring to the Lehighton Council of the Chamber sometimes can get confused with references to the Lehighton Borough Council.It's fair to refer to the individual municipal groups as committees.We're glad to see the Chamber remain such an active organization. In this current atmosphere of economic chaos, having a strong local Chamber is important.By Ron Gowerrgower@tnonline.com