Aerospace Cluster and More!

I was worn out trying to keep up on the tour of Columbus, MS as Joe Max Higgins and Allegra Brigham showed me the SeverCorr and PACCAR sites, with a combined $2 billion in investments and thousands of newly created jobs. But, those two mega-projects weren’t the only things that were happening in Columbus.

Columbus, which is also the home to the Columbus Air Force Base, trains about 500 pilots per year. Those pilots and their support personnel have helped the community to recently develop into an aerospace cluster. American Eurocopter located here in 2003 to manufacture helicopters. The Lakota Helicopter, a replacement to the Huey, is being made in Columbus. Aurora Flight Sciences, which makes UAVs (unmanned aero vehicles—also called drones) and recently won a contract for a new composite cargo plane, has a plant at the local airport. In 2007 Stark Aerospace, a division of Israeli Aircraft, announced plans for a company campus to make drones and aero-optics. Collectively, these three firms employ about 300 but projections are to exceed 1,000 within a few years. A 15 acre Aerospace & Defense Incubator is planned at the airport.

A second port on the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, which links the Gulf Coast with the Ohio River and other navigable rivers, is being built in Columbus. Other plants have expanded in the past few years. Columbus is on the move, at a scale that I’ve not seen in any other small town in my travels.

One final economic development note: Almost as a side note Joe Max and Allegra pointed out the site for a new 800,000 sf, $100 million shopping mall on the west side of town. While 2,000 jobs will be created and would be hailed with great glee in most towns, we all knew that real wealth is created with the other projects that are being created in Columbus. Retail will quickly follow. It doesn’t happen the other way around.

Flocking to Columbus

Joe Max Higgins is an example of where the combination of planning, persistence and risk taking combine to equal success. His first opportunity to distinguish and differentiate Columbus from the pack came less than a year after he started as head of the Columbus-Lowndes Development when the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) held a workshop in Nashville, TN, inviting hundreds of towns within the TVA area to look at developing new mega-sites for automotive, steel and other large projects.

Joe Max related that at the workshop they got up and said, “Ok, here is what you are going to need if you want to play. You’ve got to have a commercial airport within 50 miles. You’ve got to have one and hopefully two Class I railroads. You’ve got to put together at least 1,500 contiguous acres of land with at least 1,000 that are developable. And, you can’t have an existing automotive assembly plant within 50 miles.”

He went on, “We went check to that; check; check; check. But they only gave us six weeks to put everything together. That included controlling the site, getting engineering plans done and having cost estimates done for infrastructure.”

Allegra Brigham added, “It really separated the men from the boys. No one thought we could pull it off. They thought we would give up midway through. But, Joe task mastered everyone and we pulled it off. When we were done we had a six inch binder to submit with all of the details they were looking for.”

The new mega-site involved getting seven different land owners to agree, something that I can’t imagine being able to do in such a short period of time.

The site became the first TVA certified site in their seven state area in August, 2004 and SeverCorr, a new generation steel producer, walked in the door in October. The $880 million project was announced in January, 2005 and formally broke ground in September, 2005. The ribbon cutting for the plant is later this month. Two other companies (Heidtman Steel and New Process Steel) are also building plants adjacent to SeverCorr to utilize the mill’s production.

Allegra talked about the community’s reaction, “We had a lot of doubters in town. Some of the people started to finally believe when we got the mega-site certified but there were few doubters when SeverCorr landed.”

Joe Max added, “The knife was hot and we cut through the butter with SeverCorr. But one winning season does not a dynasty make. So, we had to do it all over again. We signed options with another seven different land owners for our second mega site in November, 2005. We got that site certified in the spring of 2006 and it became TVA’s fifth mega site. We were the only town that has ever done two. Suddenly, we were a player!”

Columbus quickly became a finalist for National Railcar that ended up in Mussel Shoals, AL; a GE plant that went to Batesville, MS; and a new PACCAR Engine plant that is now being built in Columbus.

Joe Max said of PACCAR, “We were simultaneously working all three of these projects in a six month period of time when PACCAR called and said, ‘We want to come to Columbus but you’ve got to end discussions with the other two projects you are working.’ We rocked the ED world when we took ourselves out of the running for GE and National Railcar.”

He laughed as he told me that he had lost over $1 billion in projects in the past year, even as he was landing the $1.1 billion PACCAR plant with almost 1,000 jobs.

The SeverCorr jobs will pay an average of $75,000/year. PACCAR’s will be $50,000/year jobs. Of the 3,500 jobs that have been created, only 200 could be classified as lower paying ones. Quite an accomplishment for Columbus and its citizens.

Can you believe I’m not done with this story? Monday: Other, smaller companies landed that would be front page news in most towns!

More than Entire States!

Todd Thoman, our resident economic development expert at Agracel, kept telling me about Columbus, MS (population 25,944) from his travels around the country. Todd is on the road almost as much as I am and was the person who taught me the ED field many years ago. As we were expanding, he was the first person who I thought of bringing on when we were of a size to do so. Fortunately, he accepted and is a key part of Team Agracel.

I finally got to Columbus on my way to a Mississippi Power talk in Meridian. Almost 100% of Mississippi Power customers lost power from Hurricane Katrina, but valiantly the company had everyone back online within 12 days. They are a world-class organization.

Joe Max Higgins, CEO of Columbus-Lowndes Development, and Allegra Brigham, CEO of 4-County Electric Power Association, were my tour guides for a very quick two hour tour of Columbus. In fact, as you’ll see in my report, it was too quick and I’m going back next month for another visit.

Joe Max explained a bit of the history of Columbus, “Forty years ago we were bigger than Tupelo, but George McLean and Harry Martin started the Tupelo Miracle and within ten years we were the same size. Today Tupelo is about 40% bigger. We developed a great deal of complacency and had a loser attitude. We were constantly coming in second on many projects.”

I’ve often said I’d much rather come in tenth or twentieth rather than second on an industrial project. You lose either way, but coming in second is especially disheartening.

Joe Max went on, “I was working in economic development in Paragould, AR and a recruiter called me about the job in Columbus. I hung up on him but then started looking at them compared to other locations. I thought that they should be hitting home runs, but it appeared that they didn’t have a team in place and they weren’t working any deals.”

Allegra added, “Joe came in to the interview and knew more about our town than we did. We knew we had to do something different and talked him into leading us. One of the questions he asked us that day was, ‘Do you value the past more than the future?’ I responded that day, ‘We appreciate the past but are looking to the future.’ Joe is definitely one who is looking to the future.”

That was June, 2003. Since then Columbus has landed two mega-projects and numerous other new businesses that have collectively invested over $3 billion into the community. Those companies will hire approximately 3,500 people, virtually all at over $16/hour. Their goal is to continue to grow 1,000+ jobs/year, a very aggressive plan for a town of 25,000.

Three billion in projects is more than some states that we work in have accomplished in the entire state! Tomorrow’s blog relates how they landed those companies.

Earthbound Farm

One of the more incredible stories that we found in researching BoomtownUSA was that of Drew and Myra Goodman, city kids from Manhattan who took some time off from school to start growing 2.5 acres of raspberries in the Carmel Valley in 1984. Myra’s idea of bagging up lettuce so that she could make a quick salad when they came in from the field, grew into a huge idea. Today Earthbound Farm is the largest grower of organic produce and their pre-packaged products are found throughout the entire country.

We visited their original farm stand and enjoyed walking through their fields and flower beds. The place was hopping!

Earthbound Farms has special events at their farm stand EVERY weekend from May 1st through the end of October. Such events include: Bug Walk; Garlic Braiding; Corn Husk Dolls; Flower Walk; All About Herbs; Chef Walk; Raspberry Revelry; Corn Crazy and many others.

The Goodmans learned long ago that it is not just about how you produce but also how you market that is the difference between failure and success.

Farmers in San Francisco? And, NYC?

As I mentioned in my blog yesterday, one of the great advantages that I see in CA agriculture is its wonderful diversity of crops that are grown on its farms. Driving down the road for an hour you can see dozens of different crops, both annuals and perennials. This diversity has helped to elevate CA into the top spot in American agriculture.

Another advantage that CA has, in my opinion, is that it also receives one of the lowest amounts of subsidies as a percentage of its production when compared to the other 49 states in the USA. CA farmers are producing for the market, not because of what Washington incentivates with its Farm Bill. I’ve seen how eliminating subsidies can stimulate an agricultural economy in New Zealand and wish that we would give it a try in the USA.

The maps of SF and NYC that are on this page show the number of “farmers” that received agricultural subsidies from 2003 to 2005. The larger dots received hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money for the farming that they were doing.

I guess that I’ve just not gotten to the right spots in either city to see the farms that are located there!

End Subsidies?

Dean Kleckner, Illinois farmer and former head of the American Farm Bureau from 1986 to 2000 had a wonderful op-ed piece in the NY Times this morning entitled “Today’s Harvest of Shame.” In it he attacks our current system of subsidies and calls for a more open agricultural trade policy. Here are two of the more powerful paragraphs from his op-ed.

In the 1990s, however, a trip to New Zealand made me realize that eliminating subsidies was not just a free-market fantasy, but rather a policy that could work in an advanced industrial nation. New Zealanders had stopped subsidizing their farmers, cold turkey, in 1984. The transition was controversial and not without its rough spots, yet it succeeded. On that visit and several later ones, I never met a farmer who wanted to go back to subsidies.

Today, it’s obvious that we need to transform our public support for farmers. Many of our current subsidies inhibit trade because of their link to commodity prices. By promising to cover losses, the government insulates farmers from market signals that normally would encourage sensible, long-term decisions about what to grow and where to grow it. There’s something fundamentally perverse about a system that has farmers hoping for low prices at harvest time — it’s like praying for bad weather. But that’s precisely what happens, because those low prices mean bigger checks from Washington.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/opinion/15kleckner.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

October 15, 2007—Wonderfully Diverse Agriculture

My wife and I were out in CA for a wedding and took a day trip up the Salinas Valley near the coast. We love driving through wonderfully diverse areas like this where one field is cabbage, the next is lettuce, grapes, artichokes, etc., etc., etc. I’m a firm believer that much of the reason for the incredible strength of the California agricultural economy is the great diversity of crops that it raises as compared to a more limited number of crops in much of the rest of the USA.

This diversity has served it well. Today CA produces almost twice as much in dollar terms than the second highest state, TX. The ag and food processing sector is the second largest industry in the state, following only computers and electronics. As the largest U. S. agricultural exporter, if CA were a country it would be the 6th largest ag exporter in the world!

One of our more interesting stops on the road that day was Pezzini Farms, which has developed a niche in artichokes. They’ve been producing them for over fifty years near Castroville, CA, a community that boasts it is The Artichoke Capitol of the World. At the Pezzini Farms shop, surrounded by artichoke fields, we saw and learned more about artichokes than I’ll ever be able to use. From their packing plant in the back the Pezzinis’ ship artichokes across the country and around the world.

Further up the valley we spent some time in King City, CA (population 11,094), a farming community in a uniquely California sense. Most of the shops in their beautiful downtown were in Spanish (lots of entrepreneurs!) and later I learned that 80.4% of its population is Hispanic, with 73.9% speaking a language other than English as home. Their average age of only 25.3 years compared to a national average of 35.3 is one of the youngest that I’ve encountered in my journeys around the country.

One final observation is that it appeared to me that grapes and wineries are beginning to take over some areas in CA, including in the Salinas Valley. As I observed and reflected upon it, and I don’t profess to be an expert, it appears to me that grapes could be much easier to grow. They only have to be planted once. Wine is the new sexy product. I hope that other crops aren’t abandoned as a result.

Marvelous Marvin

One of the better regional business magazines that I subscribe to is Prairie Business out of Fargo, ND, which covers the two Dakotas and Minnesota. Rick Killion, its editor, is a very engaging person with a real passion for the development of local businesses and communities.

Last month’s issue had a wonderful story on Marvin Lumber & Cedar Company, known around the country for their Marvin Windows and Doors. Privately owned, the company was started by George Marvin and is still run by third and fourth generations of the family from Warroad, MN (population 1,722), a town just six miles south of the Canadian border. Grandson Bob Marvin runs Marvin’s truck fleet in addition to serving as mayor of Warroad since 1994.

With 5,400 employees in five states the company is by far the largest employer in the far northern MN and has positively impacted the towns in which it operates. I hope that I can get to Warroad to study them more.

http://www.prairiebizmag.com/
http://www.marvin.com/

E-Community Kansas

“The best way to improve economic and community development in rural communities is to foster entrepreneurship. After conducting 32 town hall meetings and awarding more than $240,000 in loans and grants to small businesses across the state during the past 15 months, we have learned that the best way to achieve success is by empowering local leaders to engage rural entrepreneurs,” said NetWork Kansas Director, Steve Radley. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The initiative was started in 2004 as a way to revitalize and encourage more economic development activities in the state. This latest effort will provide $1 million in tax credits to four towns or rural counties chosen to use as grants or loans for start-up businesses.

The Kansas program provides each donor to the program to a 75 cent income tax deduction for each dollar that they contribute to this program. Other states have taken similar approaches with angel investor networks in rural areas. I wish that more would follow.

Waterfowl Capital

Having won the designation as the “Waterfowl Capital of Mississippi” in 2006, Drew (population 2,434) is holding their first annual “Delta Wings Festival” on November 3, 2007.

I was in Drew in July and wrote several blogs in late July and early August about how Drew and neighboring Ruleville were making valiant efforts to reinvent themselves from that of the typical Delta town. I was particularly impressed with the effort being made in Drew to redevelop their historic downtown.

This first festival will include a youth and adult duck calling contest; a duck gumbo competition; music; food and other activities. Prizes include a celebrity hunt with Archie Manning at the Fighting Bayou Hunting Club. The event will wrap up with a Delta Waterfowl Banquet at the Drew Country Club.

Drew is not giving up. I’m impressed with their approach and tenacity.

Resume Bank

Nebraska Rural Living is a non-profit e-magazine that will now allow visitors to the site to upload a resume and cover letter to their newly-created resume bank. What a great idea!

Betty Sayers, co-founder of the web site in 2003, commented, “We can’t promise anyone a job, but we will make the resume bank available to employers and propose resumes for specific opportunities we become aware of.”

Nebraska Rural Living features articles on small town and rural entrepreneurs, events, activities and people. The site also profiles “Livable Small Towns” and offers a database of houses, businesses and commercial property for sale, as well as a database of rural jobs.

“Small town have many wonderful benefits to offer,” Sayers said. “Housing is affordable, crime is low, and pollution and congestion are almost unheard of. There are also many employers here who are eager to hire skilled workers and paying competitive wages. We’re hoping the resume bank can be a win-win proposition for everyone.”

What a great way to match people with jobs – and help your community’s greatest asset, your residents!

Raising Shrimp in the Cornbelt?

My wife and I made our annual trek to the Stan and Kay Zumbahlen Dairy Farm in rural Newton, IL for their shrimp harvest this past weekend. The Zumbahlen’s have been raising shrimp for the past half dozen years with nieces, nephews and grandkids all helping with the draining of the ponds and sorting of the shrimp.

The young shrimp come from the Gulf Coast where they are acclimated from salt water to freshwater. Around June 1st of each year the Zumbahlen’s put about 1,100 of these baby shrimp into their larger pond, which I estimated was about 2 acres in size. For the next 4 months they feed and aerate the pond, draining it each fall. They sell the shrimp for $8/pound, selling all they produce by the end of the day and without a great deal of advertising.

This is one of the many different types of unique “crops” that can be harvested in our rural areas. It continues to puzzle me of why more farmers don’t look at some of these alternatives to help diversify their revenue away from what is becoming too much of a monoculture or duopoly of crops.

Another observation from visiting Shrimp Day on the Zumbahlen’s Dairy Farm is that farmers need to learn to become not just good at production but also good at marketing. Revenue could be significantly enhanced by turning a production day of draining the pond into a festival with such things as a shrimp boil, shrimp races, etc.

These niche ag products are rapidly developing around the country. I just wish that they would happen more quickly.

Forbes 400

The Forbes 400 hit my mailbox today. It now takes $1.3 billion to make the list, which puts me multiple zeros away from ever making it.

But, there on page 31 is Forbes’ publishers list of the best books to get rich by. And guess which book is one of the 53 that they chose? Pretty cool, huh!

Here’s what they said,

Let’s suppose your goal is to raise a child who will grow up and make The Forbes 400 list someday. How do you feed her brain and nourish her spirit? What secrets of wealth-building do you pour into his pulsing veins?

And they went on,

Here are 53 books that I and some of my self-made, rich friends recommend. These books range from the theoretical to the practical, the instructional to the inspiration. It’s an eclectic list—highbrow to hokey, it runs the gamut. No one will like the entire lot. But I hope you find a few gems that might help your children achieve outsize success.

I’d never ever considered BoomtownUSA a “Get Rich” book, but who am I to know? At least we didn’t make the “Don’t bother ever reading this book” list.

Take a look at the list of books for yourself here.

Traffic Congestion

When I was asked to address the Illinois Association of Highway Engineers’ annual meeting which was being held in my hometown, I did some research on what I perceive as an increasingly more congested road system. The following graphs show that while our lane miles of traffic are up marginally since 1980, the number of miles traveled on those roads is up over 250%. No wonder it seems to always take me longer to get around!

Even more alarming was the area in red on the following two maps from 1998 and projected to 2020. The red area is highways that are operating at over 115% of their rated capacity.

Several months ago I spoke with Peter Kinder, the lieutenant governor for Missouri, who explained a plan to try to develop I-70 and I-44 the length of the state into 8 lane highways, with 4 of those for the exclusive use of cars. After studying the last two maps I could understand why they are looking at such a plan.

While much of rural America has not been bothered by serious highway congestion, other than our ‘rush-minute’ at the start and stop of the day, it is going to become more of an issue as the population of the country continues to grow and more people flee the ‘rat-race’ of the bigger cities for the tranquility of the countryside.

1998 Data

2020 Projection

They Still Call Him Johnny

John Wooden’s record of winning 10 national championships during a 12 year period at UCLA is one that will probably never be broken. However, his leading the local high school to a state championship (in the days of a one-class system) and three straight state finals as the team’s point guard, is what he is remembered best in Martinsville, IN.

Johnny Wooden, as he is known locally, was born on a farm without electricity or running water, moving to town when he was in high school. From Martinsville he went on to star at Purdue where he was a three time All-American and College Player of the Year.

A series of coaching assignments in high schools, enlistment in the Navy during WWII and coaching at State Teacher’s College in Terra Haute preceded his accepting the head coaching spot at UCLA.

Wooden’s late wife Nellie, who was his high school sweetheart, was also a Martinsville native. The town named the Martinsville High School gymnasium in his honor in 1989.

How come so many of the great ones come from small towns like Martinsville?

From Mineral Water to Destination

“Our motto was the City of Mineral Water and we had a dozen sanitariums in the town,” Jamie Thompson, Executive Director of the Greater Martinsville Chamber of Commerce, told me as we started our tour. The sanitariums are long gone but the Morgan Hospital and Medical Center with its cutting-edge technology investments and 550 employees is bringing in patients from all over the USA and some foreign countries.

I often talk about crossroads for communities and decisions that have to be made when towns come to those crossroads. Martinsville, IN (population 11,698) is at one of those crossroads. The population of the county has grown by over 50% in the past 30 years, primarily due to its strategic location midway between Bloomington and Indianapolis. Many working couples moved to Martinsville as the drive to each town was only 30 to 40 minutes. A new 2,100 acre housing development of 1,300 homes ($400,000+) with riding stables and a Pete Dye Golf Course on the outskirts of town will only accelerate this growth. Or you can buy a Frank Lloyd Wright designed home for about $250,000.

An even greater impetus for growth will be the new I-69 interstate that is in the planning stages, linking Detroit to South Texas/Mexico and linking up Indianapolis to Bloomington and on to Evansville. That project which will take at least a decade to complete will physically split Martinsville but allow the town to rethink what they want to be in the long term.

I told my audience that they needed to rethink the approach of some, that Martinsville’s best strategy lay in continuing to be a bedroom community. The financial ramifications of going down that path are dire. The longer term ones of building a community when the best in your town are worn out from a long commute are even more devastating.

The Morgan County Economic Development Corporation, under the able leadership of John Taylor who I’ve known for over a decade, is pushing to leverage Martinsville’s location between Eli Lilly in Indianapolis and Cook Group, a biomedical powerhouse, in Bloomington to develop a life sciences cluster. Another possibility is auto racing technologies building upon a local company’s success with making racing car windows and visors that are 460 times stronger than normal auto glass.

Martinsville has a very bright future. Decisions that are made in the next couple of years will determine how brightly that future glows in the next decades.

Downtown Franklin

Franklin, PA (population 7,200) is the county seat of Venango County. Venango is an Indian word for ‘Beautiful River Runs Through It’ and the Allegheny River which runs from Oil City to Franklin and then on down to Pittsburg, is certainly a beauty.

Franklin, also called the Victorian City, was an important French fort. A young British officer named George Washington was sent to the town in 1753 to warn the French that they were trespassing on land claimed by Great Britain.

Their downtown is one of the loveliest I’ve seen in my travels with all of its old two and three story brick buildings still intact and largely occupied on the main floor. Efforts are under way to redevelop the upper floors with apartments and condos, something that I view as critical to long term success in any downtown.

The community did a downtown study and blueprint on its future in 2004, revamping parking and beginning the redevelopment of upper floors. A 498 seat, early-1900s theater has been redone and the town puts on 7 festivals each year. The largest is the annual Applefest held the first weekend of October each year, with over 100,000 annual visitors to the town. Other festivals are Franklin on Ice (ice sculptures); May Garden Mart; 4th of July; Music Festival and Taste of Franklin; DeBence Antique Music World; Rock in River and Light-up Night. That first festival, Applefest, started 25 years ago as a pie baking contest and has grown ever since. The Rock in River Festival includes the PA Stone Skipping Competition. Last year’s winner, Russ Byers, set a Guinness Book of World’s Records last year with 51 skips!

The town also features noon concerts in the summer and a patio series of musical groups on Friday evenings.

Franklin is a wonderfully charming town with a bright future.

Oil City

You’ve got to know that with a name like Oil City, there has to be a story behind the name of the town. And, I was not disappointed as I learned more about the town and its history during my tour.

Today Oil City, PA is home to 11,504 residents but its population soared to over 50,000 during its boom days in the 1860s and 1870s when oil was first discovered in nearby Titusville, changing the face of the earth forever. Colonel Edwin Drake discovered oil in August, 1859 and soon oil derricks dotted the countryside.

Stephen Kosak, one of my tour guides told me, “Back then the beautiful rolling hills that you see now were denuded of trees. It was one oil well on top of another.”

Today, most of those oil wells are long gone although there is one that is kept pumping each year as the longest continuously pumping oil well in the world.

Many oil fortunes and companies began in Oil City, PA. Kosak told me, “Three of the Rockefeller Standard Oil Trust Companies started here. The National Transit Building, which has been restored, was the center of oil commerce for decades. Both Quaker State Oil and Pennzoil (Penn Refining Company) had their corporate headquarters here until a few years ago.”

Oil City has probably taken more blows in the past twenty years than any other town I’ve been in. Pennzoil closed the last refinery in town in the early 2000s, taking some excellent paying blue-collar jobs with it. The moving of the corporate headquarters along with the consolidation of three local banks into larger, urban city banks in the mid 90s resulted in thousands of white-collar jobs being lost.

But, the industrial and financial base built upon oil for over a century is also paying dividends for the community and I feel will be the base upon which the next growth in entrepreneurship will take place. There are several specialized alloy steel manufacturers and users along with two of the three leaders in continuous casting technology located in the area.

The scenic river valleys and surrounding hills offer some spectacular outdoor possibilities. The majestic downtown with most of its old, solid buildings intact creates a very unique sense of place. The mayor elect hopes to turn the town’s view back toward the beautiful Allegheny River, a change from how the downtown was developed when the riverfront was primarily industrial. There are bike trails planned that will take you all the way to Washington, DC, a new birding festival and plans for a white water park.

Steve Kosak, who runs the Bridge Builders Community Foundation, a three county community foundation, also manages almost $60 million in permanent trusts set up by old oil families for the betterment of the community.

I was very impressed with the vision and passion of the people that I met in Oil City, in their desire to reinvent themselves as a community. I’m going to want to go back in a few years to see what they turn the community into.

Visionary, Young Leadership

Two of the major deficiencies that I often observe in rural America is a leadership that is rapidly aging in place and an isolationship approach of trying to ‘do things on our own.’ I was pleased that I saw both being combated in the Oil Region of PA, a multi-county approach, on my trip to the region last week.

The Oil Region Alliance began 3 years ago when 20 different groups sat down to attempt to reinvent themselves as a region and to turn around a population and job loss. Billing itself as “The Region that Changed the World,” the region offers a rich history (more on that tomorrow), wonderful scenery, dramatic Victorian architecture (did I mention cheap?--$280,000 for a restored Victorian mansion), numerous museums, miles of trails, fishing, boating, hunting and many other outdoor activities.

The Venango Regional Leadership Institute is focused upon improving the leadership skills of its young citizens. I loved its motto of, “It only takes one good leader to make a difference….just imagine the power of a community filled with leaders.”

I spoke to several leadership classes from the region along with a number of engaged and interested local citizens in the Oil Region. One group from Warren, PA traveled over an hour to my program. This was their inaugural leadership class and I was honored to get my picture taken with them. They are doing a two day retreat this coming weekend and I wish them the best.

Bah Humbug!

When you drive rural roads as much as I get a chance to do, you see some very interesting sites and meet some incredible people. In driving through Pratt, KS I stopped when I saw this 60s neon sign for a local restaurant.

In nearby Mullinville, KS I was attracted by a half mile long series of sculptures, most with a political bent to them. When I stopped at M. T. Liggett’s nearby workshop, I quickly learned that I was meeting one of the most negative people that I’ve run into for quite some time.

It didn’t matter the subject; FEMA, national government, local government, internet, tourism, Greensburg’s tornado; M. T. was against it. Not that he had suggestions for improving any of those items, mind you. He was just against them.

It is a wonderful country in which we live. We’ve got all sorts of people. I’m blessed that I get to deal with some very positive ones as I travel around the country. It makes me appreciate them more after I spend a few minutes with people like Mr. Liggett.

Transforming Dodge City

Just the name ‘Dodge City’ conjures up images of a wild west town. I was there to do a tour of the town with Mike Stevens, CEO of Centera Bank, a $175 million community bank that Mike and a few other local citizens in nearby Sublette, KS (population 1,592) bought in the mid 80s when rural America was going thru a major recession. It took a lot of guts and vision for them to do that purchase.

Dodge City was founded in 1872 when the Santa Fe Railroad reached the town. Nearby Fort Dodge had been established in 1865 to protect wagon trains that were making their trek west on the old Santa Fe Trail. Millions of buffalo roamed the nearby plains and a new tanning process allowed their hides to be turned into usable leather for shipment to the east and onto Europe. The slaughter was on with a good hunter able to make more than $100 per day.

The next boom was when the cattle drives from Texas began. From 1875 until 1886 over 5 million head of cattle were driven to the rail yards of the town. During these early wild and wooly days, Dodge City was the home to notable lawmen and gunfighters such as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Bill Tilghman, Bat Masterson and many others. Its famous Boot Hill Cemetery (now a wonderful museum) was only used 1872 to 1878, but is firmly established in cowboy lore as where the cowboys were buried with their boots on.

Dodge City has had a number of wonderful titles over the years, including: Buffalo Capital of the World, Cowboy Capital, Queen of the Cowtowns, Wickedest Little City in America and others.

Today it is a town of 25,176 that is going through a transformation. Two major packing plants that process over 15,000 head of cattle each day give the city and region a strong industrial base but one that is dominated by this one industry. Of the 16,022 jobs in Ford County, 36.7% (120th highest rank in the USA) are in the manufacturing sector.

Most of those jobs are held by recent immigrants, with 37% of the county of Hispanic decent. The downtown is dominated by Spanish language signs and Mike Stevens estimated that over 70% of the children in the school system spoke Spanish at home. These new immigrants have created some very unique issues but I’m convinced that Dodge City will be a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity in the future as a result.

Dodge City will be an interesting town to keep track of in the future.

Greensburg Green

I hate it when I’m running late, but mechanical problems on the plane from Memphis to Wichita delayed me an hour and a half. I pushed the accelerator probably a bit more than I should have as I sped to make up lost time, trying to squeeze in a tour of Greensburg, KS prior to my talk in nearby Dodge City. I made up quite a bit of time on my 100 miles trip from Wichita, but lost it all when one of Greensburg’s finest pulled me over for speeding. But this blog isn’t going to be a rant on hub-and-spoke plane systems or speeding tickets. Rather, it is on the process of rebuilding a small town after a catastrophe.

Greensburg was the town that was devastated by a EF-5 tornado on May 4, 2007 with winds of over 200 mph. I had been there in July to give a talk and tour the town and was anxious to see the changes taking place in the two months since my last visit.

Steve Kirk, the local Centera banker who brought me in initially told me of the progress being made, “We’ve now developed a long-term plan with the help of FEMA. One of the more visionary, but controversial parts of the plan, is the development of a town square park that would allow us to tie the downtown together with our one tourist attraction, the largest hand dug well in the world. We’ve gotten a lot of help from the USDA which is helping us to do a business incubator, rebuild our water tower and get a grocery store going again.”

When I was last there I had been impressed with the governmental recovery workers from FEMA, USDA and others. The interest that they displayed and their monetary help are going to allow Greensburg to rebuild itself, better than it ever was.

The town is looking at redoing itself as a ‘Green’ town, something that I believe that it could capitalize upon. While there is some resistance to rebuilding with new 2003 codes, if the local residents can continue to take a long-term approach I believe that they will look back with pride on what they have accomplished.

I was pleased to see a number of new buildings already built or under construction. Greensburg is coming back. You’ll be able to watch their progress as the Discovery Channel is planning to do a 13 episode series on the town later this year.

Ponca’s Take on Jobs

I’ve observed that one of the keys to maintaining a good economic development organization is communication with the various stakeholders in the community. An ED group obviously can’t share confidential information on who they are talking with, changes within companies in town, who’s expanding, etc. However, they can let citizens know about more general information. Ponca City and Duncan, OK both have very similar weekly emails that are some of the best that I’ve seen.

Last week’s Ponca City newsletter had an interesting take on their looming job shortage, in light of the announcement earlier this month that the U. S. Economy had shed 4,000 jobs in August despite having added over 600,000 in the past six months. Here is what they had to say.

THE CHANGING FOCUS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT…it used to be called industrial recruitment back in the day but it changed around 1990 when growing the economy became about a lot more than just recruiting companies. Here’s an interesting tidbit: Last week, the labor department reported that the nation, as in the United States of America, cut 4,000 jobs. At the same time, the estimate of available jobs in the Ponca City area was about 1,400 open jobs. Put another way, there are enough open jobs in Ponca City for one third of all of the people laid off last week in the whole country. Sounds simple enough. The challenge is that the open jobs here are not unskilled jobs. The alignment of the right skills and education with the right jobs is not easy. There is also the matter of having someplace they can live and someplace they want to live, (do not underestimate the importance of the latter). Finally, they have to know about us and have the resources to come here. Lots to do.

If you aren’t doing a weekly or monthly newsletter to your constituents, you should be.


You probably didn’t see it reported in the press, but did you see that the teenage unemployment rate rose by 6% in August. Do you think that this is possibly tied to the $0.70 increase in the minimum wage? I’m sure that Congress didn’t foresee this when they increased the wage, but these are the ramifications that I often find, labeled under the Law of Unintended Consequences. What do you think?

Labor Crunch Near Crisis Stage

Increasingly in my travels around the country I’m encountering more and more signs of an increasing labor shortage which will become more acute with the looming retirement of baby boomers. The major headline in last week’s Journal newspaper from Crosby, ND (population 1,089) major headline was, “Labor crunch near crisis stage.”

Crosby is the county seat for Divide County (population 2,086) in the very northwestern part of the state. The county has lost 50% of its population since 1970, putting it as one of the 100 least populated counties in the entire country (out of 3,141 counties). At 1.7 people per square mile, Divide County is very sparsely populated, but I also found them to be some of the friendliest that I’ve found in my travels.

The Journal has over a half page of help wanted ads, some offering sign-on bonuses of $1,000 to $2,000. The local restaurant has had to close early on Saturday evenings due to lack of help. The local jobs developer David Olson spent one day the week before helping to change diapers at the local daycare because they were short of workers.

The McDonalds restaurant just across the state border in Sidney, MT was featured last month in an AP article for outsourcing their drive-up window orders to a company in Utah. Offers of $10/hour couldn’t entice enough workers to keep the drive-up window local.

I hope that you are working on improving the skills of your local workforce. It is going to become increasingly important.

When the Sun Goes Down, We Shine!

New Castle, PA is home to Zambelli Fireworks Internationale, the largest and most famous fireworks company in the USA. The company started in 1893 when Antonio Zambelli chose the rolling hills surrounding New Castle because it reminded him of his hometown of Caserta, Italy where he had learned the artistry of fireworks.

The company was later run by his son George, Sr. who ran the company until his death in 2003. Today the company is run by the third and fourth generations of the family. They put on about 3,500 fireworks shows per year with about half of them occurring on the Fourth of July.

I picked up a wonderful book about the family titled, “Zambelli: The First Family of Fireworks.” It is chock full of pictures and a wonderful history of the family business. The company motto is “When the Sun Goes Down, We Shine!”

At one time dozens of companies in the fireworks business were located in New Castle, which billed itself the Fireworks Capital of the World, but today only Zambelli is still located there.

From CA to Inc 500

One of the biggest thrills I get in touring towns and giving talks around the country is being able to visit the many entrepreneurial companies that are creating jobs in small towns. When I was in New Castle, PA, Linda Nitch, head of the local ED, took me by Vortex Recycling.

She told me, “Don KIeine had the idea for Vortex when he was living in California. He searched the country for a central location and came to New Castle in 2001. He’s been growing ever since.”

Don was out of town but John Greer, Vortex’s Marketing and Sales Manager, gave me a tour of the company. He told me, “We bring in used oil filters from all over the country. We do about ten thousand 55-gallon drums of them a month. We squeeze the oil out and sell about 75,000 to 85,000 gallons/month to waste oil users and 1200 tons/month of scrap steel.”

The business has been good as Inc Magazine ranked them the #608 fastest growing small business in a recent edition and the #7th fastest growing environmental company. The company’s business car bills it as The World’s Largest Oil Filter Recycler.

A company brochure touts the following stats about used oil filters, “Every month, nationally 31,250 tons or 2,253 semi truck loads of used oil filters are generated consuming massive land fill space. These filters contain 2,250,000 gallons or 375 semi-tankers of waste oil. There is enough steel in these used oil filters to manufacture 2.7% of the new cars in the United States.”

It’s nice to see something being done about that in New Castle, PA.

Warner Brothers First Theater Town

“In the early 1900’s we were growing faster than Pittsburg. We were the Tin Plate Capital of the World,” Linda Nitch, Executive Director of the Lawrence County, PA Economic Development Corporation was explaining to me about New Castle, PA. New Castle (population 26,309) is the largest city in Lawrence County about an hour north of Pittsburg. New Castle sits in a beautiful valley at the confluence of the Shenango River and Neshannock Creek.

Linda went on, “But tin got passed by steel and our population peeked in the mid 30s at around 50,000. Our factories ran full out during WWII but we’ve been on a population decline since then.”

But, the ED group is fighting back and has a number of projects in the works that could have the community back on a growth path. They are building a new Millennium Technology Park, a 533 acre high-tech park, a project that will require moving over 1 million cubic yards of dirt at a cost of $1 million. The park already has its first building under construction. Steelite International USA, a British company, is establishing its USA headquarters in the park.

Two weeks ago Bedford Downs, a one mile long harness racing track and slots casino was announced for the county. The county’s take from this project is estimated to be over $15 million per year with the funds earmarked for economic development projects within the county.

The real undiscovered gem that I saw was the downtown area which sits along the river and has a river walk. Having once been a city of over 50,000 gives a town like New Castle a much larger downtown than what it needs today. But, those underutilized buildings offer the potential to develop a special “sense of place” that can’t be easily duplicated.

John Dimuccio, who was the city manger for 20 years, first envisioned a renovated downtown in 1995 and was able to break ground in 2000. He told me, “We’ve got some wonderful history in the downtown area. The Warner Brothers, who grew up in nearby Youngstown, OH came to the fastest growing city in the USA to build their first theater in 1907. We were able to save it as part of our downtown revitalization.”

The work is still ongoing but New Castle’s downtown has some wonderful potential.

Sprucing Up Empty Storefronts

One of the challenges of many small towns, is how to keep the downtown looking vibrant when you’ve got a few vacancies. I’ve seen several towns try to keep the big downtown display windows full with promos for other stores, high school boosterism and other demonstrations.

But, I recently learned of a company in England that is taking the idea of filling those empty storefronts to a new level. It sounds to me like an idea that could make sense to explore.

Motomedia has developed a “Street Level Billboard” that uses cutting edge technology, motion sensors and rear projection screens to present animated visuals complete with sound. Adding Bluetooth-enabled software allows additional information to be transmitted to a viewer’s cell phone. Future technology will allow a viewer to move blocks of information on the screen, just like the Apple iPhone.

Keep your eye on this new technology application.

World's Largest Corn Maze

I’m guessing that Robert Richardson, who homesteaded 160 acres in Spring Grove, IL (population 3,880) in 1840 would be amazed at how his family farm has transformed over the years. Spring Grove is located about 60 miles NW of Chicago, on the outskirts of its rapidly growing suburbs and just south of the WI border. The farm, still owned, run and worked on by three generations of the family has grown into two farmsteads and 450 acres.

In 1982 Owen Richardson decided to try diversifying away from his traditional crops of corn and soybeans, planting a few Christmas trees. When weeds overran his young seedlings, he almost gave up that effort, but stuck with it adding 3,000 trees per year.

In 2001, the family decided to put in a corn maze….not just a corn maze….but the world’s largest corn maze. This year’s maze, built with a Chicago Bears theme is 28 acres in size, the size of 10 city blocks! They’ve also added a smaller corn maze that celebrates the University of Illinois Chief, which was retired this year by the university. In 2007, they added a 50’ tall observation tower for viewing the corn mazes.

The Richardson’s are a trend that I’m seeing of farm families diversifying their farming activities and more fully utilizing all of their natural assets, rather than being caught up in a dependency upon the fickleness of commodity prices.

Life After Maytag

Next month the last vestiges of Maytag will disappear from Newton, IA (population 15,579), a wonderful town midway between Des Moines and Iowa City. When I drove through the town last week, I wondered what changes will occur in Newton with the closing of the last Maytag plant on October 26th.


Newton has been a manufacturing mecca and headquarters for Maytag ever since local farmer Fred L. Maytag built his first mechanical washing machine in 1907. The washing machine was initially intended to help solve seasonal slumps in Maytag’s farm equipment business but quickly became the main business for Maytag. By 1927 Maytag had sold its millionth washing machine.


In recent years Maytag struggled, with a procession of new CEOs unable to turn it around, culminating in the sale of the company to rival Whirlpool in the spring of 2006. The 1,200 white-collar and 1,000+ manufacturing workers in Newton were the casualties of that sale when Whirlpool quickly announced that it would close all facilities in Newton.


I applaud Newton’s efforts to reinvent themselves as a community. They have established the Newton Promise, which will pay for four years of college for anyone who graduates from Newton High School. They also worked to build the Iowa Speedway, Iowa’s only NASCAR track, in the community. And the town is assisting in the retraining of former Maytag employees, many of which are starting their own businesses.


It will be interesting to study the transformation of Newton from a one-company dependent town into a more diversified one. There will be much pain and suffering in the process but I’m impressed with the steps that Newton has already made in their journey.

Losing Our Competitive Edge?

Mike Harvey writes a wonderful weekly newsletter called “Flourishing.” I got to know Mike when he coordinated a couple of my talks in his hometown of Winfield, KS (population 12,206).

Last week’s edition had this thought from Mike:

This unique map ought to give pause to those who imagine that the U. S. is losing its competitive position in the world economy. The structure of our economy is changing, but America is not losing its strength. Thanks to huge increases in productivity, which in turn are the result of lower tax rates on capital (thank you Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), American manufacturing output is at a record high—both absolutely, and as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product.

It amazed me that the economy of TN is equivalent to that of Saudi Arabia; GA to Switzerland; TX to Canada; CA to Italy and ND to Ecuador.

Sometimes, I think that we beat up on ourselves too much and don’t sit back and look at what a wonderful country we live in. Nor, reflect upon the many benefits we have as Americans. Mike does a great job each week of pointing those benefits out.

Super Bowl of Farming

The Farm Progress Show, billed as the Super Bowl of Farming, is held every two years in nearby Decatur, IL. I spent an afternoon there this past week seeing the newest agricultural technology and meeting a few old friends from my days in the seed business.

My observation is that while the show has gotten much larger, there didn’t seem to be as many people attending as when we were exhibiting in the early 80s. But, then again, there aren’t as many farmers today as there were then. However, the technology revolution in agriculture is simply astounding.

I got a chance to tour Monsanto’s research exhibit to see what technologies are in the pipeline for the leader in seed technology. They continue to “push the envelop” with higher yields; gene traits for herbicides, insects and diseases; and food quality improvement. Nitrogen fixation in corn looks like their next big winner, but the one that really catches my fancy, is their drought tolerant gene for corn.

This new technology, which won’t be released for at least five years, has the potential to dramatically expand where corn is grown while also giving farmers more assurance of being able to raise a crop without worry of a complete failure due to drought. It also will dramatically cut the need for irrigation water, allowing that water to be used for human consumption.

Right after my tour, a group which included the CEO of ADM was touring the Monsanto research plot. Some of her entourage didn’t look too comfortable in the 98 degree heat. They really should have lost their suits prior to the tour.

John Q.

I was back in Springfield, MO for the Governor’s Conference on Economic Development last week. When I toured the community a year ago, I was struck by the number of entrepreneurs who had positively impacted the community, but none more than John Q. Hammons who had built a $32 million minor league stadium, museum and many other improvements to the quality of life in Springfield. I had been inspired when I read his biography after that trip.

As I was walking thru the hotel lobby, on my way to dinner, I was pleasantly surprised to see Mr. Hammons sitting in the lobby. I was thrilled to get a chance to chat with him for a few minutes and to invite him to my talk the next morning. Unfortunately, he was flying out of town and couldn’t attend but I used him as an example several times in my talk.

Here is his story. John Q. Hammons was born in Fairview, MO (population 395), 60 miles south and west of Springfield. He was one of only 12 students in his high school graduating class. After two years of college he became a teacher at a salary of $40 per month. During WWII he helped to build the Alaskan-Canadian Highway, nicknamed the Road to Tokyo, and served in the Merchant Marines in the Pacific Campaign.

Mr Hammons told me, “I’ve built 187 hotels during my career and have $360 million in new construction going on right now, so we’re rapidly closing in on 200 hotels.”

Today he owns hotels in 23 states, including the award winning Chateau on the Lake Resort and Conference Center in Branson, MO.

One of his employees at the hotel told me, “He lives here in the hotel and works every day of the week. He is a real joy to work for.”

It’s been an amazing journey of 88 years from tiny Fairview, MO for John Q. Hammons.