Slow and steady may be the way to go (06/30/06)

It’s virtually impossible for those of us who live in and around small towns in Indiana and Ohio to read about Honda’s decision to build a huge new plant near Greensburg and not wonder what such a plant’s impact would be here.

What would it mean to a Portland or a Dunkirk or a Fort Recovery or a Geneva or a Redkey or a Pennville to have 2,000 new manufacturing jobs plugged into the local economy?

Some folks estimate that within a few years a total of 6,000 new jobs will be created in Decatur County as a result of the Greensburg plant.

Already there’s talk of real estate markets heating up.

But if attracting an industrial project like Honda is a challenge, so are maximizing its impact and coping with enormous change.

The best parallel in Indiana is probably the Toyota plant in Princeton, another example of a very big fish in a small town pond.

And Princeton’s experience indicates that while such a plant means regional growth, it’s harder to capitalize locally.

A big chunk of the Toyota workforce commutes from metropolitan Evansville, and our guess is that a large number of the employees at the Honda plant in Greensburg will commute from greater metropolitan Indianapolis and/or Cincinnati.

For Greensburg, one of the challenges will be getting as many of those workers as possible to settle into the community rather than commuting from their present homes.

Economic development on the scale of this week’s Honda announcement is the equivalent of winning the lottery, both in terms of the windfall and the complications it can cause.

In many ways, communities are better off with steady, long-term growth.

We’d love to see 2,000 additional jobs created locally, let alone 6,000.

But we’d prefer to see 20 new employers with 100 jobs each or four new employers with 500 jobs each over a period of years. — J.R.[[In-content Ad]]