Kokomo — A Ball State study predicting a big rise in area manufacturing income next year sounds good after two years of double-digit unemployment, but Kokomo Mayor Greg Goodnight reacted with caution Thursday.
“I don’t know enough where [Ball State professor Michael Hicks] gets his numbers from, and I don’t know enough about his past success rate, so it’s hard to gauge his success rate,” Goodnight said.
At the same time, Goodnight said he thinks the loss of manufacturing jobs locally has stabilized.
“I think we’ve been given an opportunity to keep these remaining jobs, but we’ve got to focus on the other parts of the puzzle, diversification and quality-of-life issues,” he said.
Employment has decreased in Kokomo every year since 1999, according to the 2009 Indiana University economic outlook report for Kokomo.
Over the past decade, Kokomo has lost a quarter of its employment, with most of the jobs lost being the city’s bread and butter — high-wage, union manufacturing jobs.
For the first eight years of the 2000s, Kokomo was losing those jobs at the rate of about 1,000 per year.
During the national recession, that pace more than doubled.
Commissioner Tyler Moore said the Ball State report says a lot about the Kokomo and Howard County area.
“After the report of a year or two ago that we were a dying community, people dug in their heels and rolled up their sleeves,” he said.
Moore said the area is reaping the benefits from the commitments by Chrysler and Delphi in Kokomo and the efforts to develop the downtown area.
“Companies and site consultants see the investment in the downtown and the infrastructure,” he said. “Central Indiana is the place to be and we’re seeing a lot of investment and interest.”
Jeb A. Conrad, president and CEO of the Greater Kokomo Economic Development Alliance, attended the breakfast where the report was released, and said much of the discussion centered on the comparative lack of education in Indiana’s work force.
For advanced manufacturing jobs, “Critical-thinking skills are going to be required. That’s much different than traditional manufacturing where the work force was task-oriented. Employees are going to have to upgrade their skills to meet tomorrow’s needs,” Conrad said.
“We have a rich history in manufacturing. We have the facilities and equipment. We produce products and we have a tax environment that makes doing business here favorable. We have a gap to close in human capital, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be closed,” he added.
Douglas Hall, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute’s Economic Analysis and Research Network, was less optimistic about Kokomo’s position.
“The [Conexus Indiana] report says the recession is ‘clearly over’ but the matter of fact is we lost millions of jobs during the recession and those jobs are still lost and the population is growing.
“What they [the report] are saying doesn’t represent working-class families facing foreclosures, struggling to make ends meet and facing long-term unemployment. People should not blindly accept what is in the report because it is not reflective of real people’s lives,” he said
“I am an economist. Someone has to speak the truth. Kokomo is a city of 45,000 to 46,000 [people]. It may seem to be good news, but when you have businesses coming in or investing, it’s usually due to tax incentives that could go to other needed services.”
Dean Baker, co-founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the report’s predicted double-digit manufacturing income increase — it predicts a 17.967 percent increase — was possible.
“There were 2 million manufacturing jobs lost since the recession ... 20 percent of manufacturing jobs have been lost and with such a sharp drop and a robust recovery, it’s normal to have a bounceback and it’s not unrealistic to expect a 5 to 6 percent increase. I am not sure about 17 percent.”
Jim Tidd, chairman of the six county — including Kokomo — North Central Indiana Economic Development Partnership, said business interest in the region “is picking up.”
“Now, we have to wait and see about the financing [of them locating here]. But if it continues, from what we are seeing, this is absolutely positive and we can achieve that double-digit increase,” Tidd said.
He said he was also hopeful about improving the state’s poor rating for its “human capital.”
“One of the good things about the recession is it gave people an opportunity to go back to school and prepare themselves for the jobs of tomorrow,” Tidd said.
• Tribune staff writers Scott Smith, K.O. Jackson and Ken de la Bastide contributed to this report.