EVANSVILLE— With the first leg of Interstate 69 completed and remaining links still to come, it’s time for Southwestern Indiana to brainstorm on how to best capitalize on the highway, participants in a Friday event agreed.
Regional economic development is the goal of the EVV-Crane I-69 Innovation Corridor Consortium, which met Friday at the University of Southern Indiana.
A proactive approach to the highway’s presence “can advance innovation and prosperity and make life better for future generations as well as our own,” said Mark Bernhard, USI associate provost for outreach and engagement.
The audience of about 100 people at Friday’s event included representatives of government, business, health care and education, plus nonprofit organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and Leadership Evansville and regional staples like Holiday World & Splashin’ Safari.
Task forces within the group over the next few weeks will write reports on approaches to branding, civic collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship, and more. The full group will reconvene on occasion to review progress.
Priorities will include business startups and encouraging existing industries near the corridor to grow. Expanded wireless access and cellular service along I-69 are examples of ways to advance those goals, participants said.
Another focus area will be ensuring that area universities are teaching skills that prospective companies require.
“I am so excited. It’s regional, it’s collaborative, it’s looking to the future,” Debbie Dewey, executive director of Growth Alliance for Greater Evansville, said of the group’s process. “It’s bringing together different organizations that have one long-term goal for the region. There’s a lot of stuff already going on that’s impressive, and I think pulling it together and marketing it that way will help us.”
GAGE and USI have been working with the Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center on economic development initiatives tied to I-69’s completion.
Crane receives federal funding to develop technology for military applications. Donald Schulte, director of engagement at Crane, said local partnerships enable the warfare center to take full advantage of those dollars.
“We’ve got a mission to accomplish for national defense,” Schulte said. “We recognize that for us to be efficient and effective, we have to be able to leverage other resources, and we really believe that innovation is going to be critical for us to be able provide warfighters with the capability to do what this country needs. That’s really the whole thrust of this,”
Friday’s gathering at USI was the second meeting of the EVV-Crane I-69 group. The first one, attended by about 60 people, was Nov. 12 at Huntingburg. It was reported then that areas along the new I-69 corridor have seen below-average growth in employment, population and personal income.
Reversing those trends will take collaborative thinking, and that’s what the EVV-Crane group represents, said Greg Wathen, president and CEO of the Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana.
He noted attendance at Friday’s event included people from numerous area counties.
“We’re not going to get 50 or 60 things done, but if there are two or three things that transcend geographic boundaries that we can put together solutions for, or remove barriers to solving, then we can call this a success,” Wathen said.