LaGrange County has embarked on a comprehensive planning process to chart an economic future that will focus on enhancing existing industries, attracting new ones and in sum diversifying a manufacturing-heavy economy.
One public meeting has been conducted, a second public meeting and five focus group sessions were expected to be completed by April 22, and a second public meeting will be scheduled in June. Planners hope to draft the county’s first economic development plan in a decade by the end of June.
Keith Gillenwater, executive director of the LaGrange County Economic Development Corp., said those involved in the process have endeavored to make it as transparent as possible, posting steering committee meeting notes and consultant reports online and asking residents to fill out questionnaires.
“Transparency is something we thought was important, particularly for LaGrange County, because (the EDC) is a relatively new organization. We’ve only been around for a couple of years,” Gillenwater said. “We want people to know what’s going on. We want people to be involved and understand what we’re trying to do — how important economic development is for this community.
“The goal that we have for the economic development strategic planning process is to develop a road map of objectives that we can focus our resources on over the next few years. This, hopefully, will provide for us some measurable objectives that will help us reach our goals of creating an environment where responsible growth can occur while avoiding the threats and pitfalls inherent in the process.”
LaGrange officials, aided by Bloomington-based consultant Strategic Development Group, have identified five key areas: education and work force development; small to medium-sized businesses; the local woodworking industry; tourism-related entrepreneurship and downtown business; and major employers.
Each sector presents challenges, officials said, but most notable is LaGrange County’s reliance on manufacturing in general, and the recreational vehicle industry in particular. In 2009, according to statistics supplied by SDG, manufacturing in LaGrange County accounted for 44.2 percent of the work force. The top six employers, according the EDC, are manufacturers, and at least four of those are affiliated with the RV industry.
The recession buffeted the RV industry and in the month when Gillenwater was hired in 2009 it was announced that LaGrange County had the highest unemployment rate in the state at 18.9 percent. The county’s unemployment rate in March was 9.4 percent.
Such volatile shifts in fortune have convinced LaGrange County leaders they need to diversify the county’s economic portfolio.
“We absolutely need to diversify our employer base,” said Joe Pierce, an EDC steering committee member and president and CEO of Farmers State Bank. “Clearly, the RV emphasis dominates LaGrange County and, if nothing else, recent history says it would be good to have some diversity. And it’s not just recent history. The RV industry has had its ups and downs its entire life.”
One of the significant hurdles in achieving and sustaining any diversity, Pierce and others said, is providing job opportunities for young people in the county who increasingly are being equipped with 21st-century skills.
The 670-student Lakeland High School in LaGrange has become a so-called New Tech school and is providing project-based learning to freshmen and sophomores and infusing that learning with employment attributes such as work ethic, collaboration and leadership. The five-school Lakeland School Corp. is planning on extending its New Tech Leading EDGE initiative to all four grades at Lakeland High, and it has begun training teachers to employ modified project-based learning at Lakeland Middle School.
The problem, Pierce said, is “we’re training kids to leave town. We’re equipping them with the tools to go elsewhere and get a good job. Our goal should be to have them get that job here.”
Risa Herber, steering committee member and superintendent of Lakeland School Corp., agreed with Pierce’s assessment.
“Lakeland School Corp. is getting the ball rolling, but we realize that is not the end game,” Herber said. “The end game is getting these kids to want to come back to LaGrange County and having the job opportunities available to make that happen.”
Added Pierce: “Clearly, we’re giving these kids skills that currently don’t have a home in LaGrange County. We’ve only gotten half the job done so far.”
What jobs will be available for LaGrange County’s skilled public school graduates aren’t known yet, but Gillenwater and others have some ideas about employment segments of the county that can be strengthened and new employment opportunities that can be pursued. Gillenwater said LaGrange County, because of its proximity to the Indiana Toll Road, would be ideal for distribution centers. The county’s agricultural underpinnings, meanwhile, would be a good foundation for food processing operations.
“Food processing is an opportunity for us that we don’t have a lot of here, but we have a lot of the infrastructure,” Gillenwater said. “We have a lot of raw materials produced here. We have the transportation infrastructure here for people to ship products out. We have the highest number of certified organic farms in Indiana, which would work really well for the specialty food market.”
LaGrange County also has tourism, and that is an economic segment that can be expanded, officials said. Tourism and the travel industry contributed $112.4 million to the county’s economy in 2009, according to an analysis by Certec Inc. of Lexington, Ky. More than 1.4 million people, many lured by Amish-related attractions, visited the county in 2009.
Beth Thornburg, executive director of the Shipshewana/LaGrange County Convention & Visitors Bureau, has been working on a countywide branding campaign that uses the word “Shipshewana” as the focal point. The word is not about the town per se but about the lifestyle and amenities represented by the town — and by extension the county.
Radio commercials extolling LaGrange County as a prime destination spot were placed last year in Fort Wayne, Grand Rapids, Mich., and Chicago. Print ads are planned this year for Chicago, Toledo, Ohio, and Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor, Mich.
Meanwhile, Sheryl Kelly, town manager of Shipshewana, said her community recently received a $49,500 state grant to plan a downtown revitalization that she believes will make the 659-resident town more inviting and easier to access through infrastructure upgrades.
“We need to improve on our process to make it easier to shop in Shipshewana, to improve on the services we provide,” Kelly said. “We can also improve by adding variety and trying to attract more businesses to the area.”
Another existing industry that should be factored into economic development planning, officials said, is furniture making, which is bolstered by the more than 80 members of the Shipshewana-based Northern Indiana Woodcrafter’s Association. It was a representative of that organization who persuaded Amish resident Mervin Lehman to consider making mattresses.
Pierce, who chairs the EDC board, said industries like woodworking, tourism and agriculture provide some economic diversity.
“But we’re a long ways from being finished,” he said. “We need more (diversity).”
He and other planners are confident that will happen.
“I think for the first time in a long time,” Herber said, “we have a collective purpose and a collective vision that we need to identify where we’re going next.”
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