By DAVE KITCHELL, Pharos-Tribune staff writer
Sam Frain is president of the county council in Pulaski County, one of the most sparsely populated counties in Indiana, and he has been around long enough to see the benefits of multi-county planning and cooperation for counties the size of Pulaski.
"I really believe when you get in a region like Pulaski County, Fulton County and White County, collaborations have to work. Pulaski County, Fulton County, Jasper County, Starke County can't work individually. You have to collaborate with agencies in other counties to be able to function. We can't afford to operate on our own. They can't operate on their own," he said.
"We're looking at a multitude of things that are going to have to be done multi-county if they're going to be accomplished in the future."
Pulaski County has partnered with White and other counties in the Kankakee-Iroquois Regional Planning Commission for several years. He sees the need for regional planning and partnerships -- the kind a new state center at Purdue University can foster. The Purdue Center for Regional Development has been launched to convene discussions about partnerships across city boundaries, county lines and other traditional jurisdictional barriers.
Vic Lechtenberg, the co-director of the center, is a former Purdue agriculture dean. He says the center means as much to rural areas of Indiana such as the Logansport area as it does to urban areas. Since last Aug. 1, he has been involved in 200 community conversations about the center and potential collaborations that can promote regional development.
"We're actually just getting it off the ground. We just launched it in February. We're partnering with the Indiana Humanities Council with regional seminars around the state We have had some success in getting some federal and state grants."
The council also is sponsoring an upcoming leadership summit in Indiananpolis that is promoting further discussions on the future of the state.
Tech park for Logansport?
What can the center do that other economic and community development efforts cannot?
"I think it's going to be a place to go for analytical information and analysis."
A case in point is the planned new Ivy Tech State College campus south of Logansport on the Hoosier Heartland Corridor. Tech parks are not industrial parks, he says, but they are places where public universities in Indiana link with advanced manufacturing initiatives. Indiana has 15 tech parks either open or in the works -- 10 of which have ties to Purdue.
That was good news for Logansport-Cass County Economic Development Foundation President Skip Kuker to hear Friday. Kuker said when the campus was first funded that a tech park was not out of a question, but the university link is a key.
"It's fantastic," Kuker said of the potential development of a tech park in Cass County.
"I am very excited about that. We have the land out there that is donated to the city," he said.
Lechtenberg says a tech park gives something for economic development officials like Kuker "to brag about."
While there are other regional development centers nationwide, Lechtenberg says the Purdue center is only the second one he knows of that is affiliated with a university.
What the center can do is get communities, counties and regions of the state to examine strengths and weaknesses and joint solutions that help entire regions. One area of potential growth in the Logansport area is on the Cass/Miami County line between Galveston and Grissom Air Reserve Base. Galveston is the second largest community in Cass County and State Sen. Tom Weatherwax has identified residential developments in and around Grissom as the second largest community in Miami County. The two communities are virtually blocks apart, but have no joint planning for facilities such as sewage treatment or public services, in part because they are in different counties. Multi-county drainage issues, trail development in areas such as the Nickel Plate line between Rochester and Peru and the former line from Winamac to Logansport also raise potential multi-county issues.
Frain says he can see the need for joint planning for tourism in his county and the north central Indiana region.
Sam Cordes, the co-director of the center, says he can see potential for watershed development along rivers and streams in Indiana.
"I think that we can provide information and some good analysis of some regional and international trends that will allow communities to have some important dialogues about what kind of a community or a region we can have in the future, and what kinds of challenges and opportunities exist in a globalized world. The idea that individual communities can come together and collaborate on a regional sense is one of the things I think we can help people through," he says.
"There seems to be quite a bit of interest and recognition that at least from the standpoint of economic development, it really is important to collaborate to compete," he said.
"We want to be a non-threatening resource that want to talk about how to handle certain problems in a collaborative, regional approach."
© 2005 The Logansport Pharos-Tribune.