The Van Wert County Courthouse

Friday, Mar. 29, 2024

Van Wert community far from dying

Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part series about economic development in Van Wert County. This article addresses many Van Wert residents’ perception that the city is dying and not enough has been done in the area of economic development.

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

When Van Wert Economic Development Director Nancy Bowen looks at the numbers, she finds it hard to understand why anyone would call Van Wert a dying community, even compared with some of its most successful neighbors.

Vision Industrial Park has been one of the success stories of the community, growing from one company and 40 jobs in 1999 to eight companies and 500 jobs today. (Dave Mosier/Van Wert independent

Bowen has some facts to back up that assertion, including the following:

  • In the 30 years from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s, the number of jobs in Van Wert doubled and the number of businesses tripled. During that time period, from 1976 until 2006, more than 4,300 jobs were created here, Bowen said. “People think that the number of jobs have gone down over the past 30 years, but nothing could be further from the truth.”
  • In 2004, the city was listed in Boomtown USA as one of only 397 out of 15,800 communities in the nation (1 of 8 in Ohio and with Findlay the only city in the region) in the top 2.5 percent of “agurbs” (towns with strong agriculture economies that are growing).
  • In 2007, Site Selection Magazine named the city as one of the top 100 “micropolitan” areas in the country. In fact, the magazine came back in 2008 with an article on the Jobs Ready Site that will be fully certified by December 2012.

Even when compared to other communities in the region, Van Wert stacks up pretty well. Consider the following:

  • Between 2000 and 2008, Van Wert was one of the fastest-growing job centers in the region, with 8 percent job growth, behind only Mercer County’s 13-percent job growth.
  • Van Wert County led the region in job growth in the 15 years between 1993-2008, with a 16.6 percent growth rate, versus 1.6 percent for Mercer County, 2.8 percent for Putnam County and Auglaize County, which was the nearest competitor at 11.7 percent.
  • The county is also been a leader in developing tools to foster job growth, such as the local microenterprise and business incubator programs, site development initiatives and other development tools. In fact, development officials in six neighboring communities were so impressed with the Van Wert development efforts they requested assistance from local officials in creating similar programs.

“We’ve got an excellent development team here,” Bowen said, noting that Van Wert has the fastest growing business loan program in the region and the longest running business retention and expansion program, which was started in 1990 and has conducted more than 440 visits with area businesses.

“I feel that the BR&E program alone helped us retain eight businesses affected by the 2002 tornado and a total of 500 jobs,” she added.

In talking about Mercer County’s recent success, Bowen said that county had to go through some tough times to get where they are now. “When Huffy went out, Mercer County lost a lot of jobs and was in bad shape,” she explained.

After several years and periods of double-digit unemployment, Mercer County officials finally were able to diversify that county’s economy – something she says is directly responsible for their comparative prosperity and low unemployment today.

“We in Van Wert County looked at what Mercer County did and used them as a model for some of the things we’ve been doing over the past few years,” Bowen added.

That’s because the Van Wert community has also been undergoing a transition of its own from being an economy top-heavy with goods-producing manufacturing facilities – most of those tied to the automotive industry – to having more diverse companies and industries.

Those efforts have met with some success, with a healthy number of new business start-ups and relocations over the past few years. Those businesses include Golden Heritage Foods, Window Creations, ABM, Elmco Engineering, Braun Industries, Cooper Farms, Plastics Recycling Technologies, Miller Precision, Rural King, Cool Machines and a second Holiday Inn.

Vision Industrial Park alone has gone from one business and 40 jobs in 1999 to eight companies with 500 jobs, and even though some of those firms are struggling now, the situation is still much better than 12 years ago.

And then the recession hit.

“Van Wert is rebounding from the worst recession in its history,” Bowen said, noting that the community has lost approximately 630 manufacturing, goods-producing jobs between 2008 and 2010, as well as 362 indirect retail and service sector jobs.

“We were particularly hard hit because employment here is concentrated in those goods-producing industries,” she added.

But things are starting to look up, Bowen said, and the good news is that the Van Wert community has nearly all the pieces in place to take advantage of an improving economy.

Tomorrow: What’s the plan?

POSTED: 02/25/11 at 4:13 am. FILED UNDER: News