I love driving by the large factories that reside outside of Fort Wayne. The smoke coming out of the buildings, sprawl and architectural marvels of these factories give me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. Fort Wayne definitely needs more of these around the outskirts of town. I love seeing the wheels of industry turning with these factories in sight. They provide hard working people good jobs and I don't care what some people say about the manufacturing sector, it is definitely not going anywhere despite what anyone says. There is no need to broaden the economic base.Indiana’s manufacturing-heavy economy continues to hemorrhage jobs, said Philip Powell, faculty chairman of the evening MBA program at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.
Ridiculous. I don't believe it.
“Our economy is a dinosaur. It’s based on manufacturing, and a lot of Hoosiers refuse to recognize the fact that we have to modernize.”
Blasphemy. We have good industrial jobs and should find more. They have treated the city so well and what is happening all over the country regarding these jobs wont happen here. Leave that high tech stuff to those people living on the coasts.
9 comments:
There is no doubt that Fort Wayne needs to change and become more of a "Service Business" oriented town; however, there is nothing wrong with manufacturing jobs either.
We need to become a city that is friendly to small and medium sized businesses of all types.
Mike Sylvester
There is nothing wrong with manufacturing jobs, manufacturing jobs are often very well paid and offer much upside to our city. I simply wish shed light on the fact that many people believe that we should spend more energy trying to get more of them instead of working on diversifying the economic base. Keep the status quo. Unfortunately, the economic climate in the US and Indiana in particular is not very hospitable for these types of jobs unless they are high value add manufacturing jobs. Otherwise they are constantly at risk.
I believe that the city/county should create an environment to encourage economic development across all sectors of commerce for companies of all sizes. This would hopefully diversify the economic base so that the city is not so reliant on a particular sector of industry.
I agree we don't need any more ugly manufacturing plants. What we really need is more baseball stadiums and parking garages.
Close down GM before those jobs disappear. If the workers were smart, they would ride the cutting-edge, high tech wave of Harrison Square, and apply now to sell hot dogs for Hardball Capital.
So what happens if the GM plan closes as a result of the declining US auto industry? Or is that taboo to talk about in Fort Wayne?
If GM folds, we build another ballpark, of course. THat is clearly the best way to spend a spare $35 million and attract even more great jobs.
Or, we could consider using that money to attract companies that offer those jobs. But all the studies say they really prefer going where the single A baseball is hot. So we got no worries.
It's not spare money. The money comes from the project. It doesn't even exist yet.
Apparently somehow the lines have gotten skewed between a project to help downtown become livelier and commerce. The project would make Fort Wayne a more attractive place to live as it would be a vast improvement over the current facilities and make downtown more of a destination. This may also make Fort Wayne more enticing to people looking to possibly move to the city and keep talent here. Now I am definitely not against using funds to get businesses to come to Fort Wayne through tax breaks and subsidies but this is not the same as building a new ballpark to improve the city. Most of money currently set aside for this project is restricted and can only be used downtown anyway.
Hell, why don't all of us just become our own charitable organization...thereby claiming tax EXEMPT status?
More money in our pockets for the economy....there 'ya go!
Problem solved.
B.G.
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