And Another One Bites the Dust

There's a new CEO for Blair Corporation as we see another home-grown company figuratively, if not literally bite the dust, Mr. Nandkeolyar comes to Blair as part of the merger/buyout by The Orchard Group. He also cites experience with Martha Steward Living. Interesting. And he comes bearing promises of more jobs (most likely at the distribution center -- manual labor type jobs-- my comment) , possibly a retail store or two to replace the Blair outlet we lost. Hope those bus loads of seniors will like the Norm Thompson collection enough to return to our little city.

In the nine years I've lived and worked in Warren I've watched almost every large business leave town, close, or merge; for a few years there it was very painful. The Forge is now owned by a company in the UK and it 'right-sized', Loranger's is gone, Rexnard moved away. Thank goodness for Northwest Savings, Whirley and the Refinery or we'd have just a few businesses left in town. We have to assume a refinery is doing great with oil prices at unheard of heights.

The new word for permanent layoffs is "right-sizing". It sounds so much better than downsizing doesn't it? However, the end result is the same, lots of people from professional and middle management to upper management got the axe, many of them long time or hometown families. I'm not discussing whether the business had too many chiefs or not, only commenting on the loss of long time Warren residents and supporters of town activities. In addition to the ARM debacle we are seeing lots of homes for sale as people realize there is nothing in their salary range in this small town. Just like we saw with the arrival of Lowe's and WalMart, lots and lots of minimum or slightly better wages and very little for skilled labor or professionals.

When I sit in Rural Development meetings or in advisory meetings I always say we need to find a way to get white collar or professionals into this town. A great idea could be our own community college or university like Lock Haven or Mansfield; a lot of the State Hospital is underutilized and would make a wonderful location for a school. Anyone interested? The infrastructure for high-speed connectivity is in place in town, we have T3 available to us, how about an off-site data storage center for a major East Coast business?

Tourism is valuable to us here in the "PA Wilds". Did I mention I like the new state tourism campaign? Lot's of us, myself included, moved here for the small town living, not being surrounded by crowds and more crowds of people, the availability of great hiking, fishing, biking, ATV trails and hunting but we are seeing more and more professional and skilled labor jobs leaving the region and our young people are having to chose between minimum wage jobs or moving south.

I'm sure this is the curse of many small towns, but some have saved themselves, maybe we can too.