REBUILDING MARION

Five to Thrive: Keys to Marion's success

John Jarvis
Reporter

Marion is beloved by many in the community, but there are critical issues that must be faced to ensure its future success.

Through interviews with community leaders, forums and general knowledge of the area, The Star has identified the five most important challenges facing Marion. The five topics are outlined below and will be individually explained in greater detail throughout 2015.

The point of the project is not to expose what is wrong or bad with Marion, but to identify how the community can meet its challenges to become a more prosperous place. Similar efforts are being done at The Star's nine sister publications, which hopefully will present the opportunity for each of them to learn solutions from the other.

The list, however, is only a starting point. Feedback from readers is critical to ensure the project focuses on those issues most important to the community. And engagement with the community to discuss the issues is the only way they will improve.

Below are the five topics selected for focus in 2015. They are not listed in order of importance.

• Closing the skills gap

Well-paying jobs require technical skills people in this community lack. That means hard-working people are forced to take positions that won't feed a family and local businesses are left struggling to find qualified candidates.

Across Ohio, the state is projected to gain 1.7 million jobs by 2018 through new positions and retirements. Of those jobs, 57 percent will require postsecondary training but just 20.5 percent of Marion County residents have an associate's degree or higher. In Marion County, 1,500 people are unemployed and actively seeking work even though there are more than 9,400 unfilled positions within a 30-mile drive. Many of them, about 4,000, require a degree.

Helping those who are unemployed gain the qualifications needed for available jobs is critical to the economic vitality of the area.

• Creating drug-free workplaces

Employers are having a difficult time finding and retaining employees who pass drug tests. Nationally, there was a 5.7 percent increase in positive workplace drug tests in 2013, the first increase Quicken Diagnostics had reported since 2003.

That same year, Marion County physicians prescribed opiates at a rate of 77 doses per resident, higher than the state average of 64.9. In 2013, Crawford-Marion ADAMH provided publicly funded drug treatment to 1,267 people. Most drug abusers work – 70 percent according to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence – and, nationally, cost employers $81 billion each year for a variety of issues from increased medical costs to decreased productivity.

Helping employees get clean not only will benefit their lives, but also help local businesses be more productive and hopefully grow.

• Ensuring Marion is primed for success

To develop economically, a community must have adequate infrastructure, easy access to interstate highways, ample access to rail to transport goods and services, sufficient utilities, and space for incoming industry to locate and existing industry to expand.

Marion County has all of the above, according to Gus Comstock, director for Marion CAN DO!, the private nonprofit that contracts with the city and county to provide economic development services.

A local business man continues to invest in an intermodal facility, seeking assistance from the Ohio Department of Transportation to resolve a railroad crossing issue, which he says offers the opportunity to create up to 9,000 new jobs.

Currently, three trains per day enter the intermodal facility, blocking traffic on Ohio 309 for several minutes as they load and unload. Comstock said resolving the train/highway congestion issue is a "critical economic development obstacle."

Marion Municipal Airport, which lies just east of the city, also requires "dressing up," he said.

• Increasing the priority of education

Studies show the close connection between a person's level of educational attainment and his or her income, a troubling fact for Marion County, where the percentage of people who have at least a bachelor's degree is half the percentage of people statewide.

The academic landscape is changing in Marion, however, as the local regional campus of The Ohio State University continues to add bachelor's degree programs, prepares to build a new science and engineering building, and has student housing being privately developed nearby.

Likewise, educational training opportunities grow, as Tri-Rivers Career Center, a local vocational school with an adult education program, develops its Robotics & Advanced Manufacturing Technology Education Collaborative facility. Local and non-local manufacturing companies alike have had workers trained at the RAMTEC site, and that number will grow, the Tri-Rivers superintendent said.

Nucor Steel Marion; National Lime and Stone Co.; Silver Line Building Products Corp., an Andersen Company; and Whirlpool Corp. have workers training at RAMTEC. Marion Industries, Cardington Yutaka Technologies, Bridgestone, U.S. Yachiyo and American Showa Inc. have had employees receive FANUC robotics training at the facility in the rear of the Tri-Rivers building.

• Developing the next generation of leaders

Leadership is vital to communities and comes in a variety of forms. And when leaders are gone, then what?

In Marion, similar to other communities in Ohio that aren't Columbus or Delaware County, the number of locally based leaders has shrunk and threatens to continue to decrease as high-level officials of larger employers choose to live elsewhere or in the communities where their corporations are based. As a result, million-dollar homes go unsold.

A decline in the number of family-owned businesses, which traditionally have donated to charities and given back to their community in other ways, further contributes to a deterioration in local funds available to improve the quality of life in Marion.

Recognizing a need to maintain a core of leaders to tend to the Marion area's future, a group of concerned residents initiated the Marion Area Leadership Program in 1991.

Several hundred people have participated in the Marion Area Chamber of Commerce's program, each sponsored by an organization in the community, usually the person's employer. Members of the program attend nine sessions over a nine-month period, learning how to develop and implement new leadership skills and learning about their community. Along the way they create a project to improve the community.

The topics they've explored involve education, business, government and social services, and their classes culminate in the creation of an event or program aimed at improving the community.

Gannet Ohio's Jessie Balmert and Jona Ison contributed to this report.