Forum focuses on region's woes

LIMA — The whole country is struggling under the current dismal economy, but few areas have it as bad as northwest Ohio.

How the region will recover from the recession and, hopefully, find a place in the world market was the subject of a forum Thursday at Veterans Memorial Civic Center.

The forum, hosted by Bowling Green public television station WBGU, was designed to begin a dialogue on the problems facing the region and some of the possible solutions to them. In the end, the problems took center stage, solutions were few.

Bowling Green State University economist Dr. John Hoag was joined in a panel discussion by the university’s dean of business, Dr. Rodney Rogers, and Sam Halker, president of Lima’s Smith Boughan.

Hoag opened the evening with a presentation on the state of the economy and how this region compares to the rest of the country. As Rogers pointed out, it does not compare well. The region faces high unemployment, massive layoffs and is behind the country in job growth in every area and in the negative in all but one.

“We’re all struggling, but our region seems to be struggling more than the rest of the U.S.,” Rogers said.

Exactly why that is was the main topic of the evening. Some speakers from the audience blamed a lack of communication and inclusion. Others said it was a failure to tool our educational systems to meet current needs. Rogers wondered aloud if the entrepreneurial spirit that made the country isn’t dead. Allen County Commissioner Greg Sneary responded that it’s alive, but bound by hard times and government red tape.

“I do think the spirit is still there. I think it’s very, very strong. The problem I think you see is people in their personal life are struggling … and for small businesses, there are so many rules and red tape,” Sneary said.

Businessman Bruce Dukeman agreed. The days when a man could just create something and sell it to the highest bidder are gone.

“One hundred years ago my grandfather was out in the garage designing parts and selling them to Henry Ford, … today, I couldn’t go out in my garage and supply anything that would pass regulations,” Dukeman said.

Other concerns, such as losing corporate health care and new bankruptcy laws that make failure fatal, are keeping would-be entrepreneurs from taking the plunge, added Lima attorney Farley Banks.

“If you are in a job that maybe you can just tolerate, you are going to be very wary of leaving it because you have health care,” Banks said.

Knowing what our weaknesses are may have value, but it’s more important to understand what the rest of the country is doing that makes them better than us, said Jerry Good, regional economic development director.

“What is the rest of the nation doing to make them so much better,” Good asked. “Because if they’re doing something that we’re not doing we’re going to get left behind and we have.”

Despite the region’s troubles, there are real opportunities for growth, Rogers said. And sometimes it takes facing hard times to get a community moving in the right direction.

“It seems to me the silver lining here is when we realize we have challenges, we then reinvent ourselves,” Rogers said. “It’s when we face a crisis like this we find new ways because we have to.”