PITTSBURG — During the early days of the last recession, Pittsburg lost its largest private employer in Superior Industries. The company closed its Kansas plant and shipped 600 jobs to Mexico. The area’s unemployment rate went from 6 percent to 10 percent, almost overnight.
“Five years later, we have not only recovered,” said Blake Benson, the town’s chamber of commerce president and director of economic development, “but we’ve added an additional 2,000 jobs on top of that. But it has taken everybody in our community to make that happen. After Superior left, we had a lot of employers that came out, who said: ‘I don’t have 600 jobs available, but I’ve got three.’ Another had six or eight, another had one…. I think that’s a better way to do it. It’s been diversified, and has meant that our eggs aren’t all in one basket.”
The college town is often cited as a regional model of economic development, and has been aggressive in tackling deficiencies in their labor force.
The latest effort, and the project Benson is most excited about, is the Southeast Kansas Career and Technical Education Center, scheduled to open next year.
“I think this will create the single biggest impact, economic development-wise, that we have seen.”
The center, which will comprise around 60,000 square feet of space in an industrial park on the edge of town, will be available to everyone from high school students with an eye toward a career in the trades to college students that want to work their way through school by performing a skilled job, to “the 40-year-old that is working a dead-end job and wants to go back to school to make a better life for his family.”
The scale of the center – which will offer training in fields as various as welding, masonry, the culinary arts, cosmetology, automotive, nursing, and more – promises to make it a regional, and not just Crawford County, resource.
“We are hoping that the center will show our community’s commitment toward workforce development, because I can assure you that when a business is looking to locate into the area, that’s one of the first things we’re going to show them. Every spring and fall that technical education center is going to be churning out a fresh crop of potential employees. See, when we get the [request for proposal] from someone who is interested in investing in our community, that’s one of the first questions they ask – ‘Tell us about your workforce, what’s the availability, what are their skills?’ Now these businesses have something they can put their finger on and know exactly where to go to find employees.”
Benson is the first to acknowledge the ways that having a healthy university and thriving medical sector insulates Pittsburg in ways rarely available to its smaller neighbors. “But I think every community, whether Pittsburg or Iola, has to look at what makes it unique. Iola has things that Pittsburg doesn’t and never will have.”
Pittsburg’s persistence pays off
