It was a close call for Parsons.
More than 200 good-paying jobs were on the line.
“We got complacent,” said Monte Taylor, president of Great Southern Bank in Parsons and a member of the city’s local economic development group, JOBS, Inc.
For more than 20 years Ducommun Industries, a company that makes sophisticated components for the aerospace industry, had been an anchor employer for Parsons. As far as city leaders knew, the industry not only planned to stay put, but also to expand by adding a 62,000-square-foot building and another 100 jobs.
Then word came it was looking elsewhere, including nearby Coffeyville which, unbeknownst to Parsons, had offered a lucrative package to lure the industry only 42 miles away.
With company headquarters in California, the publicly held company had no loyalty to Parsons, Taylor said. The bottom line is stockholders’ main concern.
Parsons hustled to come up with an incentive package to keep Ducommun in town. By Feb. 15 it presented more than $4 million worth of property tax abatements as well as $6.5 million in industrial revenue bonds to support the plant’s expansion, the latter for which the company would be responsible.
After an anxious four weeks, city leaders could breathe a sigh of relief. Ducommun would stay.
And while relieved, city leaders are getting out the knotted cords in penance.
“It taught us to never take our existing industries for granted,” Taylor said.
It also was a reminder that economic development is a blood sport.
“It’s a competitive business” to not only attract, but keep, industries, Taylor said.
“I wish the federal government would pass a law where cities couldn’t offer incentives to lure industries their way,” Taylor said. “Then the playing field would be more even.
“But it’s a necessary evil, if a town wants to stay alive.”
AS PRESIDENT of Iola’s Great Southern Bank, as well, Taylor also is a director with Iola Industries, Inc., and has played an integral role in seeing the development of apartment complexes comes to fruition on the site of the old hospital.
