Honda Suppliers scout sites in Dearborn County

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Dearborn County Officials are already showing sites along Interstate 74 to unnamed Honda suppliers interested in finding a location near the new plant.

"It's two years out, but you've still got suppliers who are scouring the area," says Tim Kramer, owner of a 58-acre site with 2,000 feet along interstate near Indiana 1. "Right now, it's a wonderful place to be."

The overall picture means that industrial jobs and the steady tax base they can create are going to neighboring counties.

Every day more than 10,000 residents leave the county of about 50,000 people to work somewhere else. The commuters make up about 40 percent of Dearborn County's total labor force.

And one of the county's biggest employers, the Pernod Ricard Seagram distillery in Lawrenceburg, will close in two years, eliminating about 400 jobs.

To combat that, Dearborn County needs to create jobs and draw companies, and progress comes slowly. One hometown developer is spending millions of dollars to create a developable site off U.S. 50 and I-275 in Greendale.

"The hard part is getting the community engaged in knowing there is good property available and there are people willing to sell," he says. "What we need to do is take a comprehensive look at the 74 corridor to identify properties and put some calculations toward what it would take to get infrastructure to those available sites. The barrier is that we don't have that data."

DEVELOPMENT GROUP EFFORTS

That's the job of the county's Economic Development Initiative, formed two years ago to spearhead development efforts.

Jim West, the group's president, built the same kind of program in the 1990s as president of the Tri-County Economic Development Corp., the group that managed the boom in Northern Kentucky.

West says there is interest from retail developers in Lawrenceburg, and that the Honda plant should bring activity in Dearborn County's northern regions.

But the county is a long way from producing developers that will build speculative office space, the kind of space that draws high-paying companies.

"It's not incentives that rule us out most of the time, it's lack of product," West says.

"This is not just about economic development. It's about quality of life."