2024 - Economic Development for Rural Indiana
Rural Indiana has become unattractive as a location for businesses to locate for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons are part of other issues. What can we do to correct what has happened?
Education has been attacked for 20 years so that we have an undereducated workforce. Businesses locate where they have a workforce with higher education so that their productivity will give them higher profits.
Health care in Indiana is among the most expensive and having the least quality of care in the country. This is due to corporate monopolies taking over and closing health care in our rural communities. Businesses do not want to locate where they will be paying more for their employees health care insurance to have less healthy employees.
The rural infrastructure has decayed due to neglect from the state Republican SUPERMAJORITY not replacing the funding for 12 years from Toll Road fares. We are finally making progress after the 2018 gas tax hike and working double time in the summers to replace bridges and pave roads, but the neglect and poor planning of that Republican SUPERMAJORITY has caused this situation. Businesses do not want to locate where they can’t get their products in and out.
Aside from fixing the above issues, we can be proactive and do something big that will be attractive points to get people to locate here.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided rural/small town communities unprecedented opportunity to grow economically. In my job, I have spent the last four years making it possible for thousands of employees to work remotely from home. We are now seeing that many big companies are choosing to reduce their building footprints and moving most employees to “work form home” status permanently. If people can work from the cul-de-sac communities of suburban big cities, they can do the same from our counties if not for one thing. We do not have the reliable rural broadband internet infrastructure to provide for this. At this point, wireless broadband services are an option for some, although not good options. First of all, the service towers need to be working off a fiber ring, which many are not. Secondly, the “microwave” option requires line-of-sight to the tower which trees will interrupt. Then with cellular options such as 4G and 5G, many service providers have data limits on each service when their devices are used at hotspots, most at 15 GB per month which is about what streaming a 2 hour movie in 4k uses. There is money coming from the federal government to build our internet infrastructure. As a state, we need to ensure this money is distributed to rural and small town areas and spent to build reliable broadband internet infrastructure properly.
Building fiber optic internet service in rural Indiana will be something major that would attract businesses to locate here.
