City Economy Suffers As Industry Leaves Oberlin
by Jennifer Mellen

If one were to ask the average town dweller about big issues in the community, one of the responses would likely be, “the industrial park.” A major community employer, the Oberlin Industrial Park, sits removed from the road on West Lorain Street, little more than a mile from campus.
Two of the park’s biggest industries, Bayer and Wolf Envelope, left the area last year, narrowing the tax base for the city and the public school system. City Manager Rob DiSpirito and others have been working to attract new business to the park.
“Bayer was actually very successful, so that’s not the reason they moved,” DiSpirto said. “There were better than 400 employees there. …Wolf Envelope closed down because of some financial difficulties the owner was having with some other companies.” The latter saw the displacement of about 65-75 jobs, according to DiSpirito. “When you have a loss like that…you just hope that it doesn’t have a bad effect on the rest of the park.”
To recover from the industrial park departures, the city aims to fill its empty buildings. “We don’t have an economic development director, so I perform most of his duties,” DiSpirito said. These duties include putting out marketing materials, creating websites and generally fostering interest in the vacant properties among realtors and investors.
The Lorain County Chamber of Commerce has assisted. “We’ve been showing the building to interested investors. Both buildings,” Director Patrick McGowan-Doyle said. There was a recent marketing convention in Chicago where both Oberlin buildings were represented. Locally, Oxford Realty represents the Bayer space in finding a buyer among northeast Ohio investors.
“Well, we haven’t had a dream employer that says ‘Hey, I’m just like the business that left and I want to move into this space,’ but that rarely happens,” DiSpirito said. “Sometimes communities struggle for many years.” Yet the search continues. Targeted businesses are those looking to relocate or expand their production. While many are likely to be daunted by the sheer size of the old Bayer building — 192,000 sq. ft. — its realtors hope to find a buyer interested in the entire space. “You’re probably not going to find [just] one tenant,” DiSpirito said. “The people at Bayer want to sell it in one chunk.”
That’s not the only challenge in the search for the right buyer. “In Lorain County there are a million feet of available space,” McGowan-Doyle said. It’s not that demand is low, but space-wise, “the supply is pretty high.”
Nearby resident Marilyn Feddlecheck-Harley is skeptical of the current design of the industrial park, to say nothing of Oberlin’s aforementioned taxes. “I’m very suspicious that part of what the industrial park’s difficulty in keeping businesses in is Oberlin’s high tax rate,” Feddlecheck-Harley said. “Personal income tax is high in Oberlin. You have a lot of what you call middle or lower-end jobs. It’s really hard to justify when you’ve got jobs in Oberlin that pay $30,000 a year or less.” According to Dispirito, Oberlin has a one percent city tax, 1.9 percent school tax and an additional property tax. While an increase in industry in could ease tax rates by expanding the tax base, the trick is in finding the industry.
Current inhabitants of the industrial park include Hydro Tube Corp., Express Seed Company and AgriNomix, Inc. Though AgriNomix is the most recent addition, it shows signs of sticking around. “Our long term plans will see us staying here in Oberlin. We moved into our current facility less than one year ago and our current site was built with expansion in mind. Future additions would allow us to more than triple our current physical size and therefore provide ample growth opportunities,” Rob Lando, president of AgriNomix, said.
To some, such expansion is not immediately welcome. Express Seed and AgriNomix were built extremely close to a pond. For residents like Feddlecheck-Harley, accommodating industry is not worth the sacrifice of natural beauty. Likewise, the 57 acres of woodland rezoned east of the industrial park, across Oberlin Road, is an unwelcome spot for careless business. With proper planning, of course, effects on the environment could be minimal without inconveniencing industry. “The city needs to stand back and look at the long-term impacts of its design plans,” Feddlecheck-Harley said.
One avenue for development is to employ industrial ecology techniques in Oberlin. A revolutionary few industrial parks in Europe and the U.S. consist of companies using closed-loop resource systems. “Industrial systems can behave like ecosystems, where the waste from one process is used as a feedstock for other processes. For example, in Kalundborg, Denmark, the coal plant is selling its excess steam for use as heat in the municipality of Kalundborg,” Co-Director of the Oberlin Design Initiative Casey Pickett said. But it doesn’t stop there. Other companies in Kalundborg are working together in similar fashion. A drywall company buys up another company’s gypsum output. “They have a steady supply…they don’t need to keep mining for gypsum anymore. Both companies are saving money. Lots of money.”
“There are networks that can develop like that with a large percentage of industries.…You’re actually increasing the amount of productivity while decreasing the amount of product used,” Pickett said. And environmental impacts are greatly reduced.
Pickett sees industrial ecology as an incentive for green businesses to come to the area. He feels that ecological ties in industry encourage companies to stay put. “The plan we’re pursuing is to create eco-industrial relationships among businesses in Lorain County,” Pickett said. “It’s more like a five to 10 year project. The Oberlin Design Initiative is working very closely with the Lorain County Chamber of Commerce. …[We’re] surveying companies to see what products they’re using and producing, to try to use them up.”

 

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