Pulaski County CDC Annual Summit to Be Held March 4

  
 
The Pulaski County Community Development Commission annual Economic Development Summit will be held Tuesday, March 4 at the Winamac Event Center at 7 p.m. ET

Pulaski County CDC Executive Director Nathan Origer said reports and more will be featured during this annual event.

“It will be an evening of celebrating the successes of the last year or so,” said Origer. “We’ll be hearing from a guest speaker who is going to give a phenomenal talk on the importance of quality of life amenities to attracting talent and keeping your community as well-functioning economic engine. This will bring people from the community together. We’ll also have a free catered meal. It’s going to be a pretty exciting event I think.”

Pulaski County has seen healthy economic growth in the past year-and-a-half.

“We’ve been really fortunate. We worked with Braun last summer and they announced a pretty significant expansion here in Winamac. We’ve got Winamac Coil Spring coming in to a vacant facility and bringing in one of their lines that they hope to see grow pretty substantially over the next five to ten years. Most recently, we announced that Antares Trailers will be operating in the old Tippecanoe Beverage facility. Some of these will create more jobs than others. Down the line, I just think there is a lot of healthy possibilities for us.”

The growth that Pulaski County has seen is reflected in the latest unemployment figures.

“Five-point-four for December is the unemployment rate. Actually, it’s better than the state and national averages. It definitely puts us in the top quarter in the State of Indiana if not the top fifth of all counties.”

Origer says the diversity of industry helps keep that unemployment number low.

“We’ve got a strong agricultural base and we have a strong manufacturing base with a number of different vectors represented there and most of our major employers are rooted locally. Whether they’re still owned here or not, a lot of them have a loyalty to the community and I think that not only have they seen opportunities for growth, but they have also reflected and seen reasons to commit to growth in this community.”

The county’s unemployment rate is the lowest its been since the recession in 2008.