Columbus forecast 2014.

• Author: Brewer, Ryan M.

Organizations around Columbus invested over $21 million of long term capital per year from 2005 through 2012, beautifying the downtown area and creating new, modern spaces for business and leisure. (1) Why? The reasoning lies in attracting and retaining talented people and to secure more well-paying jobs. This strategy has been working. One question remains: given considerable uncertainty arising from soft global markets conflated with national political instability, will this strategy continue to work?

From 2010-2012, Bartholomew County realized the state's fourth highest population growth, a change of 3 percent.(2) Interestingly, for the state's nine most highly educated counties (the top 10 percent), being educated is correlated to attracting more people (see Figure 1).

With respect to talent as measured by level of educational attainment, Bartholomew County ranks near the median among counties in the United States on the whole--and Indiana ranks 44th among the states. Even so, Bartholomew County ranks sixth among Indiana's 92 counties in the level of educational attainment, with 27.2 percent of its adults having earned a bachelor's degree or higher, yielding a strong and growing highly educated workforce suitable for attracting jobs in advanced, high-tech manufacturing.

Coincident withstrong population growth and highly educated people, Bartholomew County has experienced impressive recent net job creation, namely in the manufacturing sector, which captures 37.3 percent of all jobs in the county. For instance, in August of 2013, Columbus added 1,000 jobs, a 2 percent increase over July. In fact, Columbus, Indiana ranked fifth nationally among metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) over the period, and 22nd nationally over the past year with a total of 1,800 new jobs created.3 it is important to note that Columbus continues to see average per capita income rise due to high paying jobs being created. Per capita income in Columbus rose from $37,023 in 2010 to $39,645 in 2011.4 This 7.1 percent rise in per capita income bested every city in our control group aside from North Vernon, which experienced a rise of 7.7 percent to $31,435 as of 2011 (see Table 1).

TABLE 1: Annual Per Capita Personal Income for Select Indiana Cities, 2006 to 2011 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 North $26,654 $27,958 $29,353 $28,728 $29,200 $31,435 Vernon Columbus $35,520 $36,504 $38,377 $35,579 $37,023 $39,645 Kokomo $31,592 $33,127 $32,988 $30,962 $31,087 $33,126...