Lawrenceburg & Dearborn County.

• Author: Markwalter, Robert
• Position: Indiana

After more than a decade of false starts, Lawrenceburg and the rest of Dearborn County, tucked away in the state's far southeastern corner, seem poised finally to board the economic juggernaut that has been barreling through the suburbs of nearby Cincinnati.

Finally. Predictions of economic growth have been popping up more or less regularly since indiana's 2.5 mile stretch of the Cincinnati beltway, Interstate 275, opened a dozen years ago. Downtown Cincinnati had long been only 35 minutes from Lawrenceburg. Now, however, the Queen City's northern suburbs were equally as close, and the Greater Cincinnati International Airport, just across the Ohio River in Boone County, Ky., was even closer.

But while most of the I-275 corridor blossomed with off ice parks, shopping malls and light industry, the expressway seemed also to take people to work and to shop elsewhere. Fully 40 percent of the Dearborn County's workers hold jobs outside the county.

The area missed the boat for two reasons, according to Bill Mountsier, the man now charged with catching it. First, there was a lack of available, developed commercial and industrial sites and, second, there was no aggressive, coordinated leadership to develop and to sell the sites that existed.

As the first executive director of the newly consolidated Dearborn County Chamber of Commerce, Mountsier provides the leadership to fund and to create the county's first comprehensive economic development plan. He projects that the plan, scheduled for completion this year, will create 1,000 jobs in five years. With the right touch, Mountsier adds, this can be done while preserving the rural flavor of the county and revitalizing the charm of its quaint river towns.

There is charm aplenty here, but the hills that make this part of Indiana so lovely also have restricted its development. Most of Dearborn County's population is concentrated in its southeastern corner, in the ancient flood plain at the confluence of the Ohio and Great Miami rivers. Here, the towns of Greendale, Lawrenceburg and Aurora meander along 10 miles of U.S. 50. That stretch holds about one-third of the county's 40,000 people and most of its infrastructure.

Beyond the river valley, the land rises abruptly into a series of rolling ridges cut by numberless creeks and rills. There are, Mountsier says, commercial and industrial sites in this part of the county, most notably along U.S. 50 and the Interstate 74 corridor in the north. Utilities and...