Park place.

• Author: Dunlap, Phil
• Position: Growth in Indiana-based business and industrial parks

Explosive growth in business and industrial parks

Somewhere between the cornfields and the smokestacks, a new crop of business parks is growing across Indiana. Even as businesses struggle to find enough employees, expansion and location projects have filled existing industrial parks in many communities and forced them to plan new ones.

Plymouth, for example, is in the process of developing its second industrial park, right across the street from its nearly full, 700-acre Plymouth Industrial Development Park. The new park, on 120 acres, is called the Pine Road Industrial Park. Infrastructure is already well on its way. As with its predecessor, the new development will have CSX rail access.

The Plymouth project is representative of what's going on all over Indiana, reflecting the booming economy and in spite of the labor hurdles affecting most Hoosier communities. "The unemployment rate here is very, very low," says Doug Anspach, executive director of Plymouth Industrial Development Corp. "We have a serious shortage of available employees. But that hasn't stopped most companies from expanding. We're fortunate in that we've been able to attract people from outside the area to move here. We're the 10th-fastest-growing city in the state, having increased in size at a rate of 22.3 percent from 1990 to 1998."

Many of the projects sprouting across the state are like the one in Plymouth, smaller-town parks planned by community leaders. "It's better if the community does it because they have a vested interest and they should put their money in redeveloping their own community," observes Mark Writt, first vice president at CB Richard Ellis in Indianapolis.

Developing business parks makes sense for smaller communities because they can bring together employment opportunities and infrastructure availability. Projects in these areas may also include the cooperative efforts of local utilities and the Indiana Department of Commerce, resulting in enticing incentive packages. Low land prices in smaller communities help smaller parks succeed as well.

Two significant new industrial parks are in the works in the Richmond area. Whitewater Regional Interstate Industrial Park is a 282-acre development located at Interstate 70 and State Road 1. Projected to be completed in two years, the park will serve several counties. The other Wayne County park is the 380-acre Richmond Midwest Industrial Park, a $3.5 million development which broke ground on July 13.

"Several sites in the park will be served by Norfolk Southern railway service, so we think we're going to appeal to a niche market," says Jim Hizer, president and CEO of the Economic Development Corporation of Wayne County. "Overall, our marketing...