Southern Indiana update: the region's top business stories.

• Author: Mayer, Kathy
• Position: REGIONAL REPORT SOUTH

AS ORANGE COUNTY welcomes a surge of visitors to its reopened resorts and new casino, other southern Indiana counties--Clark, Crawford, Floyd, Harrison and Washington--are getting economic boosts from manufacturing expansions and tourist-drawing nature settings.

Gambling getaways. "A tremendous impact" is how Rob Denbo, executive director of the Orange County Convention and Visitors Bureau, describes the influx of about 1.3 million people in the last several months. "Any time you bring a million new people into the area, it's tremendous, and that's stating the obvious."

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The parade of visitors began last November when the French Lick Resort Casino opened and then got another boost with the May 2007 reopening of the West Baden Springs Hotel, which had been closed to travelers since 1932. Between them, they offer 700 hotel rooms. "We spent eight years being muddled, going nowhere. Now, we're working on some new ventures," Denbo says.

Projections were 1.2 to 1.5 million visitors the first year, and it looks like that will be met, he says. "I absolutely couldn't be more excited."

Another hotel, four-screen movie theatre and new city center are all coming to French Lick, he says. "There's a lot of viable speculation on other projects, too. Orange County hasn't seen this type of influx of business in my memory. You're talking about $450 million being put into this area in two or three years, with the casino and others. That's pretty nice."

Long a one-employee operation, the convention and visitors bureau will have a full-time staff of five by year-end.

About 1,600 are employed at the resorts and casino, half of them Orange County residents, says Judy Gray, executive director of the Orange County Economic Development Partnership.

A microcosm of the ripple effects the newcomers are bringing can be seen with Mitchell's Jewelry & Gifts, Gray says. Opened in 1954 in Paoli, when there were six other jewelers on the square, it was the only one remaining and about to close when the business got a call from the French Lick Resort Casino, asking it to consider opening in the remodeled West Baden Springs Hotel.

"What a change it made for us," says Nancy Mitchell, one of the family owners. "We Went from a small, quiet store with only one employee, to a busy, tourist-filled store which now requires up to six people to keep up with the traffic."

In nearby Harrison County, Caesar's Indiana has 2,150 people on its casino payroll, says...