Communities should tap resources

March 9, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

NEWARK, Ohio (AP) — The books came by the crateload, slim and shiny, pressed from hand to hand on the quiet streets of this manufacturing city. You must read this, people said.

It started with 12 copies. Then there were a thousand.

By the time it was done, Licking County had spent $12,500 ordering more than 1,400 volumes of the book — a self-help manual of sorts for the economically challenged — and sent it home with teachers, preachers, farmers and politicians.

“Community Capitalism: Lessons from Kalamazoo and Beyond” chronicles the economic growth of that Michigan city, preaching the idea that instead of waiting for a government bailout, communities should tap into existing resources and fix their own problems.

Ohio officials hope the book will inspire an economic revival in this community, whose factories and businesses have shuttered and whose young people are steadily leaving. It’s a tall order, especially in these bleak economic times, when resources are hard to come by.

“It’s pretty interesting how they kinda just said, we’re gonna have to do this ourselves,” said Jim Layton, general manager of the National Trails Raceway in Hebron, Ohio, which has suffered from higher operating costs and fewer car racing spectators.

Layton joined about 150 community leaders who, in their excitement over what they had just read, formed a makeshift book club on a cold November evening to discuss how they can keep the county from fading into obscurity.

“How many of you have read the book?” asked Pat Jeffries, a retired insurance executive who served as moderator. About three-fourths of them raised their hands.

“The sky is the limit, really, for this community,” Jeffries said. “How do we make this area an attraction for people to come here and settle?”

They haven’t quite figured that part out yet.

The rule at the meetings was “no whining, no griping, no complaining,” said Steve Layman, board chairman of the Licking County Port Authority, which oversees transportation and economic development.

The plan was to lay out the community’s best attributes first. Figuring out what, exactly, to do with them would come later.

But Newark, a city of about 45,000 people, is filled with empty storefronts and charming old-fashioned buildings that seem stuck in the past. One of the few traces of modernity in the central square is a sign hanging in the window at a McDonald’s in Candlewick Commons, a condominium home for senior citizens: Wi-Fi Here.

The Longaberger Co. has laid off several hundred employees in recent years. Building materials maker Owens Corning plans to put some of the 700 workers at its Newark insulation plant on unpaid furlough. And that’s just the surface of the deep well of layoffs here.