June 10 -- Over the past 20 years, Beatrice was known as “Lawnmower City.”
The moniker described the lawnmower and turf care equipment manufacturing town, with Husqvarna Turf Care, Encore Manufacturing and Exmark Manufacturing employing more than 600 employees.
After Husqvarna announced it would be consolidating local operations into a million square foot, 2,500 employee plant in Orangeburg, S.C., “Lawnmower City” has effectively been cut in half.
Looking to the future, however, city and economic development officials say that Beatrice’s economy can’t remain a “one-trick pony” for much longer without potential permanent damage done to the community.
Beatrice Mayor Dennis Schuster said the community will need to look at diversifying its economy when negotiating with potential industries to fill the vacant Husqvarna building at the end of this year.
“Over the years, manufacturing has dwindled as far as employment,” Schuster said. In 1950, he said, half of the working population was employed by manufacturing jobs. Today, that number is 10-12 percent of the population.
“We make more goods with 10 percent of the population than we did with 50 percent” Schuster said. “There just isn’t the jobs available that there used to be.”
Schuster said many citizens see manufacturing as a “good, steady job that provided benefits and good, stable income.”
But Schuster said with the closing of Husqvarna, Beatrice needs to exercise options to attract industries that will look at staying and growing in the southeast Nebraska region.
“We need to look at all types of manufacturing,” he said. “We have a lot of no-skill, low-skill assembly type jobs in Beatrice. There are higher skilled jobs available out there.”
Diversifying the economy is not a new concept to Schuster, who said he has been urging the local economy to diversify for the better part of a decade.
“It’s imperative for our survival that we diversify here,” he said. “We can’t continue to depend on manufacturing like we have. If we don’t, Beatrice will continue to shrink and fail as a community.”
John DeHardt, managing principal of the Husqvarna building with Kessinger Hunter in Kansas City, Mo., said a building like Husqvarna’s typically holds two types of industry: manufacturing and distribution.
According to DeHardt and Gage County Economic Development director Terri Dageford, while a distribution warehouse set up in the Husqvarna building would provide jobs, numbers would be down significantly from the 230 permanent and over 100 temporary jobs at Husqvarna.
“Manufacturers naturally have more jobs and is more labor intensive,” DeHardt said. A distribution warehouse would employ as many as 30, he estimates.
Also, DeHardt said a study of distribution routes across the country might indicate Beatrice to be a less-than-ideal location for a large-scale distribution industry.
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