Stories show slow, but steady progress
By Pat Caldwell
Sunday, October 14, 2007 1:52 AM PDT
Several stories this week stood out in terms of the economic future of Ontario.
Tuesday we printed a front-page story regarding the fact the new Walgreens store in Ontario is nearly finished.
The store, a company spokesman said, will probably open after the first of the year. The store, situated on East Idaho Avenue and Goodfellow, is projected to employ more than 20 people.
Thursday we printed another front-page story about a groundbreaking for a new Holiday Inn Express along Southeast 10th Street. That project, more long-term in nature, will most likely open in July 2008.
That facility is projected to employ between 25 and 30 people. Monday, many readers will see a story regarding the new AutoZone on Fourth Street in Ontario.
That business will host a grand opening Wednesday and is, so far, projected to employ nine or so people.
All three of these stories carry a single, unified theme: jobs. Between the three new businesses there is the potential to add more than 60 jobs to the area economy.
While a fair debate about wages — we don’t know, for example, what the wage for most of these jobs will be — is valid, at the end of the day any boost in employment, however small, is a good first step in the right direction.
Will the three new business turn the economy around? Probably not. But they are solid, good first steps on the long road back to economic prosperity.
Businesses are coming to Ontario for a reason. They’re simply not arriving out of a vacuum. They’re arriving in our little piece of the heartland because there is, I’ll bet, an awareness of the potential of our area.
That is good news.
Is there more hard work ahead in terms boosting the economy? Absolutely. Has enough been done? Nope. Occasionally economic development, like other sacred cows locally, can appear to be exempt from proper examination. The fact much of the economic development occurs behind a shroud of mystery does not help matters. Still, valid, compelling economic development questions should be asked, not only by the Argus Observer, but by average taxpayers as well. And elected and appointed leaders, from the county on down to the city, have an obligation to be ready with an answer.
The projects outlined on our front page this past week are just drops in the economic bucket. However, while small in terms of the big picture, they’re also very, very important. They are each, in their own way, a signal that hard work is going on by some officials to get things moving, and that is gratifying.
There are still questions to be asked (as always) and we intend to ask them. Yet the growth in Ontario should be good news to residents, even it if it seems modest.
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There are still a number of compelling stories we will be working on in the next few months. A good case in point is the small story we printed in today’s newspaper regarding West Park Plaza.
We intend to follow up with a more in-depth story later, and there are other subjects — the bio-refinery, the ongoing saga at Ontario City Hall — that we will continue to follow.
There are other stories that are just fun to do. Our story last week on the restored B-17 Flying Fortress in Boise for the week is a good example. Some could probably argue there wasn’t much news value in the story — it’s just a plane after all, right? — but I just couldn’t resist sending someone over (in this case, our Sports Editor, Scott Ford) to do a story on the plane. We are also preparing to offer some new tools to our Web site for readers. One key concept, called a “community page,” is in the development stage. Once we get the concept off the ground, I’ll deliver more news in this space and on this page.
Suffice to say we want to find another way, another avenue, to get more reader involvement.
We have some portions of our Web site, such as the blogs, that gather a huge amount of reader input nearly every day.
However, we’d like to create as many doorways for readers onto our Web site as we possibly can.
Pat Caldwell is the editor of the Argus Observer. He can be contacted at PatC@argusobserver.com
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