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Sunday’s front page of The Goshen News outlines the economic uncertainty Elkhart County continues to struggle with. Two years ago, when the bottom dropped out from under our seemingly invincible recreational vehicle industry, we knew it was going to hurt for a little while. Well, it’s been a little while and it still hurts.
This weekend, however, the Midwest RV Super Show in downtown Elkhart showcased how the RV industry does seem to be finding its traction once again. But it’s nowhere near back to highway speed just yet. If anything, the Super Show illustrates the chasm between what was and what is. What will be has yet to be determined.
According to the RVIA, a record 390,500 RV units were shipped in 2006. Last year a little more than 165,000 units were shipped, down 30 percent from 2008. Up through 2008, the RV Super Show was held in our area for 54 consecutive years. It was flat out cancelled in 2009 before returning this year in a much smaller scale to downtown Elkhart. The venue had routinely been the Elkhart County 4-H Fairgrounds here in Goshen and included a large RV rally. There was no rally this year.
And that’s the good news. The Elkhart County Council essentially announced Saturday that it will lose about $3.5 million in revenue from option income tax sources. It doesn’t take an MIT economist to deduct that jobs and programs will be lost as a result. There is less money to go around and that must be dealt with appropriately by our local public spending units. Private money also continues to take a beating, as anyone who has been paying attention to the markets can tell you.
Unemployment numbers are trickling in the right direction, but there are fewer people looking for jobs and many more who are simply underemployed because of reduced hours, cut shifts and mandatory unpaid furloughs.
It is good to be optimistic, but it’s also important to be realistic. We’ve tried to look through our rose-colored glasses as much as possible when producing this page, but even then it’s impossible not to bear witness to the fact that job creation here continues to languish, unemployment is still substantial and our local governments are scrambling to protect basic services. Our financial belts must be tightened to get through this, because counting on waking up one day and having things like they once were simply isn’t logical thinking.
