By JAMES BELL
Hays Post
Grow Hays executive director Doug Williams recently shared an Ellis County economic recap during the final quarterly luncheon of the year.
And while no groundbreaking surprises were presented during the hour-long event, Williams shared with the crowd some of the challenges that came to light in 2021 and some of the opportunities that also were presented.
"To say it's been a challenging year, a couple of years, would be an understatement," Williams said.
But he said looking forward to 2022 and beyond, Ellis County has the potential to face those challenges.
"I think we need to be thinking longer-term than maybe we have in the past as we try and deal with the world as it is today, which is a whole lot different than the world that was yesterday," Williams said.
That thinking is exactly what Grow Hays is all about, he said.
"Every time I go back and talk about...what do we do this year, I go back to our mission," Williams said. "And so how do we fulfill our mission and our mission is business creation, business retention and expansion, and business recruitment."
Over the year, events such as the Robert E. Schmidt Entrepreneurship Series, the Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge, the Think Like an Entrepreneur Class and Think Tank Group helped with those efforts.
And he said Brief Space, the co-working space operated by Grow Hays remains a powerful tool to assist in business development.
Over the year, he said usage of the facility has increased, with students from Fort Hays State University utilizing the space and podcasting tools, while more and more other area entrepreneurs, including some established business owners, are also coming to utilize the building for various purposes.
"We keep continuing trying to create this environment, this community of entrepreneurship because it's critically important that we grow our own," Williams said. "We can't count on necessarily recruiting people from outside. We continue to do that, but we also have to grow our own."
"And then we go to a community loan program. We currently have 25 loans out to small businesses, about $600,000 in volume. We service those, and we make more loans each year in that program," Williams said.
Next year those efforts will be expanded, he said, as events like their Pitch It series are set to return.
Another continuing focus of the organization is succession planning.
"We work consistently on succession planning," Williams said. "We believe it's really important that we have stories like Northwestern printers, or Werth Plumbing Heating, as opposed to Goodwin Sporting Goods or some things like that. We wan want succession versus closure in a business."
Key to those efforts, however, is housing for workers in those businesses. He said on that front, much work remains.
"We've done a lot in the area of housing," he said. "Our Heart of America, our RHID addition, currently, we have 10 homes under construction, actually, at various stages, some of them actually coming up out of the ground, which is great."
He said homes in the new development are critical to meet the community's housing needs, but also so the developers can recoup building costs and begin working on more housing projects.
The homes in that project will help, but Williams said other ongoing construction, as well as future plans for multi-family housing to be built, will be vital.
Among the projects he noted, was the repurposing of the former St. Joesph school into apartments, and additional construction at the Ellis Estates.
Plans in the works for a retiree community near Hays Med also continue to develop.
"We're working on it," Williams said. " One step forward, two steps back, but we're still confident that can happen and will happen."
Looking ahead
As development continues, Williams shared with the group efforts to establish long-term planning for Ellis County are moving ahead full-throttle.
"We have a new committee called the Imagine Ellis County committee which is committed to promoting growth in Ellis County," Williams said. "We've got a couple of grants to tell our story."
He said videos on Ellis County have been developed, highlighting the benefits of living in the area.
Helping in the effort to recruit and retain businesses, Grow Hays this year also hired a new director of recruitment and retainment.
David Clingan was hired in the role earlier this month and will begin in the role on Jan. 3.
"We were very fortunate, and thank you to the city of Hays and Ellis County," Williams said. "They both stepped up to the plate this year with some funding for our organization to allow us to hire... And we're expecting big things."
A key component of that recruitment is having the workforce and, even setting housing shortages aside, regional population decline could dampen the ability of Hays to maintain the level of businesses currently supported.
"And as I look forward, there's one obvious, in my opinion, elephant in the room, and this may be a little beyond 2022, but if we look at the population trends for western Kansas...northwest Kansas shrank by .62 percent," Williams said. "And that's our trade area. So we've got a situation where we're growing just a little bit or holding our own, (while) our trade area is shrinking. And that's not a good combination."
Work needs to be done now to ward off regional population decline.
"If we want to grow that workforce, we really got to start thinking about some things we have to do and what we have to be more proactive about," Williams said.
But as more and more people are looking to leave urban areas in favor of more rural areas, he said he is hopeful the housing concerns can be addressed soon enough to capture that potential workforce.
"We have an opportunity here that is kind of unique in the next 10 years. [There are] some statistics that talk about, there's going to be up to 20 million people migrating from urban areas to rural areas... We need to make sure that we're in a position to capture those urban migrators, at least a share."
Even with the challenges, Williams said he felt the year was productive for the organization as it looks ahead.
"I think we had a really good year. There's certainly a lot of things I wish we had done faster and gotten more done, but hopefully, that's always the case," Williams said. "So now we look forward to 2022."