LIMA — Dome’s Nut Shop in downtown Lima doesn’t look much different than it did 43 years ago.
A classic popcorn machine, cones of pink cotton candy, jars full of nuts, and walls adorned with Looney Tunes characters greet customers inside the business at 130 N. Main St. since 1976. Glenn Dome, the family-owned nut and candy shop’s third-generation owner, might offer visitors a sample of pickled watermelon rind, or whatever other experiment he’s working on in the back.
Mr. Dome’s grandfather bought the business in 1938, back when the store was a simple walk-up window just across the street from its current location. Generations — in some cases, as many as five — of Lima families have frequented the shop over the years.
Mr. Dome has spent his whole life in Lima, and for four decades he’s largely sold the same candy and and the same nuts to the same faces. The customer stream fluctuates day to day, but it’s steady overall.
But even as his business has remained relatively unchanged over the years, Mr. Dome has watched his city change around him.
Lima, the seat of Allen County, was once known as a sort of industrial stronghold. More recently it has experienced its fair share of hard times. As it faces a continuing decline in population — nearly 54,000 people lived in the city in 1970, while the number was 37,000 in 2018 — Lima finds itself at a turning point.
Once fighting to keep large companies in the region to preserve the community’s industrial jobs, the Lima of today — home to manufacturing giants like Procter and Gamble, Ford Motor Co., and General Dynamics, and a regional health-care hub with the presence of Lima Memorial Hospital and Mercy Health St. Rita’s Medical Center — is in the opposite situation: Jobs are plentiful, but workers have become a precious commodity.
Attempts to attract and retain young people in the region, from connecting teenagers with well-paying jobs right out of high school to sprucing up the city’s downtown area, raise important questions for the small Rust Belt city: What is it that Lima has to offer? What does it stand to offer in the future? How can the community tell its story in a way that will compel people to make and spend their lives in Lima?
Middle America, lost and found
While Dome’s has remained a community mainstay largely unaffected by the wider trends in Lima life and business, Lima-based Superior Credit Union has felt firsthand its city’s ups and downs.
Founded in 1954 by 20 employees of the Superior Coach Co. — a school bus and funeral hearse manufacturer based in Lima since 1915 that once employed a large swath of the city’s workers — Superior Credit Union began as a small venture running out of the inside of the Superior Coach plant on East Kibby Street.
“At that point in time, when you built things — when it came to vehicles and small engines — this was one of the hubs of the country,” Kurt Neeper, Superior’s senior vice president of business development, said.
But the golden days of manufacturing could last only so long. Lima hit a major economic rough spot in the 1980s as “everything fell apart ...,” said Phil Buell, the credit union’s current president and CEO. Superior Coach went out of business in 1981, and other major local employers like Westinghouse and Clark Equipment closed their doors in Lima around the same time.
After Superior Coach closed, the 2,500-member credit union lobbied for and received a community charter after merging with the 1,000-member Circle Diamond Credit Union, the credit union for Clark Equipment. It soon began to merge with more and more employee credit unions in the area and to expand its member base throughout the dismal decade.
Since Lima hit its low in the ‘80s, both the city and the credit union have continued on an upward trajectory, credit union leaders said. Lima slowly pulled itself out of its economic slump as Superior steadily grew and expanded. And while the Great Recession of the late 2000s presented economic setbacks, the damage wasn’t anywhere near what hit the town two decades prior.
“We were hurting before hurting was cool,” said Keith Eiden, executive vice president of sales and lending at Superior.
Yet even though the economy has been doing well, the credit union and the people who run it have seen pattern shifts in the past few years — in particular, the effects of a workforce shortage.
When Mr. Eiden took his position in the early ‘90s, he often dealt with members who were struggling to find jobs.
“Now, I’m dealing with the businesses on the other side that are just screaming they can’t get people,” Mr. Eiden said.
Mr. Neeper pointed out that Lima also does not seem to have the housing capacity it should given the employment opportunities. Superior’s real estate subsidiary, Superior PLUS Realtors, often sees residential properties enter and leave the market within a matter of days because of a high demand for housing, he said.
The number of available jobs within a 10-mile radius of the city has tended to fluctuate between 1,200 and 1,800 in recent years, Mayor David Berger said, showing a sustained pattern that community leaders expect to continue.
“We haven’t had this strong of an economy for more than 40 years, and that’s good,” Mr. Berger said. “It’s good to have the problem of actually having more jobs than we have people. … We’ve done this whole range of actions to address that, and I think over time those will prove to be viable, sustainable solutions.”
City leaders are framing the workforce issue as an opportunity for Lima’s next generation to jump into a stable career right out of high school.
Among these efforts is a new program that places jobs counselors in every high school to help students understand the steps involved with a jobs search. The program supplements schools’ existing resources like guidance counselors, said Joe Patton, the director of Allen County’s chapter of Ohio Means Jobs.
MakerFest is an effort coordinated by Allen Economic Development Group, Link Lima/Allen County, and Ohio Means Jobs. The fall event, now in its fifth year, allows Lima students to connect with local employers for advanced manufacturing, design, engineering, and the skilled trades — the sort of career paths that don’t require a four-year degree.
Last year, MakerFest hosted more than 100 employers and drew 1,200 students from more than 30 schools, Greater Lima Region Inc. President and CEO Doug Olsson said. Event organizers anticipate an even higher turnout this year, he said, and have planned to relocate the job fair from its old venue at the Lima Civic Center downtown to the larger Allen County fairgrounds.
And while these measures combat Lima’s workforce shortage “in an aggressive and deliberate way,” Mr. Berger said, it has not yet reached a point where they can be declared successful.
To do so, the city must face another roadblock: While many locals will point to a slew of benefits their hometown has to offer — low cost of living, convenient traffic, a family-oriented atmosphere — Lima becomes a more difficult sell when its young people leave the community to go to college or otherwise explore the world.
A perception problem
When Jennifer Brogee was in high school, any sense of Lima pride was pretty much non-existent.
“I don’t know statistically what it would be, but most of my friends that went to college elsewhere did end up moving out of town,” Mrs. Brogee said. “To stay here was, in your high school mind, not considered successful.”
Despite the prevailing mentality, she returned to be near family after spending her college years in Indiana. Mrs. Brogee is part-owner of the Meeting Place on Market, a downtown coffee shop and co-working center that she began with her parents in 2003.
Now that she’s been running a local small business, Mrs. Brogee recognizes the pros of the town: low cost of living, a great community, a vibrant arts scene, “fun, quirky little events.” In her view, Lima is a place with potential.
But years after Brogee left high school, Lima pride still isn’t ubiquitous.
Amanda Chrisman, 25, met her boyfriend at Ohio Northern University and bought a house with him in Lima three years ago.
While Miss Chrisman grew up in a smaller town with less to do and acknowledges that Lima does have some interesting offerings — bowling, drive-in movies, local bars, live music downtown on Friday evenings — she still doesn’t see the city as a particularly special place to live.
“If you would compare this to Findlay, I think people would rather go Findlay,” she said of the nearby city. “I guess there's not a lot that attracts people to Lima. If I didn’t have to move here, I would not be here.”
Ultimately, negative impressions of Lima are something that lifetime locals like Superior’s Mr. Neeper chalk up to insufficient community promotion.
“I think sometimes we’re our own worst enemy in that regard,” Mr. Neeper said. “The kids, they graduate high school, we didn’t do a great job of promoting the community to them before they left and went to college and saw another community and said, ‘Oh this is great.’ Columbus, for example.”
Still many people are investing in the town’s future and see positive things to come.
New businesses have opened downtown in recent years, and there are plans to spruce up the downtown district even further, said chamber of commerce President Jed Metzger. Rhodes State College has plans to move downtown, more new small businesses — which Mr. Metzger calls the “engine” of the town and its economy — are in development, and a new $1 million downtown amphitheater is also in the works.
But for Mr. Berger, improving the city and promoting Lima and other similar Ohio communities inside and outside the region shouldn’t be just a local effort.
Relative to other states in the country, Ohio is “falling behind,” he said, and politicians in Columbus need to “prime the pump” by creating programs and initiatives to allow Ohio to become a better place to live and improve its reputation, thereby stimulating population growth across the state.
“I think for a long time, it’s just not been seen as a priority for the state to attack that mindset,” Mr. Berger said. “Because, I think, folks in Columbus see what’s going on in Columbus and they think it’s cured. They think what’s going on in Columbus is happening throughout the state. You walk out the door, you drive around for 20 minutes, you see everything booming.
“And I’m not putting down what’s going on in my community, because I know how well we’re doing relative to what we were. But I’m telling you that that sense of vibrancy that they have down there is not the sense that most people have as you’re going around the state.”
First Published September 6, 2019, 11:00 a.m.
