Last year, nearly 140 businesses considered making Johnson County their new home, a record year for the county.
In the end, 17 of those businesses chose to come here.
Businesses are showing a significant interest in Johnson County because of an improving economy, the central location of Indiana being good for shipping, easy access to the interstate and the investments local communities have made in infrastructure and recreational amenities, said Dana Monson, the interim executive director of the Johnson County Development Corp.
In the past year, the county has seen an increase in the number of initial calls, or leads, from companies interested in potentially relocating to or expanding in Johnson County. Last year, 137 businesses were interested in Johnson County, compared to 118 in 2016 and 115 in 2015, she said.
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Click here to purchase photos from this galleryMonson attributed the increase to a variety of factors. Overall, the economy is doing well, which is leading businesses to be more willing to invest in expanding. Locally, Johnson County is in a prime location in Indiana with good access to Interstate 65, she said.
The biggest challenge that remains is having a workforce that has the proper training and skills to support new businesses, she said.
With the county unemployment rate hovering around 3 percent, the ability to attract employees to a community is critical for businesses, Monson said. That means factors such as school quality, the housing market and recreational amenities are of huge importance when a business is making the final decision between a handful of locations.
“One of their biggest things that they are looking for is communities where people want to live and belong,” she said.
When companies first approach the agency expressing interest in coming to Johnson County, some of the initial questions they ask aren’t about tax breaks or zoning rules, but about how many parks and trails a community has, and whether the housing market has good quality homes that new employees moving to the area will be able to purchase, she said.
“That has been something we’ve heard for a while,” Greenwood City Council President Mike Campbell said. “Companies want places employees want to live.”
Quality of life and the ability to attract employees for new businesses is something that Greenwood city officials consider with projects, including the Freedom Springs Aquatic Center that opened in 2015 or the current plans to add trails along Madison Avenue when that road is rebuilt, he said.
Recently, the Johnson County Development Corp. has been working with local communities to get funding for a plan to build a county-wide trail network, Monson said.
Since 2015, Greenwood, Bargersville and Trafalgar have all taken steps to require home developers to raise the quality of the houses they are building.
“It is showing communities care about themselves and take pride in themselves,” Monson said.
The efforts of local communities to invest in infrastructure also plays a large role in attracting new companies, she said.
For example, in Greenwood, the Worthsville Road interchange on I-65 helped spur the creation of a 350-acre business park nearby. In Franklin, the city’s redevelopment commission approved spending $1.3 million to create a new road to provide better access to 68 acres of land inside the city’s business park, which had been difficult to develop due to the lack of infrastructure.
In past years, the Johnson County Development Corp. has run into a situation where prospective companies have approached them seeking a building to move into, only to be told that nothing suiting their needs was available in the county. Now, after 10 shell buildings have been built or planned in both Greenwood and Franklin the past several years, the county has more than 1 million square feet of building space that is either complete or in the construction process, she said.
Current spaces that are available include two 500,000-square-foot shell buildings in Greenwood and a 50,000-square-foot shell building in Franklin.
Monson expects the number of companies expressing interest in the county to continue to increase. With the ability now to find immediate locations, 2018 could be another year with sizable new business investments, she said.
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The Johnson County Development Corp. works to attract businesses looking to move or expand to Johnson County. Here’s a look at the number of businesses that have expressed interest in moving to the county, how many of those took that step and how much money those businesses invested in projects:
Businesses interested
- 2017: 137
- 2016: 118
- 2015: 115
Projects started
- 2017: 17
- 2016: 12
- 2015: 14
Business investment
- 2017: $104 million
- 2016: $44 million
- 2015: $26 million
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