What is your viewpoint on jobs in Northwest Indiana?
I look for people that are selfless leaders. We need more selfless leadership in Northwest Indiana. People that want to step up and work together. People who want to be inclusive, consider other people’s ideas and to take value in those ideas trying to understand where this other person is coming from. Because particularly if they’re passionate about it, it might not necessarily be a bad thing. It could be a very good thing. But you have to have the opportunity also to present your own ideas in a passionate way - in the right form - to be considerate of each other and then find out how to make something happen that you all believe in.
No matter how small or big the group is. Hopefully we can get an absolute army of people pushing the region forward because I would like to see this region consider itself more as region of opportunity than a region of where you get a free lunch.
We have tremendous resources here with Lake Michigan, the commuter rail, the confluence of our roads, our freight infrastructure, the Dunes National Lakeshore. Just asset after asset after asset that so many other communities don’t have. We are not doing enough to take advantage of those assets and really improve our region's economy and quality of life.
I get a chance in our territory too - and this is one of the values that Diane and I bring to the table - to see a lot of stuff. When you’re in thirty counties you can say right away who has the best assets and who is more challenged. You also get a chance to see different styles of leadership, who’s more effective and who’s not. We can do some coaching we can do some cheering. We can just say “Hey you guys are on your own, you don’t need any help. Great.” But if there is somebody that needs help and they’re all truistic in where they’re trying to go and they can get some people behind them, we are in. We are all in.
For example, we are big supporters of the Northwest Indiana Forum. The Forum, under the leadership of Mike Maassel and with the support of our board and his staff, are really beginning to turn around Northwest Indiana’s culture and proving ourselves that we can put things together.
Try to look back in history a little bit. The steel mills are here because they had proximity to the midwest. They actually took a bunch of marsh and land and put mills on it and created steel. Now, one thing that people don’t think about is that we used to have wooden plows. Wooden plows didn’t work real well in Midwest clay. If somebody builds a plow out of steel... geez that’s marketable. So we started building plows and farm equipment. Now about 25% of our steel goes into making cars, so thank goodness we still have an American car industry here.
Let’s say for example if all the Automotive jobs started going overseas and they weren’t buying any of our steel, you might lose 25% of your steel output. Maybe you’d lose 25% out of 18,000. Maybe you’d lose four or five thousand jobs here. So one of the things we need to continue to focus on is building better and better and better products and expect to be able to do that. Let’s use our Universities like Purdue Calumet, Purdue North Central, Notre Dame, Purdue Lafayette, IU Northwest, Ivy Tech or St. Jo College etc.
We have such great institutions here. We have got to get into the minds of young people and have them believe that tomorrow will be better. We also need to talk to parents about having their children believe that “I can get a job” instead of washing cars at the carwash or flipping burgers or taking tickets some place for an amusement ride. To think about creating something, building something. There’s room for many many types of jobs in Northwest Indiana but our focus has got to be on creating better and better products that can compete in a world market and getting people believing that they can actually produce those products.”