City to Move Forward on Schoolhouse Restoration

A timely donation of $25,000 from local philanthropist Charles Todd has allowed the City of Columbia to move forward on pursuing a grant to fund restoration of the Shoemaker Schoolhouse as a new Monroe County Welcome Center. The Columbia City Council will vote Monday evening whether or not to authorize the submission of an application to the State of Illinois to provide roughly half of the funds needed to complete the nearly $59,000 project. Todd's donation--along with "in kind" contributions from the City and volunteers--will provide the matching funds needed for the grant.

The project will renovate a one-room schoolhouse built around 1850 for use as a facility to serve visitors. The schoolhouse is located on Illinois Route 3, the Great River Road Scenic Byway and—much earlier--the Kaskaskia Trace, in Columbia, three miles southeast of I-255.

Since Illinois 3 is the first exit for travelers crossing the Jefferson Barracks Bridge into the state, visitor use of the facility, when open, is expected to be high. The Tourism Bureau Southwest Illinois estimates that the Welcome Center could, conservatively, generate $50,460 per month in economic impact or $605,520 annually.

City Website Gets New Look

City of Columbia staff and colleagues from Monroe County participated last month in an economic development marketing workshop sponsored by the International Economic Development Council (IEDC). A major theme of that workshop was the importance of marketing communities via websites and social media; as a consequence, the City's website will be getting a facelift over the next few weeks.

According to Bob Ady of Ady International Company, 62% of corporate leaders now use community websites as their primary source for evaluation of potential sites for new locations. This is a big change from even a few years ago--a change that corresponds with the rise of site selection consultants who have multiple clients and little time. Ady observes:

If a community doesn’t have a website, the website cannot easily be found or it doesn’t have the right type of information, the consultant moves on to other communities that have the information he or she needs.

Columbia's website will be undergoing reorganization and redesign as part of the facelift. Expect to find information more easily--and find more of it--and expect more graphics, links and features.

Dow Rebounds, But Economic Signals Remain Mixed

The Dow Jones industrial average yesterday rose past the 10,000-point milestone for the first time in a year--evidence of a Wall Street rebound from the financial crisis--but fiscal woes are likely to persist, especially for state and local governments.

State tax collections across the nation from April through June dropped by a record 16.6 percent compared with the same period a year earlier, according to a report released today by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. The report observes that tax collections were down by $63 billion for the year ended in June—roughly twice the amount the states had received in stimulus money up to that point.

This dismal data highlights a hard truth: there can be a long delay between the time the economy begins to improve, as some economists believe is happening now, and the time that the change is reflected in state and local finances. Many people were out of work or earning less, income tax collections were down 27.5 percent for the quarter, and sales tax collections were off by 9.5 percent.

Will the economic climate get better soon? Not if history is any guide. While the most recent past recession officially ended at the close of 2001, states faced their worst budget crises in the two years that followed.