President's Corner

Carl Stevens, President Decatur Chamber of Commerce

I stated, in my first of these articles back in January, that the Chamber functions not unlike area households as we all are affected by the economic environment we operate in. At the same time there seemed to be a guarded sense of optimism in our community as we were beginning to see some reasons for encouragement as we faced the coming year. Recent events have born this out, especially as we look at where we were a year ago.

Early this June we had our annual Chamber Golf Outing. Last year participation in this event was noticeably down as area unemployment was quite high. While this year we only had one more team participating the level of sponsorship was far more robust. This is important to the livelihood of the Chamber as it is one of our larger revenue generating projects. We didn’t make our budget, but we sure came closer than last year.

Much the same can be said of the recently concluded Motor Sports Festival. Participation, revenue and profitability were up over last year. Again we didn’t meet our targeted profitability, but we still came in much better than last year.

I mention these two recent events because they seem to me to have gone hand in hand with information our Adams County Economic Development Director, Larry Macklin, shared at our June board meeting. A year ago Adams County unemployment ranked third worst in the state. Now we rank 42nd, having recently slipped below the 10% number. Quite an improvement from a year ago! Clearly we have a long way to go to reach full employment, but we’re definitely better than at this time last year.