Every place has a pitch for why you should live there. Mark Dobson, the CEO of the Economic Development Corp. of Elkhart County, might have the most seductive line of them all.
“Please come to Elkhart County,” Dobson likes to tell people. “We’ve got a job for you.”
That’s not hyperbole. Elkhart County has a 2.2 percent unemployment rate, the fifth-best in the U.S., and low enough to almost ensure that anyone who is capable of working can find a job.
This story by James Briggs originally appeared in the Indy Star.
Elkhart is riding a tidal wave of a boom-and-bust economy that is driven by RV manufacturing. Employers have created nearly 10,000 manufacturing jobs during the past two years, making Elkhart a virtual utopia straight out of President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign message that the economic future belongs to Americans who build things, according to the newspaper.
It’s fitting, then, that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence will appear in Elkhart today to kick off the general election campaign season with a 7 p.m. rally at North Side Middle School. They are expected to take aim at U.S. Sen. Joe Donnelly, one of the most vulnerable Democratic senators up for re-election in November, and give a boost to Republican Mike Braun, CEO of Meyer Distributing, two days after he emerged from a brutal primary campaign.
