Fast forward to today. Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company sold or off-shored it’s U.S. manufacturing operations and moved it’s headquarters to Tennessee–today it employs no people in Broome County. IBM sold most of its local interests and now employs something like 1,200 people at one remaining location. Link Aviation has been sold and resold many times, with most of its jobs moved to Texas and other locations. Maybe you’ll understand why this area’s collective psyche has been in a permanent state of depression since the 1980s, when many of these changes occurred.

Enter natural gas. (No, this is not a punch line or joke.) It’s early days yet, but there’s quite a stir going on if you own any amount of land in this part of the country. With energy prices skyrocketing, one of the great underutilized resources in the U.S. is suddenly becoming popular and profitable–natural gas. And who woulda thunk there’s potentially a large reservoir of it sitting beneath Broome County?

Today’s Press & Sun-Bulletin provides background information about this phenomenon, along with a hint at what may be “happy days are here again” for our area. Here’s a few paragraphs from Gas drilling raises economic prospects:

Gathering the manpower and equipment to tap natural gas under the Southern Tier will continue for months and years as companies recruit qualified help for jobs ranging from land prospecting to drilling, industry sources said.

Some jobs, such as clerical help to process land deals and laborers laying pipe to carry the gas, will be local. Others, like specialized teams operating drilling rigs, will likely be brought from out of the area.

Until recently, low natural gas prices and technological limits caused a lull in the industry regionally, said Brad Gill, a spokesman for the Independent Oil & Gas Association of New York. A drop in gas prices below $3 per 1,000 cubic feet in the late 1980s and through the 1990s “decimated our industry,” he said. Consequently, prospecting slowed, infrastructure development lagged and jobs dwindled.

Prices have since more than tripled, and new technology and current geological models have led to a rush to tap the Marcellus Shale formation. It’s the largest untapped natural gas reserve in the country and it extends under the Southern Tier and Pennsylvania.

Everything is suddenly changing, as companies race to catch up.

The article goes on to say that one energy company, XTO Energy of Fort Worth, TX, is about to sign a land deal with 300 local landowners in the Deposit, NY area worth $90M! Wow. And this is just the beginning. Maybe happy (economic) days are returning to our area! Too soon to tell. What we have right now are hopes that these prospecting companies will find some good veins or deposits. Perhaps the naming of Deposit all those years ago was a prescient act.

Let’s hope the socialist politicians in this area don’t tax the profits into the ground, and let’s hope the drilling companies start pulling natural gas out of the ground.

Technorati Tags: Broome County, Broome County history, Binghamton, natural gas, natural gas drilling, Marcellus Shale, Deposit NY

It also got me to thinking that perhaps I should write a few posts about the benefits of living and working in Greater Binghamton (or Broome County), NY. This is the first of those posts.

A big reason people may want to locate in our lovely area is geography–or more precisely, our proximity to other areas. There are two major food distribution companies in our region: Willow Run Foods and Maines Paper & Food Service. They both have contracts with restaurant chains throughout the northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions of the U.S. Penguin Publishing has a huge printing and warehouse facility here. And the United States Postal Service has a Hub and Spoke Program (HASP) located here–one of only 10 in the entire country–where mountains of mail come in, get sorted, and shipped back out each night. Why? Location.

Greater Binghamton is located at the intersection of three major highways: Interstates 81 & 88, and NY State Route 17 (soon to be renamed Interstate 86). If you take a compass and put its point on Binghamton and draw a circle around Binghamton that reaches 100 miles, you’ll see Albany, Syracuse, Rochester and Scraton-Willkes Barre. If you go out to 200 miles, you’ll include New York City, Philadelphia and Buffalo. And at 300 miles you get Boston, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Ottawa and Montreal. So within a five hour drive, you will hit better than half of the population of the East Coast.

Another staggering number…if you go out to 750 miles from Binghamton, you’ll get fully one-half of the United States and Canada’s: population, personal income, skilled workers, and business establishments. If “location” is the key to great real estate, Binghamton is in the cat-bird seat. Major highways, a very good regional airport (and close proximity to other airports), and half the country’s markets where you can sell your goods and services. Greater Binghamton has it all.

Come on in, the water’s warm!

Technorati Tags: Binghamton, Broome County, economic development, business relocation, best places to live