Ashley is one of those sleepy little blink-and-you-might-miss-it kind of towns — except for the enormous yellow-gold smiley face on the water tower that beams down on its 1,010 residents and passers-by along nearby Interstate 69.
Today, that smile has never been more appropriate after the announcement that a $70-million, 815,000-square-foot Family Dollar Stores Inc. distribution center will be built in town, bringing with it 350 jobs by 2012. Coupled with several other projects, the number of employed in the town that straddles Steuben and DeKalb counties will swell nearly 50 percent to 1,600.
And yet, on a recent Tuesday, Town Planner Randy McEntarfer, a 57-year-old Ashley native, and 66-year-old longtime local business stalwart Wayne Klink weren’t smiling. They were crying, quietly. The kind of crying that leaves a person momentarily speechless. For them, the tears were a sudden, overwhelming mix of love of community, a victory hard won and a pride for a sleepy little town that could.
“Some towns go to sleep and never wake up,” McEntarfer said, struggling for words. “We’re going to stay awake.”
“That’s just me,” said Klink, owing his tears to an inherent sentimentality. “Just the community. Just the relationships.”
What McEntarfer and Klink see for Ashley with the impending arrival of Family Dollar at the southeast corner of I-69 and County Road 800 South is a renewed economic vitality for the town that may include filling roughly 20 vacant homes and triggering a surge in new retail and housing development to support the new employees.
“You know, you got to eat, you got to get gas, those kind of things,” said McEntarfer’s wife, Karen, who has been Ashley’s clerk-treasurer for more than 25 years.
And indeed, the Family Dollar operation will increase the level of activity in Ashley, even if all 350 employees don’t choose to live in the “Home of the Smiley Face.”
Family Dollar spokesman Josh Braverman said the state-of-the-art distribution center, which at times will house up to $40 million in inventory, will have 200 to 250 trucks moving in and out of the facility daily.
He said Family Dollar, a nearly $8-billion-a-year company with 6,800 first-run, name-brand stores in 44 states, envisions the Ashley center as a Midwest supplier and a foundation for the company’s expected retail expansion west of the Mississippi River.
Although the precise number of stores the distribution center will serve hasn’t been decided, Braverman mentioned Indiana, Ohio and Michigan as likely states to be supplied by the Ashley facility. Combined, those states have 977 Family Dollar retail outlets. The company, he said, plans to open 300 more stores throughout the country by August.
Braverman said Family Dollar chose Ashley for its 10th distribution facility over finalist Van Wert, Ohio, because of the northeast Indiana town’s ideal transportation location.
“We’ve got to be able to get in and out quickly,” he said, “and the location allows for that.”
But he said the nature of the people in the Ashley area — and particularly the cooperation of the town and the counties, which together have pledged $1.52 million for infrastructure improvements — was also a deciding factor.
Ashley, he said, is the right kind of town for Family Dollar, and the company is looking forward to contributing to the community’s future. That includes, he said, hiring as many local people as possible at unspecified wages that “will be competitive and something folks can be proud of.”
“One of the things we take pride in is being a good community partner,” Braverman said. “We really try to be responsive to the needs of the community.”
For Steuben County economic development officials — and to a larger extent for Randy and Karen McEntarfer — securing that new community partner was a lesson in patience and fortitude.
Susan Miller, assistant director of the Steuben County Economic Development Corp., said officials began discussing the possibility of the center with Family Dollar in 2006, then waited out the recession.
“They were moving forward, and all of a sudden (the project) went on hold because of the economy,” she said. “So we just kept in touch over the years and things started to turn around. Finally, they said they were ready to look again. And we were ready.”
The persistence of Ashley officials helped, too.
“Ashley is an amazing community,” said Steuben County Economic Development Corp. Executive Director Gary Nielander. “It’s absolutely one of the most aggressive communities for development I’ve ever worked with.”
Klink, president and owner of Klink Trucking Inc., who began his now-considerable business in 1965 with a single-axle, used dump truck spray-painted green, has played a part in that economic development push over the years. In the case of Family Dollar, he helped make the project possible by indirectly selling 100 DeKalb County acres to the retail giant for $2.4 million.
Klink’s trucking firm is just north of the Family Dollar site, across County Road 800 South.
“It’s kind of like family,” Klink said of the community. “Just doing what’s best for everyone. It’s not one person trying to make a big name for themselves. It’s trying to make the community better for everyone.”
That has also been the vision of the McEntarfers. Karen McEntarfer, 53, remembers that when she first became clerk-treasurer in 1980, the town was in the red, she worked from an old metal desk in her home and she didn’t have enough money for pens and pencils for town employees.
“When I’d do payroll,” she said, “it was collect the water bills so we’d have enough money in the checking account.”
Today, in part through the efforts of Karen McEntarfer and husband Randy, who served on the town council for 16 years, Ashley has gone from a town with $2 million in assessed property valuation to $44 million. The town’s offices are now in a community center that also houses an Ivy Tech Community College branch and a fitness center. And a town that once had two industries now has 11 — and is about to have 13.
In addition to Family Dollar, Randy McEntarfer said another distribution facility is poised to announce it will locate in the former Chemtura Corp. building on the southwest side of I-69 along H.L. Thompson Junior Drive, bringing with it up to 40 jobs.
At the same time, McEntarfer said, TI Automotive, which manufactures automotive brake and fuel lines, is in the process of hiring an additional 70 employees. And Klink recently opened a new contract packaging business, K-CoPack LLC, that he expects will eventually employ up to 40 people, many of them former Chemtura employees.
That’s 500 more employees working in Ashley, and there are more than 400 acres ready for development near the I-69 exchange, including a Klink-owned 85-acre parcel on the Steuben County side that has rail access.
The McEntarfers would like to think that the venerable smiley face, which regularly draws people from the interstate for a closer look, has had something to do with Ashley’s good fortunes — perhaps more for the symbolism of a friendly community than for idle curiosity’s sake.
The visage has defined Ashley in so many ways, the McEntarfers said, and the town has even produced coffee cups that display the smiley face and a quote prophetic of recent events that Karen McEntarfer said she plucked from an 1892 newspaper heralding the founding of Ashley.
The quote reads: “The golden opportunity is never offered twice; seize then the hour when fortune smiles, and duty points the way.”
“People,” said Randy McEntarfer, “just feel comfortable about Ashley, and (the smiley face) is part of it. That and the people in the community. I think visitors sense that the people in the community are very welcoming. And I think Family Dollar, from Day 1, that was the key to them coming back.”
Said the EDC’s Miller: “The smiley face is Ashley.”