Made in the USA. You need to pull your head out. Face what is fact.
If it wasn't for the packing plants, this would be a ghost town compared to what it is now.
Lets say tomarrow you could flip a switch. No Hispanics, no plants. GONE.
By Friday, 1/3 of the small business in
DC would be thinking about it real hard. That is, what are we going to do.
It goes on an on. You can have the Dodge City that was here before the plants were. "we were doing fine" Without what you have now, the biggest thing here is ag. Look at what it is doing. There are businesses here that have more than 30 employees, a dozen or so.
Cut your fast food joints in 1/2. Cut Bogners profit of beer sales in 1/2 or more. Taxes would suck. Take the business away, take the people away, do you think those who have been making desisions lately are going to cut back. NO, they would eventually have to do so, but they are not going to want to do that.
Folks this is huge. Once a town has a business as such in place and it removed, many thing suffer. As mentioned before, it trickles down.
I would hate to think what would happen if you just removed the workers.
I like it here, I don't like everything about it that is for sure. Dodge City is a small town in my world. I have worked with towns 3 times this size, and the impact of taking something away, or trying to replace workers in this enviorment is never a good thing. It has a huge impact on everything. It just keeps rolling down hill.
On another note. Install the Ethonal plant here. What impact does that have with the plants in place and nothing changed about Dodge. It is simple. The Ethonal plant will further starve our water situation. The packing plants use, per head, per day, in each plant, 1500 gallons per head to process that beef. That is a lot of water being used already.
Install a water starving Ethonal plant, and we have a water problem the following summer. Can't water our grass, because we are trying to make Ethonal. There is no benifit to Ethonal as it stands right now. It will take taxpayers $.55 per gallon to produce it, let alone the 3 gallons of water per gallon of usable Ethonal. It doesn't create many jobs. It takes about 6 people, give or take a couple to run it. The rest are truck drivers, and at the estimated 40 drivers, not many of them will live in Dodge. The Ethonal situation needs to evolve more before it is profitable, resorce managable, overall a replacement for foreign oils.
The casino stands to have a huge impact on the area. I have not researched this at this point, but I have some actual fact numbers from the Topeka area casino's before and after. It will take some time to pull them, and break it down.