How did you get involved with NIPSCO?
“The wonderful part for me was I really got interested in the energy business. So through a number of jobs all across Northern Indiana over many, many years I got a lot of experience within the territory. We cover more or less the Northern third of the state. I’ve been here, as I said, a very long time - this is our 100 year anniversary as you know - but we have the absolute best management team we’ve had in our company since I’ve been here.
Over the last two or three years, particularly with Jimmy Staton’s leadership and now Jim Stanley’s leadership we couldn’t have a better management team that cares about our customers, cares about our employees, the environment and about building our economy.”
How was 2012 for NIPSCO?
“You know what was great about 2012? We had some base hits and we had some home runs. One of the home runs I would argue is the Inland Logistics Port in Kingsbury. That’s going to literally connect us to the world with our products from the midwest and bringing products in from outside to the midwest more efficiently than anybody else does it.
We also have examples like Paul Wurth Engineering in Valparaiso. 40 engineers that design the best steel producing equipment in the world. They are going to help our steel mills be even more efficient. The Ratner Steel at the Port of Indiana was announced. The Urschel Labs recently announced that he’s going to stay in Porter County. Here’s a company that produces some of the finest food processing equipment in the world and could go anywhere they want and they decided to stay in Porter County. What a victory for us.
A few years back we had Canadian National announced in Gary, Modern Forge announced in Merrillville, MonoSol, they’re on their 5th expansion in LaPorte. We have a lot of really great things happening around here and people say ‘we can do it’.
How do you feel about the RDA?
“I’m a huge, huge fan of the RDA. You know this was a concept that even Bill Sheldrake - I give him credit for - with Policy Analytics talked about at the Port of Indiana - I remember back around late 90’s, early 2000’s - about having a regional authority with funding behind it that could invest in capital projects. So the concept of the Northwest Indiana RDA was created. Governor Daniels got behind it, a lot of our legislators got behind it.
Ultimately we got legislation where we would take $14,000,000 of casino dollars, $3,500,000 of seeded funds from Porter County and combine the two to have $17,500,000 of regional money within the two counties and then complemented with another $10,000,000 from the state. So you have a pool of $27,500,000 to work with on an annual basis and you can work on catalytic projects like extending the runway at the Gary/Chicago airport, like extending more access to Lake Michigan with the market plan which our Congressman has championed for so long. What a great concept. We’re sitting here on the fresh coast and nobody can get to it. So, there needs to be more access there.
The Portage Park is just a phenomenal park on the shores of Lake Michigan. It was done with RDA money. It wouldn’t have ever been done because we couldn’t have gotten enough political support to get enough money to do the deal. It’s nestled right next to US Steel and the Burns Waterway. The park itself actually used to be a place where there was a lot of waste years ago deposited there from the steel mills. It was pickling types of materials. That all had to be cleaned up so we cleaned all of this stuff up and now we’ve got a beautiful park in the Dunes. If you haven’t been there you have got to get to the Portage Park. Ultimately we are going to also connect the Burns Waterway to where you may be able to buy a canoe or boat at Bass Pro and be able take it down and get it to Lake Michigan for a tryout. So that is someplace in the works down the road.
What the RDA has done is created a funding source. Without a funding source you can’t make big deals happen. It’s very hard from a political standpoint to get multiple communities to work together on big projects. So having a common funding source at the two-county level with again, great leadership with Bill Hanna our previous chairman, Leigh Morris their board of directors put countless hours in to really work hard at making some catalytic projects come to fruition.
It’s exciting and it’s creating excitement. We’ve got a legion flying in and out of the Gary/Chicago airport now, the runway’s going to be completed here at the end of 2012, we’re cleaning up the Little Cal River and the Calumet River. Northwest Indiana, we’re coming back!”