KEARNEY — The people of Lexington. A rancher from Perkins County. Colleges and universities in the Tri-Cities.
Tyson Foods’ exit from Lexington in January eliminated more than 3,000 jobs, about a quarter of the labor force in Dawson County. But the impact of the beef plant’s departure will reverberate beyond the county’s borders and the state’s cattle economy, panelists from across Nebraska said at a forum hosted by the Flatwater Free Press.
Only one of the six panels at Friday’s daylong event, which drew 220 attendees to the historic World Theatre in Kearney, was meant to focus on Lexington after Tyson.
But over and over again, speakers from a diverse set of backgrounds invoked the town at the center of one of Nebraska’s largest-ever mass layoffs.
“When something like that happens, it impacts the entire community,” said Brooke Envick, the dean of the College of Business and Technology at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Envick was among three college administrators featured in a panel on the present and future of a college degree.
“The closing of the plant obviously doesn’t just impact those employees,” she said. “It impacts the families and the communities.”
Steve Hanson, a cattle producer from Elsie who participated in a panel on Nebraska farmers competing in a changing world, said the plant’s closure had complicated the sale of his livestock. Hanson used to ship his cattle to the Lexington plant, which was less than two hours from his feedlot.
“Now, they’re gonna get on a truck for six hours,” he said. “It’s going to change the way we operate, I think. Maybe not. We hope not. We plan on going to Cargill in Fort Morgan, (Colorado). And maybe that’s an answer. But it’s not an easy answer.”
In the panel that focused on Tyson’s departure and Lexington’s future, John McCoy, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said the closure — which eliminated jobs for 23% of Dawson County’s labor force — marked the second largest layoff in the nation in three decades.
He said the ripple effects on the town’s economy would likely cause even more job loss.
The company’s November announcement of the closure left Lexington in disbelief, said Rocio Casanova, a town librarian. Hundreds of Tyson employees left Lexington even before the plant closed in January.
“I thought it was a big lie,” Casanova said at Friday’s forum. “And then when I realized it was true … my first thought was, ‘What am I going to do to help everyone who works there?’ It took me a while to realize that I was not going to be able to help everyone in my community — or have everyone in my community stay.”
3 Comments
““Now, they’re gonna get on a truck for six hours,” he said.”
Why is that? There’s a brand new packing plant in North Platte!
Why the chicken little act?
““When something like that happens, it impacts the entire community,” said Brooke Envick, the dean of the College of Business and Technology at the University of Nebraska at Kearney”
It sure does, and so, why did the leaders in Lexington not diversify its economy in the past 30-40 years? Was the exit of Sperry New Holland in 1985 not a clue as to what could happen when a MAJOR employer leaves?
Sorry, Lexington mostly brought this on itself.
North Platte isn’t a complete slaughter facility, for one thing, and it isn’t nearly as large. As far as diversifying, that’s easier said than done. The town’s leaders likely can’t answer that. It sounds good, but–
When a community relies on a counterfeiting labor force, failure is inevitable.