Published in the Carlisle Sentinel

July 20, 2013

Procter & Gamble’s decision to build a distribution center near Shippensburg and create nearly 1,000 new jobs is a vote of confidence for our region. For all its faults, Pennsylvania’s pro-business policies bode well against neighboring New York and Maryland. That major employers take notice of that is encouraging.

On Thursday, Procter & Gamble said it would move into a 1.7 million-square-foot distribution center under construction in Southampton Township, Franklin County. The $93 million facility will employ four to six managers and 950 contracted employees. The consumer-goods manufacturer says the Shippensburg site is ideally situated between its massive plant near Scranton and a manufacturing facility in Maryland.

It’s the latest in a string of positive economic news for the Shippensburg area, with Volvo expanding its local facility by $100 million and Brazilian manufacturer Wipro Infrastruture Engineering bringing 74 jobs to Chambersburg. Gov. Tom Corbett rightly credits the state’s relatively pro-business policies as luring major manufacturers to Pennsylvania.

He’s absolutely right.

Huge swaths of neighboring states, including upstate New York, have all but given up on manufacturing jobs. With few exceptions, growth there has come from the small-business sector. The days of mass employers moving in are long gone, many economic developers say. Yet in Central Pennsylvania, our economy is robust across sectors — farming, retail, small business, manufacturing and increasingly in distribution centers.

We enthusiastically welcome Procter & Gamble to our community, and we appreciate the hard work of the Corbett administration to incentivize the company’s move to Shippensburg.

(Editorial Board, "Our View: Pro-business policies paying off,"Carlisle Sentinel, 07/20/13)