To mark Centralia’s 150th anniversary
two years ago, community leaders installed a big metal sign on the
rooftop of the historic Frost Building. It declares:
“Centralia Your Opportunity.”
The sign, which overlooks the old Illinois
Central railroad tracks, is a replica of one erected in the 1920s
by the local Rotary Club and taken down in the 1950s. Its message
had been credited with inspiring those passing through to give
Centralia a try. The city’s leaders hope that the new display
will deliver the same result. In recent years, this 14,000-resident
southern-Illinois town has experienced multiple negative
consequences of the emerging global economy. Centralia’s downtown storefronts are
largely empty. A tattoo parlor and a coin shop occupy prime retail
space near the main intersection. The Mercantile Bank, built in
1882, is now a music store where, says proprietor J.D. Chapman, a
former radio DJ, the biggest part of his customer base is on eBay. Centralia’s retail businesses suffered
when a succession of major employers — Meridian Automotive
Systems, Littelfuse Inc., Greif Bros. Corp., Sealed Air Corp., and
World Color Press — closed their doors between 2001 and 2003,
laying off almost 3,000 workers. Many Centralia residents who earned $14 per hour in factories two years ago now make minimum
wage working in fast-food restaurants. Other laid-off workers are
attending community-college programs, retraining for careers in health
care, technology, forklift operations, or trucking. The social impact of job losses includes
increased crime, drug use, teenage pregnancy, and demands on
churches and nonprofits to provide additional food, clothing, and
shelter. The nation’s economy is moving from
mass production to mass customization, which requires a leaner,
more skilled, and flexible workforce, says Cesar Suarez,
Centralia’s director of economic development. Factory
production that was once carried out by 50 workers is now
accomplished with 10. “Low-skill labor is going out of the
country,” Suarez says. State legislators and city leaders are taking
steps to attract new manufacturing operations, encourage
entrepreneurship, promote the region’s technology center, and
support production of alternative fuels. These efforts may require
years to bear fruit, yet many Centralians are optimistic about
their city’s future.
Centralia’s current problems began a
quarter-century ago, when the Illinois Central Railroad started
laying off employees, says Keith Brown, executive director of BCMW
Community Services, a local agency that assists the poor. Brown’s father and grandfather worked
for IC’s car shops and yards, building and repairing coal
cars, when the company employed almost 1,000 people in Centralia.
The association between the railroad and the city had always been
close: Centralia, founded at the crossroads of several major rail
lines, was named for the IC and became its division headquarters in
1910. In addition to providing passenger service
and shipping produce and manufactured products to market, the IC
provided service to 65 coal mines throughout southern Illinois,
including mines in Centralia that produced more than 5,000 tons of
coal per day. Centralia’s coal mining ended when its No. 5
Mine exploded and killed 111 workers in 1947. In the first half of the century, there was
interdependence between the coal mining and railroad industries:
The coal companies needed the railroad to ship coal tonnage across
the U.S. and Canada, and the railroad required coal to fuel its
steam locomotives. Marion County, where Centralia is located,
also experienced an oil boom in the late 1930s and ’40s,
which helped the area recover from the Depression. At its peak, the
Salem-Lake Centralia oil field was the largest producer east of the
Mississippi. In the 1960s and ’70s, as coal and the
railroad were becoming less significant to
Centralia’s economy, factories producing automotive components,
packaging, printing, and electronics moved in. In the mid-1990s,
incomes grew, and the poverty rate dropped. By 2000, the unemployment
rate was down to 4.4 percent — the lowest in a decade. And then everything started to go wrong. One
by one, the big factories started closing, and unemployment shot up
to 11 percent. For 30 months, Marion County had the highest rate of
joblessness in Illinois. “It was the second wave” to
buffet Centralia, says Geoffrey Hewings, director of the Regional
Economics Applications Laboratory and economics professor at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Between 1970 and 1990,
Illinois lost a half-million manufacturing jobs, and another
220,000 have disappeared since 1990, he says. The layoffs and closings aren’t the
result of the companies’ losing money, says Dennis Hoffman,
labor-market economist at the Illinois Department of Employment
Security in Mount Vernon, just south of Centralia. There were other
reasons they closed — some just wanted to be more profitable,
he says.
The 2004 Heartland Report on
Illinois Poverty showed that even during the prosperous 1990s, poverty increased throughout much of rural
Illinois. In 31 Illinois counties, 11 percent of residents, or more,
were living below the poverty level; 75 percent of those counties were
in the southern or southwestern region of the state. “Poverty is shifting in
Illinois,” Hoffman says. The report also showed that long-time key
industries such as agriculture, mining, and manufacturing are
leaving rural areas, exacerbating unemployment and underemployment
throughout southern Illinois. Like many rural counties, Marion
County has a labor surplus. The underground economy — for
instance, the drug trade — is on the rise, the report says. Gary Roberts, a former Meridian employee, has
given up looking for work. A tiny man with darting eyes and a
nervous manner, Roberts spends his day tending the garden on his
property, selling vegetables and fruits to motorists from a
bright-green roadside stand. At 23, Roberts and his wife, Regina, set off
from Rockford, Ill., in early 1970s to find work in Arkansas, but their
car, a ’61 Ford, broke down in Centralia. Roberts got hired
at Rockwell International, earning $2.90 per hour, and stayed for
the next 29 years, until the very end. “I kept hoping it wouldn’t
happen,” he says. “I guess it was denial.”
Roberts took a temporary job stacking boxes
at another company last year, but his supervisor said that he was
trying too hard and might have a heart attack. “I’m getting too old for that
stuff,” Roberts says. He tried to get his general education
diploma but couldn’t score high enough. Without a high-school
degree, he can’t enroll in the Dislocated Worker Program at
Centralia’s community college, Kaskaskia College, to try a
new career. At 58, Roberts isn’t old enough to draw
his pension, but he can’t get hired anywhere, either. He has
cataracts and heart problems and is without health insurance or
Medicaid. The money he earns selling produce and his wife’s
$600 disability check are the couple’s entire monthly income.
“If I’d filed for disability, I
wouldn’t be wondering how I was going to put tires on my
vehicle,” Roberts says. “Right now, I got
nothing.”
Centralia’s Salvation Army, located on
a shady residential street on the west side of the railroad tracks,
has provided basic social services to the needy for more than 100
years. Besides running a food pantry and thrift store that gives
out clothing and furniture, the Salvation Army distributes school
supplies and provides assistance with energy bills. Sharon Hall began working at the Salvation
Army five years ago, before the plant layoffs. Back then, she
distributed groceries to 200 families per month, but now she gives
out 600 bags of staple foods. “We have a bread line on Tuesdays and
Thursdays,” she says. “Of the 50 people in line, 45
families really need the food.”
“Most of the people who come to me are
people who say they have applications everywhere and can’t
get hired,” Hall says. Since welfare reform began, it is
almost impossible to get public aid, she says. To qualify, people
must attend the Illinois Employment and Training Center’s Job
Club on Tuesdays to learn interviewing skills. That doesn’t
help, she says, because there aren’t any jobs anyway. People are living in tents and in cars, Hall
says. Centralia has no homeless shelter, so some families go to
shelters in Belleville or Olney, an hour away, until they can get
employment or public aid. Centralia has a “couch”
homeless population, Hall says — people go from one relative
to another. “You can’t live if you are
working at McDonald’s, unless you have some kind of
subsidy,” she says. With limited public transportation and no
buses running after 7 p.m., most people working a night shift in
Centralia have no way to get home if they don’t have access
to a car. And without a car, it’s hard to go back to school
or arrange for child care, Hall notes. In some cases, whole
families worked at the plants that closed, so nobody had an income
to help with the transition. “People are so dug in holes that
there’s no way out,” she says. “We want to
mainstream everybody, but not everybody can be a respiratory
therapist.”
At least, people in Centralia help each
other, she says. “This is a good area when you’re in
trouble,” she says. “Centralia is a community that does
step up.”
Centralia’s employment base
is fairly diverse, with more than 1,000 state jobs and the Warren
G. Murray Developmental Center for the disabled, St. Mary’s
Good Samaritan Hospital, and the Centralia Correctional Center. Prisons have become one of the top three
employers in the state. Nearly 400 work at the Centralia
Correctional Center. The facility holds more than 1,500 inmates,
twice the number it was designed to accommodate when it was built
in 1980. When the correctional center opened, new
people began moving to Centralia, says Capt. Rick Densmore of the
Centralia Police Department. “Families moved from all over when the
prison opened,” he says. The police started seeing cocaine, Densmore
says, then crack and organized drug traffic: “It took a long
time to get that busted up.”
Half of the residents in Centralia’s
public housing are families of the prisoners, Densmore says. The
change had a big impact on local schools. “Young people are on heroin,” he
says. “We’re having accidental deaths with
overdoses.” During the past three years, the production and
use of methamphetamine, or “meth” — a powerful
central nervous system stimulant that is highly addictive —
has become the biggest drug problem. Centralia Police Chief Larry Evans says that
his officers make daily arrests for possession or manufacture of
meth. By year’s end, Centralia police will have made more
than 500 drug arrests. “Drug crimes drive other
crimes,” Evans says. “Domestics, forgeries, bad checks
are all potentially tied to a drug problem.”
The National Bank Building, built in 1866 at
the corner of Broadway and South Locust Street, has an impressive
façade with tall columns that recall a prosperous and
expansive time in Centralia’s history. The Community Resource
Center occupies the bank building now, providing social services,
including counseling for teen patients, to low-income residents. Although statistics from the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services show that the incidence of teenage
pregnancy has declined nationwide, that isn’t what Jo Ann
Glenn is seeing at the resource center. Glenn is a case manager
with the Illinois Department of Health and Human Services’
Bureau of Child and Adolescent Health. “I’m seeing junior-high kids
where it used to be high-school,” she says. Women are working
two jobs or working until midnight, she says, and the kids are
alone all night. Many girls who have come to her say that they
wanted to get pregnant to please their boyfriends. “After
they have that baby, they want to give it back,” Glenn says.
“The baby is crying, and they wonder how are they going to
make this thing stop.”
Eleven years ago, when Glenn started working
at the center, the families of the girls she counseled were living
on public aid. Now, she says, the incidence of teenage pregnancy
isn’t income- or race-related.
“Planned Parenthood is not there, so
they can’t get birth control,” she says. “How are
you going to go to the doctor if you don’t have
money?”
In Marion County, only 8 percent of the
population has a college degree. Rural counties have the highest
high-school and college noncompletion rates in the state, according
to the 2004 Heartland Report on Illinois Poverty. Thirty percent of
adults in southern Illinois read at a fifth-grade level, says
Vickie Cook, dean of continuing education at Kaskaskia College. Many of the factory workers laid off during
the recent closings were relatively young, able, and determined
enough to retrain for new careers. Those workers whose jobs were
sent overseas qualified for two full years of unemployment
benefits, making it easier for them to support themselves while
training.
Stephanie Galbreath was an assembly-line worker
earning $14 per hour when she received seven days’ notice
after 18 years of service. Like her Meridian co-workers, she was
denied severance pay as a result of the company’s bankruptcy
proceedings and qualified for just six months of unemployment
benefits. “They expect you to have a whole
life-changing event in six months,” she says.
“It’s hard to make it in a small town when all your
industry is closing down.”
Galbreath worked 20 hours a week at UPS this
past year, toiled part-time at St. Mary’s Good Samaritan
Hospital and mowed lawns while enrolled in Kaskaskia
College’s respiratory-therapy program. Her UPS job ended in
January, when the work was moved to a larger distribution center.
Despite the challenges, Galbreath earned all
A’s. She assumed that grades would make a difference on her
résumé. “I busted my ass,” Galbreath
says. “I was real stubborn — I wouldn’t give
in.”
Industrial Park No. 1, south of the city
along Route 51, is where most of Centralia’s manufacturing
plants are located. The empty Meridian plant sits across the road
from Graphic Packaging Corp., which on June 1 announced the layoffs
of 30 workers from its laminations facility. The layoffs spawned entrepreneurship. Greg
Klie and two partners, former Meridian workers, began BK Metal
Works, a die shop, in the empty shell of the old plant.
Meridian’s closing actually improved his prospects, Klie
says.
Klie began working at Rockwell right out of
high school, where he had learned business and welding. He was one
of the few promoted into Rockwell’s apprenticeship program.
Klie stayed through two ownership changes, from Rockwell to
Cambridge Industries and, finally, Meridian Automotive. Before Meridian made the formal announcement
that it would be closing, Klie obtained a $30,000 bank loan to
purchase equipment. He took on contract work from engineers who had
left to work at other manufacturing firms. Now a partnership, BK Metal Works has enough
orders to begin hiring additional workers. “We’re
getting ready to really grow here,” Klie says. Klie repaid his bank loan and purchased a new
home 20 miles away, where, he says, the schools are better.
“I never would have started my own business; I wouldn’t
have had the backbone to do it,” he says. “I was pushed
into it.”
Centralia has made some recent progress
toward revitalizing its downtown. Last spring, its City Council
pledged $250,000 in tax-increment financing monies to support the
restoration of the vacant Illinois Theatre. FGM Architects, in
Mount Vernon, was recently selected to oversee renovation of the
former movie theater, which will become a venue for small musical
and comedy productions. The theater’s marquee has been lit
for the first time in years. The Veterans of Foreign Wars Building is
undergoing a similar $500,000 renovation by a Murphysboro
dermatologist who is also real-estate developer. The retrofitted
building will house downtown business offices and retail stores. The Centralia Regional Tech Center opened a
year ago with financial assistance from the University of Illinois
and the South Central Regional Mass Transit District. Local
residents may now earn college degrees by way of online courses
from the University of Illinois, Eastern Illinois University, Rend
Lake College, or Southern Illinois University — the tech
center’s partners. The big news was an October announcement by
Midwest Agri-Energy Production of a plan to build a $73 million
ethanol plant in the oilfields between Centralia and Salem. The
plant will use methane gas emitted from the fields to achieve
energy savings while converting locally grown corn into high-grade
ethanol and high-protein livestock feed. As gas prices continue to
rise, the demand for ethanol is sure to increase. Indeck Development, a partner in the project,
will apply clean coal-burning technology, revitalizing the
area’s coal mines. Fifty jobs and an estimated $110 million
per year will directly and indirectly benefit the region, says
Chris Daniels, a member of Midwest Agri-Energy Production’s
board. Another energy project, still in the
conceptual stage, is a billion-dollar facility at Rend Lake, 40
miles from Centralia, which would convert coal to synthetic natural
gas. That project has the potential to generate 300 coal-mining
jobs, 150 administrative jobs, and 1,000 spinoff jobs, says Kurt
Granberg, D-Carlyle, state representative in the 107th District of
Illinois, who has been working to get the deal approved. In a crazy twist of circumstances,
Centralia’s seemingly outmoded resources — railroads,
oil fields, coal mines and cornfields — have coalesced to
presage what could lead to a brighter future in the new economy. But if anything guarantees hope for this
small Midwestern city, it will be the loyalty and sheer doggedness
of its citizens.
This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2005.
