{"id":6831,"date":"2023-12-10T09:00:11","date_gmt":"2023-12-10T14:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dahlman.online\/?p=6831"},"modified":"2023-12-10T16:54:03","modified_gmt":"2023-12-10T21:54:03","slug":"out-in-the-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dahlman.online\/index.php\/2023\/12\/10\/out-in-the-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Out in the Country"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is another in the \u201cSunday Story\u201d Series on Our America.  There\u2019s just a few local politics here, but mostly a story of a \u201clittle\u201d city called:   Pataskala.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christmas<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Jenn and I were out Christmas \u201cprepping\u201d the other day.  There\u2019s a difference between Christmas \u201cshopping\u201d, that is, buying presents, and Christmas \u201cprepping\u201d.  The \u201cprepping\u201d is all of the wrapping paper, ribbons, packing boxes, tape and other supplies that go into our long distance Christmas this year.  So we were getting \u201cprepped\u201d for an evening of wrapping; trying to re-package all of those Amazon, Fed-Ex and UPS boxes that arrived on our front porch at literally all hours in the past two weeks.  The dogs have had a field day with that \u2013 no one gets by un-noticed, even the 4 am stealth Amazon delivery guy. We  listened to the Nat King Cole and James Taylor Christmas albums, and told stories of \u201cprepping\u201d Christmas\u2019s of yore.  A little red wine helped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While we were driving around gathering supplies, I turned down a main county road here in Pataskala.\u00a0\u00a0Mink Street (or Mink Road, or Wagram Road, or County Road 41; it goes by all four) was once a country road, with farm fields on all sides.\u00a0\u00a0But it\u2019s a connector from State Route 40 (the National Road, or Main Street, Columbus) to State Route 16 (Broad Street, Columbus), and it was always a busier-than-usual route. But now things have really changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roundabouts<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

First, it is the \u201chome\u201d to the first roundabout in the city of Pataskala.  That\u2019s right, the old and dangerous intersection of Mink and Refugee (that\u2019s Refugee in Licking County, not Refugee in Fairfield and Franklin Counties \u2013 a totally different road) now has a \u201cnewfangled\u201d roundabout.  It slows the traffic on Mink quite a bit, but it makes it possible to actually get onto Mink from Refugee without getting slammed by someone going sixty miles-an-hour on an \u201cunmarked\u201d country road.  Not that Mink\u2019s really unmarked \u2013 to the chagrin of the locals, it was marked at 35 miles-per-hour a few years ago.  But that was widely ignored, and the city wisely moved it to the 45 MPH speed limit it has now.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of that traffic control wasn\u2019t just a matter of the \u201cgreater Pataskala\u201d population growth, though.\u00a0\u00a0You see, County Road 41 just \u201cain\u2019t\u201d in the country anymore.\u00a0\u00a0What was fire Station #3,\u00a0\u00a0farms, a boat storage place, and a nice residential sub-division at the south end, is now wall-to-wall industry.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And by industry, I mean big, giant footprint, semi-traffic and twenty-four hour action, industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cities and Townships<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Our local governments divide Mink Street.  North of the new roundabout is the City of Pataskala, south is Etna Township.  And both Pataskala and Etna are part of the huge industrial boom taking place on the outskirts of Columbus, beyond the \u201couter-belt\u201d.   What in the \u201cold\u201d days we would call warehouses, have been rechristened as \u201cdistribution centers\u201d.  And Etna has a bunch of them, from Fed-Ex and Kohls to several in the Ascena complex.  But the biggest ones of all have the familiar Amazon <\/em>label on the side.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So there\u2019s the original Amazon distribution center, a huge single building built between the National Road and Interstate 70, titled \u201cCMH 1\u201d.  And like any booming company, that initial complex birthed several only slightly smaller buildings (I think a total of six) with two spreading up Mink Street.  In fact, those are the buildings where the ubiquitous little blue delivery vans come from.  They line up everywhere, at the roundabout, intersections, and gas pumps in the Etna\/Pataskala area.  Those blue vans even create a local gas price \u201cbubble\u201d, the old supply and demand story.  They create a lot of demand, raising the price a few cents a gallon here in our area.   Just driving west into Reynoldsburg usually drops the cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stalks of Concrete<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

And it\u2019s not just Amazon.  I can\u2019t even tell you who owns the other giant \u201cdistribution centers\u201d to the north on Mink, but they go up faster than corn grew in those fields just a couple of years ago. The pre-fabricated walls just pop up, days after the bulldozers and cement trucks move on, and soon there\u2019s another nearly mile long building, with the requisite drainage pond alongside.  The migrating ducks and geese are happy with the idea, as long as they don\u2019t get in the way of the twenty-four\/seven semi-trucks, or those little blue vans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it\u2019s not just moving product either.  No matter where you stand politically, we all realized after Covid that too much of the \u201cimportant stuff\u201d used by Americans was made in China.  So \u201cwe\u201d are \u201conshoring\u201d industries like making computer chips (Intel is building about five miles north at the other end of Mink Steet).  The newest is manufacturing solar panels, right here in \u201cRiver City\u201d (that\u2019s a reference to the musical The Music Man,<\/em> a show about the clash between the \u201ccountry\u201d and the \u201ccity\u201d).   One of the first industrial solar panel manufacturing plants in the United States is set to open in January, just down Refugee road from the new roundabout (Newark Advocate<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On-Shoring<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s some controversy over that too.  Solar panel manufacturing is dominated by the Chinese, and a Chinese company has a financial stake in the American company building here in Pataskala.  Who would have thought \u2013 the words \u201cChinese Communist Party\u201d were actually uttered in a Pataskala City Council debate, as if the \u201cPeople\u2019s Liberation Army\u201d were opening a training facility on the \u201cRed Chip\u201d Parkway, the next road east from Mink Steet.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pataskala is now a \u201ccenter\u201d of US \u201conshoring\u201d.  Soon the next industrial solar panels will say \u201cProudly Made in Pataskala\u201d, instead of Wuhan or Qingdao.  That\u2019s a good thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And guess who just bought the land between the Red Chip Parkway and Mink Street, north of Refugee?  Here in the \u201cSilicon Valley\u201d of the Midwest, the folks in Pataskala are welcoming Microsoft <\/em>to their new 300 acre site (Dispatch<\/a>).   The computer company isn\u2019t revealing its plans for the farm fields and horse stables yet; but you can bet it won\u2019t be a Bill Gates\u2019s horse farm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking for a job?  Pataskala is definitely the place.  The \u201centry level\u201d positions at Kroger\u2019s and McDonalds are filled with high school kids.  For fulltime work, there\u2019s thousands of jobs available within the confines of the City of Pataskala and the Township of Etna.  Just don\u2019t get stuck having to rent or buy here.  The housing price \u201cbubble\u201d, just like the gas, is pressing up.  As always, people like to live near where they work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if you\u2019re looking for a nice place, \u201cout in the country\u201d, with quiet lanes and bucolic scenes, it\u2019s probably not here in Pataskala, a \u201cRight to Farm\u201d community (it says so, right on the city boundary signs).  We are on the cutting edge of American industry.  But we \u201cain\u2019t\u201d out in the country anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PS – the original version of this essay mistakenly referenced the musical “Oklahoma”<\/em>, instead of “The Music Man”. Shirley Jones, of “the Partridge Family” fame was in the film versions of both – which is, I guess, why I made the mistake!!!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Sunday Story Series<\/h4>\n\n\n\n