Outside Erie

George Miller has an interesting story in this morning’s Erie Times-News about folks who are buying condos in the soon-to-be-refurbished Mercantile Building in downtown Erie.
The story points to a positive sign for those who care about making Erie a more attractive place to live and work.
People — especially younger professionals — want to live in […]

This week’s top comment comes from Jim, who writes an interesting post about the attitude people in Erie have toward business owners and the cost of doing business:

“It’s not just the unions and labor costs that are driving business from Erie, and Pennsylvania. You have to look at the cost of government; the cost of […]

We’ve recently started a debate in this space about whether Erie’s leaders should make a concerted push to study regional government.
I’m a proponent of that effort. And I’m even more so after receiving some recent correspondence from Alan Kugler, the president of PA Futures in Erie.
“If we are truly going to get serious in ways […]

Congress is looking at expanding the Trade Adjustment Assistance program to provide aid to communities that have been hard hit by the loss of manufacturing jobs to foreign trade.
The House Ways and Means Committee — the committee that sets U.S. tax policy and includes Erie’s Phil English as one of its key members — has […]

David VanAmburg, the author of Think Big Erie (our newest GlobalErie blog) has an interesting recent post that points to the Web site for the Project for Public Spaces as a source of inspiration for Erie’s planners.
I was pointed to that site not long ago by a colleague, and for those who care about Erie’s […]

Erie’s tourism bureau has a new name.
Gone is the dreadfully long moniker The Erie Area Convention & Visitors Bureau.
It’s been replaced by something much more simple — Visit Erie.
My thoughts?
If your job is to market something, your name should be something that is easy to remember.
Visit Erie gets the message across, in my mind. It’s […]

The announcement that $85 million in new philanthropic money will soon be pouring into Erie is certainly cause for celebration.
But it should not be looked at as a message that the rest of us should relax.
Instead, it should be seen as a challenge to do better.
The Erie community has been granted a big gift here […]

I received a comment last week from Joel Natalie, the author of Erie blog Radio Free JoJo, saying that he would love to see more information on Outside Erie about best practices from other communities.
When we started this site, that was one of our major goals.
With so many of our visitors hailing from outside of […]

With one massive stroke of generosity, the mystery donor who is giving $100-million to the Erie Community Foundation has the potential to do much more for Erie’s future than the new horse-racing track or the bayfront convention center.
How?
Well, consider that it will take Presque Isle Downs eight years — at $11 million per year — […]

Dan Bassill — an advocate for tutor-mentor programs in Chicago — has an interesting post on his blog about a recent conference in Chicago that talked about finding ways to attract young workers to pursue careers in high-tech manufacturing.
This, of course, is a problem in Erie. Many of its high school grads are heading off […]