Montgomery County population hasn’t grown in 20 years. But our footprint keeps growing- as we continue to sprawl out over fertile farmland to do what exactly? Create jobs? What kind of jobs? Benefiting who?

There are plenty of sites in the county that Amazon, Crocs or anyone else could have picked to build a warehouse – near roads built for the traffic, near people needing the low wage jobs they offer- but, noooooo they have to be near the airport- where there is already a large package handling building sitting empty- the old Emery Air Freight terminal.

Instead, they are going to build on farmland, and have to create huge parking lots for employees, overload roads that weren’t built for that kind of traffic and require infrastructure upgrades- from intersections to water towers, all at our expense.

Need an example- look at the impact of The Greene on Kettering police and fire services, or Costco et al- on water supplies and roads. Look at the traffic at Austin Landing. Look at the widening of County Line road. It all adds up- and, guess who pays? All of us. Because invariably, we give these businesses tax breaks to lure them in- so the only taxes we see is income taxes- that only go to the municipality- not the region.

If we had leadership that thought these things through- long ago, we’d have a train running out to the airport much like Cleveland does with it’s “Rapid”- light rail- mostly above ground light rail. This way low income employees would have access to the jobs, and we wouldn’t have near the traffic to deal with.

For a while when Airborne air freight was at peak employment in Wilmington, they were running private buses out to ferry employees from Dayton. The same has happened to get workers to the giant warehouses in Mason. Dayton- crickets.

At some point we need to draw a circle around Dayton- and stop the sprawl. Portland Oregon did this decades ago- refusing to extend city services outside a boundary, pushing reuse and higher, more efficient development. They also built light rail.

There is no reason for the City of Union to exist- anymore than Moraine or even Clayton. It’s time we realize all these banana republics have costs – of duplication of services and additional unnecessary governmental overhead.

This is just one more reason to start looking at uni-gov. Please subscribe to Reconstructing Dayton if you want to see a new, more efficient vision for the region.

Update 25 May 2021- Reconstructing Dayton does a longer dive into this subject: The Promise of Trickle-Down Regional Benefits is Killing Dayton