West PointAfter a plant closing earlier this year, out-of-town employers had a hard time finding people willing to move away from this northeast Nebraska community. West Pointers, we learned, have many reasons to be excited about their town’s future. Story by Curt Arens, Photography by Bobbi and Steve Olson |
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Click the above image for a slide show of images of West Point by Bobbi and Steve Olson. |
On February 16, 2006, representatives
of the Tyson Foods plant in West Point met with city officials. “We have
some bad news…” they began. For Johnson, mayor of this east central
Nebraska city for the past eight years, those words could mean only one thing.
“I knew what they were going
to say,” Johnson recalled. “At that moment, I felt a sinking feeling
in the pit of my stomach.” One of West Point’s anchor employers
was closing its plant. Effectively immediately, 365 workers – 10 percent
of the town’s population – were out of work.
A few minutes after the meeting, plant
employees heard the news themselves. Forty miles away, 1,300 Tyson employees
in Norfolk were laid off on the same day.
“We can’t sit still for
long,” Johnson told the West Point News that week. “We have to start
exploring what is out there and start moving forward.” The days and months
that followed have been the busiest since she’s been mayor.
When we visited several months later,
we found a new rehabilitation unit just opened at the hospital, a new community
center ready to break ground, and a number of major business expansions in the
works. On the north edge of town, we passed a large construction site just off
Highway 275. It would soon be a travel plaza with a motel, convenience store
and gas station.
We drove through the crowded business
district and parked near the city office building on the south end of the brick-paved
Main Street. Mayor Johnson greeted us in the lobby and pointed out the architect’s
drawings of the new community center. She led us to the city council chambers
where we sat down to talk about her town’s future.
We got the feeling that residents
were looking at the Tyson closing as a “bump in the road” as Johnson
put it, not as a sinkhole of doom. That’s the way West Point citizens
have been from the beginning. They are not quitters. They are doers.
(The complete story appears in the September/October 2006 issue of Nebraska Life Magazine.)
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