Brown County has one A, one B, two Cs and a D on its report card — slightly lower “grades” than it received in 2012 in a state study of its assets.
Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research evaluated all Indiana counties in seven categories for its Community Asset Inventory and Rankings.
The categories are arts, entertainment and recreation; government impact and economy; human capital — education; human capital — health; people; changeable public amenities; and static (unchangeable) public amenities.
Data came from publicly available sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau, state department websites, National Cancer Institute and others.
“The goal of the CAIR was to help Hoosier residents and elected officials compare the condition of their county with others in the state to get an unvarnished view of what is good and bad,” said Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State and one of the researchers.
“Self awareness is critical to any effort at self improvement,” he added.
In addition to the seven main categories, the study also included a “housing value barometer” that shows where all counties’ housing inventories score in two areas: value growth over the past eight years and price relative to the state average.
Studying housing is important because it factors into families’ decisions to move to or stay in a community. Safety and livability, the quality of schools, and the social connections residents make affect those decisions as well, and demand for housing also impacts the price and quality of homes in that community, the study says.
Brown County was one of the highest-scoring counties in the state in both measures of housing.
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How we did
The only A Brown County received in the study was in the education category.
The B was in arts, entertainment and recreation.
The Cs were in people (C) and health (C+).
The biggest change was in the county’s grade for government impact and economy, which went from an A in 2012 to a D in 2018.
This category looks at the crime rate; tax rates relative to personal income; the number of communities participating in a Main Street program (Brown County has just one: Nashville); and whether or not the county is in a Metropolitan Statistical Area, a region used by the U.S. Census Bureau. (Brown County is.)
Statewide, grades changed in this area due to changes in tax rates and crime rates, the report said.
Crime information was taken from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting, Hicks said. It comes to the FBI from local agencies. It looked at the number of violent crimes such as murders, rapes, robberies and other aggravated assaults; property crimes such as burglaries, thefts and arson; and divided that total by the number of residents.
For 2012, Brown County’s total crime rate was 0.0099 per person. For 2016, it was 0.03 per person.
Brown County reported 198 property crimes and 43 violent crimes in 2016, including one murder, one rape and one robbery. In 2012, the county had reported 13 violent crimes and 133 property crimes.
That isn’t to say that crime went up overall; mostly, enforcement just went up, explained Prosecutor Ted Adams in 2017. Around 2014, Brown County officers started doing reports on more crimes than they had before, Sheriff Scott Southerland said in 2017. Case reports or investigations rose 27.7 percent between 2014 and 2016.
Crime data for some counties appears to be incomplete, with several counties reporting zero or less than a half-dozen property crimes, such as thefts. “If the crimes are underreported, then a county might look better in a ranking,” Hicks said. “Outside of very rural counties, I think this is unlikely to be a significant issue,” he added.
In Brown County, the effective tax rate stayed nearly the same between the 2012 and 2018 studies, according to statistics used for this report.
The effective tax rate was 25.6 cents per $1,000 of personal income in 2012 and 25.77 cents in 2018. Those numbers came from adding up total revenue from income, property and innkeepers taxes and dividing it by personal income.
Twenty-six counties had effective tax rates higher than ours in 2018, according to the raw data.
Hicks said he doesn’t believe the grades in this report will have “any meaningful effect on business location decisions.”
“Businesses and site location consultants know everything they need to know about Brown County already,” he said. “The larger information gap is usually among residents, who often have a poor idea about relative conditions in their county.”
Dax Norton, Nashville’s newly-retained strategic direction adviser, pointed out the drop in the “government impact and economy” grade from an A to a D in his report to the town council last month. “This is certainly a concern,” he wrote.
He recommended the council keep an eye on measures such as assessed property value, school enrollment, median age of residents, educational attainment, median household income and home value, and diversity.
The first five in that list are known as community vitality indicators, and state agencies encourage communities to guide their plans in ways that will increase those measures because they indicate a “healthy community.”
Other grades
Brown County’s “education” grade went up, from a B to an A, between the 2012 and 2018 reports. This is based on the percentage of local students who pass the ISTEP English and math tests, the high school graduation rate, and how many residents earned degrees.
Brown County’s grade in arts, entertainment and recreation stayed the same — a B. Factored into that grade are per-capita personal income in these fields, employment, average compensation per employee, number of recreational properties, and accommodation and food services per capita income.
The county’s “people” grade also stayed the same — a C. It takes into account population growth, poverty rate, unemployment, and private foundation and other nonprofit revenue per capita.
The county’s “health” grade went down slightly — from a B to a C+ — though the actual score went up, from 62.5 to 63 points. This category looks at fertility and death rates, deaths from crashes, incidences of cancer and lung-related diseases, measures of physical and mental health, the number of primary-care medical providers in the county, and whether residents have access to healthy food or live in “food deserts.”
In addition, the study looked at public amenities that a community can change through its own action, like the number of parks, historic and cultural sites, fishing and boating areas, camping areas, trails, beaches and school grounds; and those that can’t change much, such as the number of acres taken up by forests, fish and wildlife areas, nature preserves, bodies of water and shorelines. In both categories, Brown County received a score of 1 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the “most ideal.”
All grades were done on a curve, with an equal number of As and Fs given as well as an equal number of Bs and Ds. The average performers received Cs.
Housing and people
Brown County’s housing inventory is gaining value, more than most counties in Indiana.
A graph in the study shows Brown County squarely in the “growth” quadrant when measuring the value of housing over time (2010 to 2017) as well as home values relative to state average.
The study also groups counties by region to see how their housing inventory compares to their neighbors’. The other counties in our region include Monroe, Daviess, Lawrence, Owen, Orange, Greene and Martin. Of those, only Brown and Monroe are in the “growth” quadrant; Martin is in the “distress” quadrant and the others are in the “recovering” quadrant.
Data was taken from Zillow, which takes into account changes in home price as well as the effect of new, higher-quality housing stock on the market, the study says.
Hicks said that the housing barometer “tells Brown County residents that the housing markets are among the few in Indiana that are really going well, with higher values and increasing values over time.”
However, that also means that housing can be out of reach for low-income people. A recent survey showed that 53.1 percent of Brown County residents were of low to moderate income.
The Brown County Redevelopment Commission has been talking about housing, population, school enrollment, taxes and other measures in an effort to better position Brown County to be economically sustainable in the future.
In 2015, a study by the Indiana University Public Policy Institute projected that Brown County’s population would shrink by more than 10 percent by 2050 if no significant changes were made and variables like birth and death rates proceeded on their current path.
Those projections were a worry to county leaders. Discussions have been under way since then about how to attract and retain residents in Brown County — people who can provide a workforce, pay taxes, own property and send their children to local schools.
Between 2010 and 2017, Brown County had been averaging a loss of 30 residents per year, IU reported.
This past April, the Indiana Business Research Center at IU reported that Brown County’s population had increased by 1.8 percent between 2017 and 2018 — the fifth-highest population growth among all Indiana counties according to Census population estimates. That translated into an estimated 235 more people living in Brown County. Brown County gained 16.5 “movers” per every 1,000 residents, IU said.
The reasons that people were moving to Brown County weren’t explained in the most recent IU/Census report, as it was based on statistics.
Redevelopment commission President Jim Kemp would like to see “economic development” defined as “the process of attracting people,” because without “human intellectual capital,” a community is “limited in its ability of raising private equity for investment into new businesses,” he wrote in an email to The Democrat.
“So, if we can agree on that basic definition of economic development as people, then we must certainly agree on improving our housing inventory county-wide,” he wrote.
