We can all see that we need more family sustaining jobs in Chautauqua County.

The poverty rate countywide was 16.7% in July 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, with that rate rising to 24% in Jamestown and 24.9% in Dunkirk. The best way to decrease those percentages is to increase household incomes, and the easiest way to do that is attract bigger employers that can pay higher wages.

While we have successes on the economic development front – Start-Up NY helping attract New Flyer, Electrovaya building a new plant and the recent $452 investment by Cummins Inc. in its Busti plant – our shrinking population is hurting economic development efforts.

“It’s very challenging for us to get companies to come here without a large workforce,” Mark Geise, the chief executive officer of the county IDA.

It’s just the latest example of the way our shrinking population is really the biggest problem facing Chautauqua County. It’s a thread that runs through many of the issues that you read about in The Post-Journal each day.

Schools are considering merging sports programs because their districts continue losing population and there aren’t enough student-athletes for schools to fill rosters. Schools are cutting positions through attrition because there aren’t enough students in the district to fill some classrooms. Volunteer fire departments are having merger talks because there aren’t enough people to fill their ranks. That same shortage prompted the county to create a fly car system that is increasingly counted upon by rural county residents. Stores struggle to remain open here in part because of our shrinking population – there isn’t the volume in certain businesses that there used to be, and the internet has filled a gap that used to be filled by big box stores and malls. County Executive PJ Wendel’s State of the County address mentioned the executive’s plan to encourage further municipal consolidation and shared services, a plan necessary in part because of our shrinking population and the need to right-size the municipal services we provide so that we can afford them with fewer people paying the bills.

A study by Cornell University regarding population loss found New York state as a whole could lose 2 million people in the next 25 years, a 13% decline. There’s no reason to believe Chautauqua County and rural counties like it won’t bear the brunt of that decline. The trend has been that we lose more than the average, not less.

In a changing world, population loss is the constant that we must learn to deal with. There aren’t many aspects of our public discussion that aren’t touched, in one way or another, by the fact that our population decline is projected to continue rather than suddenly reverse. The sooner we collectively realize that fact the easier it will be to make the difficult decisions we have to make about the way we provide everything from assessing to tax assessing and everything in between – including education, the hottest of hot-button merger and consolidation topics.