Business View Civil & Municipal | Volume 2, Issue 8

85 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 2, ISSUE 8 In addition to petitioning for the Columbus- Pittsburgh corridor’s completion, the county also earned its Transportation Improvement District designation, which will help it to finance and expedite high priority transportation improvement projects moving forward. “We were designated last year by our Department of Transportation – what we refer to as ODOT,” Homrighausen says. “It shows that we have a focus to improve the transportation infrastructure in Harrison County which, again, is about planning for the future of our economy with a vision of improving prosperity throughout the entire county. We have a once-in- a-generation opportunity to safely grow Eastern Ohio leveraging the natural resources far below our feet, and shame on us if we don’t use that opportunity to improve the quality of life within every square mile of Harrison County.” The county’s contributions to America’s growth and prosperity during the early 1900s has come HARR I SON COUNTY , OHIO full circle, with once again Harrison County finding itself “at the doorstep of something great,” in Homrighausen’s words. “It’s a county of super hard-working people, where families really matter.” Saucier adds, “It truly is a resourceful place in every sense of the word. It’s the fifth least populated county in the state yet companies are and have made billion-dollar investments there with others showing active interest.” Homrighausen insists, “When companies are interested in Ohio locations, we don’t limit our thinking to county borders. If, for some reason, Harrison County couldn’t meet the needs of a proposed project, we’d work with the surrounding counties to keep that business in Ohio.” JobsOhio, the state’s private job creation and impact investment arm, plays a major role in that cooperative effort to bolster regional competitiveness, providing the push to act like one big state, not 88 individual counties. “They’ve assisted us to entertain some of the largest