CBS News: Town Reinvents Itself with Wind Power

I am working hard to find any and all positive news stories since we're inundated with bad news (read: reality). I saw this story which was heartening - unfortunately the lesson appears to be, in the future as capital roams free to exploit the cheapest labor globally, the only thing we will build in the U.S. are things that are too expensive to ship... we've slowly been moving that way over the past few decades. Thankfully wind turbines are huge and heavy - now if we could just build a wind turbine plant in every town where an old appliance, auto, or furniture maker used to be - we're good. But it's good news for at least one town in the heartland of America.

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Newton, Iowa, has been through some tough times. But Mayor Chaz Allen has a skip in his step these days, CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds reports.

"I think we hit the lottery," Allen said.

The source of his excitement is the brand new factory on the outskirts of town. And they have people lining up to work there.

"Yeah. We currently have several thousand applications for the few hundred remaining jobs we have open," said the plant's general manager, Crugar Tuttle.

It's an amazing turnaround for Newton - closely identified for a century with Maytag and its array of appliance. At its peak, Maytag employed one out of every five residents. But a year ago, the Maytag plant closed, and 1,800 jobs were lost. Failure was in the air.

"We worked so hard to keep that company alive, you know. And it seemed like you worked harder and harder as time continued yet you could just see it was closing down," said 18-year Maytag verteran Rick Miller.

Today, Miller works for TPI, the new company in town, making blades for new high-tech windmills.

"When I left Maytag, I didn't think that I would probably every get back into the manufacturing area again," he said.

The current economic downturn may have dented enthusiasm for alternative energy resources, but not in Newton.

Not only is a new plant operating, but the once-dormant Maytag factory itself has come back to life, too. A second company has brought more jobs to town, making the foundations for those windmills from TPI.

"It makes you feel like your just doing the right thing for your country, the right thing for this community, the right thing for, you know, yourself and the business," said Wayne Monie of TPI.

And Mayor Allen said, "The idea of having these jobs here in Newton builds everybody's confidence that we're going to get out of this."

And it's unlikely any of these jobs will be outsourced one day, because shipping one of the huge, 130-food-long blades from a foreign manufacturer all the way to the United States would simply be too expensive.

So they'll be built here, in America, by Americans.

In Newton these days, change is in the wind.