The Plaza Business Park, off of Plaza Drive in Visalia, has been designated by the City of Visalia for research and technology. It currently houses Fresno Pacific University’s satellite campus, the Residence Inn and Valley Ag Software, among others, according to Chad McCardell with Colliers International.

Having seemingly grown from its agricultural roots, diversification is now the name of the game going forward for Tulare County in 2018.

The big news for the county this year is the loss of its place as top dog in the country for farm production. While 2016 was the fourth largest overall value the county has ever seen, according to Marilyn Kinoshita, Tulare County agricultural commissioner, some of the problems that caused that loss aren’t going away.

Water is one of those.

According to Sean Boyd, geography lecturer at Fresno State and former meteorologist for KSEE 24, the National Weather Service says that right now, the Pacific Ocean is showing La Nina conditions, which typically mean less rainfall in central California.
The other difficulty facing farmers is a labor crunch.

New laws requiring farm laborers to receive overtime pay are going to force employers to either hire more workers or pay workers more for the long hours the industry needs to survive.

On top of these rules, other industries have to pay workers more in order to keep people on staff or attract shrinking numbers of people looking for work.

Kinoshita says she has seen a larger focus on mechanical harvesting in response to the trend.

The way employment has been dropping across the board, labor in 2018 will only be more expensive for employers and farmers are not exempt.

Additionally, farmers have been looking at alternative ways of bringing in income.

A lot of dairies are transforming alfalfa and corn silage for nut crops, according to Kinoshita due to profitability.

Some farmers have been foregoing land altogether, selling off acreage to get into residential real estate.

Ruben Olguin, president-elect of the Tulare County Association of Realtors, has seen numerous landowners transferring profits from land and investing in condo complexes and apartments.

“There’s still a market for investors that flip properties, but more of the bigger investors are buying hold,” Olguin said. “They’re buying properties and just renting them out because the income off the rental properties is better than what they’re making on the ag properties.”

Passive profits like collecting rent are an easy way for investors to increase revenue streams.

“There’s probably not a realtor that does any production in Tulare County that doesn’t have at least one or two investors that they’re working with right now,” Olguin said.

The market is good for real estate investments, fueling the trend going into 2018.

For low-to-middle income homes, between $150,000-$225,000, they’re spending about 15 days on the market and according to Olguin, it’s a seller’s market.

Real estate values are continuing to grow and have seen 7 percent growth so far this year, with a lot of factors indicating continued growth.

Tulare, Porterville and Visalia are seeing development beyond city limits, which means industries across the board will experience growth trickling down from rising homebuilder economy.

Some of the smaller cities like Woodlake, Farmersville and Exeter, however, are still working to attract that growth, and have stayed pretty flat, according to Olguin.

The other big news Tulare County residents have been unable to avoid is the closure of the Tulare Regional Medical Center, which according an article in the Visalia Times-Delta, has left businesses in the area without foot traffic.

Even though it’s looking like the board will shed itself from its managing company and may be picked up by Community Medical Centers — the same managing company as Fresno’s Community Regional Medical Center — if the hospital doesn’t reopen it will be out hundreds of well-paying jobs that proximate businesses rely on.

Beyond that, Tulare County is seeing a lot of industrial and manufacturing growth.

Visalia has 400,000 square feet of industrial under construction that the developer has indicated has all been leased, according to Paul Saldana, president of the Economic Development Corp. serving Tulare County.

In Dinuba, as The Business Journal reported earlier this year, Delta Plastics is coming in and building a manufacturing plant for irrigation polytube.

And for a town facing a 28 percent poverty level, according to 2016 census data, that’s 120 new opportunities for residents to start making money in manufacturing.

Dinuba isn’t alone in attracting new industries either. Porterville is the midst of getting GreenPower Motor Co., a bus manufacturer. Direct jobs in both of these companies may be limited, but what interests the county is the business that will come in to meet the demands of these new companies.

Saldana even anticipates spillover from the proposed Faraday Future plant in Kings County.

For smaller cities around Tulare County, new industries are a godsend considering increased pension liabilities, which are only going to get worse on small cities.

Earlier this year, neither Exeter nor Farmersville paid their fees to the EDC serving Tulare County due to strapped city budgets, according to John Lindt of Sierra2theSea.

In response to financial pressures, many smaller cities are taking drastic measures.

Woodlake, Farmersville and Lindsay have all passed sales tax increases in anticipation of dropping revenues.

Woodlake, which has managed to stay in the black over the past few years, also passed a measure allowing the city to tax marijuana when it becomes legal in California next year.

Farmersville, which is facing a $100,000 budget deficit for this fiscal year and $200,000 for last year, hopes that the sales tax and pot measures will help fill the gap, according to Mayor Paul Boyer.

Lindsay has been especially feeling the pressure of paying its personnel and is exploring ways of cutting itself loose from the McDermont recreational facility and handing staffing over to a private managing company.

In order to increase revenue, according to Mayor Pamela Kimball, the city has begun talks of passing marijuana legislation like Farmersville and Woodlake.

All in all, local governments and business associations have recognized the need to diversify and do what they can on their part to keep Tulare County an attractive place to do business.