County 3rd on Forbes list

It’s not a bad time to move to Johnson County.

The most recent issue of Forbes magazine named the county as third on its list of “America’s Best Places to Raise a Family.”

Hamilton County, Ind., and Ozaukee County, Wis., preceded the county on the list, which gave all three high marks in several areas including quality of the school systems, cost of living, graduation rate, standardized scores, home price, property tax rate as a percentage of median home price, percentage of homes occupied by an owner, per-capita income, air quality, crime rate and commute time.

According to the magazine, the home of Kansas City suburbs Olathe and Overland Park “ranks third on our list because of its affordability and accessibility. Family-friendly perks include an average commute of 20 minutes, 5,000 acres of parkland and over 4,000 recreational programs annually.”

The county’s only drawback, according to the magazine, was that “standardized test scores are on the lower end of our spectrum.”

Johnson County Chair Annabeth Surbaugh said the ranking says a lot about the county, which has nearly 517,000 residents, considering that the two counties that preceded it (Hamilton County at 250,000 residents and Ozaukee County at 86,000 residents) were much smaller. Surbaugh said as the county continues to grow as quickly as it has in recent years, it has maintained the quality of life residents expect.

“Our challenge in Johnson County is not to be good, but to be great,” she said. “These rankings show we’re not complacent.” Blake Schreck, who is the Lenexa Chamber of Commerce president but has brokered economic-development deals in the county for years, said the Forbes ranking was “great news.”

“It’s a validation of what we’ve been working on from an economic-development standpoint over the last couple of decades,” he said. “Quality of life does matter. It’s something that has really been at the core of our economic-development efforts.

Schreck added that it “absolutely” helps in his and others’ efforts to recruit people and companies to locate in the county.

One example is Farmers Insurance, which moved the bulk of its claims operations to Olathe in 2000. Since that time, the company’s presence in Johnson County has grown to more than 3,000 employees and agents, which exceeds the number of people the company employs at its home office in Los Angeles, said Vincent Donofrio, vice president of Farmers’ HelpPoint operations at 119th Street and Renner Road.

Donofrio said the quality of life in the county was one of several factors the company weighed when deciding to locate in Olathe.

Farmers now occupies more than 450,000 square feet of office space in the county. The company will add nearly 95,000 square feet of office space at the I-35/119th Street Technology Park, staffed by 600 new employees, which will make it the second-largest private employer in the county.

“It’s a great place to do business,” Donofrio said.

He added that he wasn’t surprised to hear about the Forbes ranking, but that for those who didn’t know what Johnson County had to offer, “the secret is out.”