Pastor Elmer Armijo begins his Jan. 11 sermon, speaking about the uncertainty facing the community with Tyson’s closure. The Lexington plant is set to close around Jan. 20. Photo by Brian Neben for the Flatwater Free Press
LEXINGTON — The pastor paced the stage as he broached his town’s biggest dilemma.
Forty congregants listened from the pews of the First United Methodist Church of Lexington. Behind them is a stained glass American flag atop a hill.
More recently, the congregation draped Mexican, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan and Cuban flags from their sanctuary’s balcony.
“It is our decision what to do,” Elmer Armijo, the church’s head minister, said during his Sunday morning sermon. “It is our decision of if we let it go and rise again, or we continue to hope that the biggest company in this town is going to change their mind.”
When he arrived in the western Nebraska town, Armijo inherited a shrinking English-speaking congregation and a growing Spanish-speaking one — until the town’s Tyson Foods beef processing plant announced in November it would close its doors.
The closure — happening in a matter of days — will eliminate 3,212 jobs, about half Lexington’s labor force in the town of around 11,000. Tyson’s exit is projected to cost 7,000 jobs statewide with an economic loss of $3.28 billion a year, according to University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers.
The bulk of that fallout is expected to be concentrated in Dawson County. And the looming shutdown is already taking a toll on First United Methodist, where nearly half of the church’s Spanish-speakers have already left town, Armijo said. The congregants who will remain in those pews face the specter of wounded businesses, emptying neighborhoods and a crippled town.
A wave of donations has poured into a local relief fund, but Armijo wonders if it will be enough to keep former Tyson employees in town. His congregation is grappling with the same questions.
“I can feel the community’s fear,” Armijo said. “I share their fear, too. We receive people in our office all the time saying, ‘What are we going to do? How can you help me?’
“What we give to them is just a little hope. But that is not enough.”
‘We were in shock’
It was the Friday before Thanksgiving when members of Tyson’s corporate team arrived to deliver the news, blindsiding the plant’s 3,200 largely immigrant workers.
Kenia Sosa received one of the thousands of boilerplate letters Tyson handed out. The company was making the “difficult decision” to cease operations at the plant, the letter read. The mass layoff Tyson anticipated would “be permanent in nature.”
“People were crying,” Sosa said through an interpreter. “We were in shock…. It took us by surprise. We didn’t know it was going to happen.”
For three years, she and her husband, Yadier Beritan, had both worked at the plant, where employees processed 5,000 head of cattle a day.
Nearly every member of First United Methodist’s Spanish congregation worked at Tyson, or knew someone who did, church members said.
Within a month, Sosa and Beritan had moved from Lexington to Grand Island with their two daughters. They found work at JBS Foods, seizing two of the increasingly scarce manufacturing jobs open in the state. In December, the Nebraska Department of Labor listed fewer than 1,500 manufacturing openings across the state — and only one in Dawson County.
“There are not enough of that industry in the area to employ everybody and keep them even semi-local,” said Josie Gatti Schafer, the director of the Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Flyers at the town’s library advertise jobs at plants from North Platte to Pennsylvania. A billboard across the street from the plant advertises work in Grand Island. A posterboard pinned to a nearby signpost lists the addresses of rentals there.
More than 300 workers have transferred to other Tyson plants in Nebraska and beyond, an employee said.
And more than 200 Tyson workers have sought help navigating unemployment assistance or job hunting from Lutheran Family Services, said Handy Marin Diaz, a refugee and immigrant programming manager there. Most come with questions Diaz can’t answer.
Questions like: “‘Is Tyson going to sell? Is there going to be a new manufacturing plant that comes in to ease the situation?’” Diaz said. “…those are questions we don’t have the answers to. There have also been many people asking, ‘How am I going to feed my kids?’ or ‘How am I going to pay for my house?’”
“They are not sure exactly what direction to go at the moment,” she said.
‘We’ve got a long ways to go’
For more than 50 years, Gary White has kept his family’s Dawson County feedlot operating.
A member of First United Methodist since the fourth grade, the 78-year-old has watched his church’s English congregation dwindle but his community grow since Tyson and its predecessor, IBP, came to town in 1990.
Lexington’s population soared in the decade that followed, jumping to more than 10,000. The beef plant that buoyed the town became the top market for White’s cattle.
White is now bracing for added freight costs to ship his cattle to beef processors elsewhere in Nebraska and Kansas instead of Lexington. But he’s more worried about Dawson County’s future, where local sales tax revenues are expected to fall by $2.7 million annually following the exodus of Tyson’s workforce.
“Hopefully, something will come in,” White said. “And maybe we’ll be better for it in the long run. But, boy, we sure can’t see that right now.”
State officials have urged Tyson to repurpose the building into a smaller-scale operation — or sell. Gov. Jim Pillen said Wednesday he is “pushing at every meeting” with Tyson to “decide that sooner than later.”
A Tyson representative in January told State Sen. Teresa Ibach of Sumner the company will have a plan in place for what to do with the property by March 1, the senator said.
In Lexington, community leaders established an immediate relief fund and raised $135,000 to help Tyson workers.
Beth Roberts, the director of the Lexington Community Foundation, which established the relief fund, said at a community meeting earlier this month that the effort still has “a long ways to go.”
But for Armijo, the plan for the relief fund was disappointing.
He had already heard of three Latino businesses in town preparing to close their doors, he said. He had expected city and state leaders to outline a longer-term plan for life in Lexington after Tyson’s exit — something more like a cure and less like a bandage, he said.
“This is not what the people want to hear,” he said. “We need to put hope in the people. Why they need to stay here. Why we need to be together.”
‘We don’t know what’s going to happen’
Hours after Armijo finished his sermon Sunday morning, Pastor Javier Aguila paced the same stage and preached a similar message to a different audience in a different language.
He told the 30 Latino congregants in attendance to “make the decision to walk with God this year.”
“Tyson has stolen people’s sleep,” he said.
Thirty regulars had already left the church in the months since the announcement. Sunday marked the last service for another 10. Aguila and Armijo feared the Latino turnout could dip close to a dozen in another week — down from 65 strong in November.
“Is there anyone else leaving this week?” Aguila asked as Sunday’s service neared its end, inviting what was left of his congregation to form a circle in front of the century-old sanctuary’s pews. “Put your hand here.”
Some cried as the group huddled together, embracing each other as their pastor prayed over the latest congregants set to leave his church. He thanked God for their time together. He blessed their new jobs and their children’s new school.
“And though today we say goodbye, my God, we know that they are being sent to practice ministry, to practice your calling, to practice all that you’ve put in our lives,” he said.
After service, tears welled in Aguila’s eyes as he recalled the fast growth and faster decline of the Spanish service that his family founded less than two years ago. He grappled with whether he could rebuild his church in Lexington, with what to do for the congregants he could not help, with what would come next.
“The wait is very hard,” he said through an interpreter. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. But we can only trust in God.”
Flatwater Free Press reporters Natalia Alamdari, Sara Gentzler and Jeremy Turley contributed to this report.
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