What the Irish Festival Actually Does for Dublin

Local News

Tolles Career & Technical Center — the school our kids can attend right alongside Dublin City Schools through its satellite program — just landed a $320,000 state grant to build out a new manufacturing career track.

The money's part of a $3.2 million pool the state handed out to just 10 career-tech districts across Ohio, and it'll go toward the unglamorous but necessary stuff: curriculum, equipment, staffing, and lining up employer partners before the program actually launches for the 2027-28 school year. Tolles is teaming up with the Ohio Manufacturers' Association to design it, meaning local manufacturers will have a direct hand in what students actually learn.

This lands at a busy moment for Tolles. Enrollment is set to hit around 1,500 students this fall, the largest class in the school's history, and the $30 million campus expansion that broke ground last year is still on track to wrap up this December — nearly 50,000 square feet of new lab and classroom space.

Worth knowing if you've got a high schooler weighing options beyond the traditional path: this is one more track opening up, with manufacturing being one of the areas where Ohio employers are actively hiring.

Local News

Did you know Dublin has its own insurance company? I hadn't heard of it either, but Universal Shield Insurance Group has quietly been running out of an office on Longshore Street since 2003 — writing commercial insurance policies for small businesses in nearly every state in the country.

Here's why it just came across our radar: Universal Shield is being acquired. A publicly traded insurance company called Tiptree is buying the whole operation for $100 million, with the deal expected to close early next year. Tiptree plans to pour in additional capital to help Universal Shield grow faster and take on more business.

It's a small shop as these things go — a few dozen people at the Dublin office, with other outposts in Marengo and Michigan — so this isn't the kind of deal that reshapes the local economy the way a bigger employer changing hands might. But it's one more example of how much business activity happens quietly in Dublin outside the names everyone already knows.

Too early to say what it means day-to-day for the team here, but worth keeping an eye on as the deal moves toward closing.

Local News

Coffman Park turns green this week, and as we probably all expected, this weekend is worth a lot more to this town than just a good time.

According to Dublin's events director Alison LeRoy, last year's festival was the biggest one yet — and probably worth close to $14 million to the local economy. The last time anyone actually studied it, the number came in around $12 million, and before that, back in 2018, it was $8.5 million.

We've mentioned before that more than half the people who show up aren't even from Central Ohio, and almost a third are coming from out of state — and now that Dublin has more hotels and restaurants than it used to, more of that spending is staying here instead of heading somewhere else in Columbus.

We always figured this festival was pulling its weight. Now we finally have some numbers to back it up.