New Reed’s Pharmacy opening in Brookville

It’s a rare day that I get to report on an independent pharmacy in the area growing, not scaling back or closing.

But this Thursday, Reed’s Pharmacy will be opening a new location in Brookville.

“I thought it was a good opportunity to bring back an independent pharmacy to the community,” said business owner Gary Reed, who grew up in Franklin and already has pharmacies in Carlisle and New Lebanon.

The Dayton Daily News has reported extensively on the challenges small pharmacies say they face. Pharmacists say the middlemen who manage pharmacy benefits for Medicaid plans are keeping too much of the money as overhead and have curbed how much they reimburse pharmacies for drugs.

Since we first started reporting on the issue, Ohio’s Department of Medicaid announced next it will be switching next year to a more transparent system where the middlemen, called pharmacy benefit managers, bill Medicaid plans for exactly what they pay pharmacies for drugs and then charge a flat administrative fee.

In the meantime, Reed’s Pharmacy has found success since it first opened in New Lebanon seven years ago. Reed credits his team’s sense of customer service as well as customers’ interest in shopping local.

“We just try to take care of the customer and the rest just falls into place,” Reed said.

Office space a barometer for defense spending

If you want to know whether defense spending is up or down,

just look at how much empty office space there is in the Dayton area.

So far this year the Dayton office market has posted a net loss in occupancy of about 200,000 square feet, leaving an increase in overall market vacancy of 21.6 percent, reported Thomas Gnau, using data from real estate firm Colliers International.

Downtown’s office market is typically even more vacant. For

the third quarter this year, the central business district was 29.1 percent vacant.

But the Collier’s report points to a $61 billion increase in the defense budget earlier this year that prompted many contractors to start looking for more space.

“I think in spite of the loss, which is year-to-date, in the