Regional econ. develop. meeting topic

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

As many of those involved locally in economic development know, there are many ways to create new jobs. But creating jobs often takes a combination of state, regional and local development effort, and that’s where a relatively new agency, Jobs Ohio, comes in.

Gary Thompson, director of the Northwest Ohio Region of Jobs Ohio, talked about the three areas of economic development — attraction, retention and expansion — and how those areas work together.

Thompson first talked about attraction (bringing a new company to a community) — “this is the sexy one that makes all the newspaper headlines.”

He then talked about expansion – helping an existing company increase its workforce and facility, and finally about retention, which he said resulted in most new job creation.

“This is the bread and butter of economic development right here,” Thompson said, noting that retention is done by local economic development offices and accounts for approximately 80 percent of economic activity.

Expansion is approximately 17.99 percent of economic activity and is also done by local development officials, Thompson added. Although attraction gets most of the headlines, it’s only about 2.01 percent of economic activity.

“There are a lot of (local) groups around the state that spend a lot of time on this,” Thompson said, calling attraction “a high risk activity with low reward” for local development officials.

He likened the way economic development agencies work to the way a football team works together. “Everybody has a role to play and they play it at a different time,” Thompson said, noting that his office or state officials most often get involved when a company is looking to a build a new facility.

Unfortunately, he said, before the creation of Jobs Ohio, state officials usually handled most of the attraction work instead of partnering with regional and local economic development agencies.

That resulted in a lot of top-down economic development, but didn’t seem to work all that well in bringing new businesses into Ohio, mainly because state officials didn’t know all the areas of the state as well as they should have.

That has led to dividing the state into six regions, with Van Wert County part of the 17-county Northwest Ohio Region that also includes Allen, Crawford, Defiance, Fulton, Hancock, Hardin, Henry, Lucas, Ottawa, Paulding, Putnam, Sandusky, Seneca, Williams, Wood and Wyandot.

Thompson noted that Jobs Ohio, a private, non-profit entity, was created by Governor Kasich’s administration to provide a more responsive and quicker means to search for businesses seeking to relocate.

“We don’t care about the geographic boundaries, we simply listen to the customer and say ‘what do you need?’” Thompson said, noting that the new state outlook on economic development is to provide a regional partnership for economic development.

The benefits of regional partnerships, Thompson said, is they consider an entire region’s assets to attract new businesses, rather than limiting efforts to a county or specific community. He said that creating new jobs within a region also benefits counties and communities that border a plant site.

Basically, the regional outlook doesn’t always sit well with some local economic officials, who want to be involved in attraction work.

“Some people like that, some people don’t,” Thompson added. “I don’t really care one way or another because we’re about trying to find people jobs.”

He also noted that the 17 counties involved in the Northwest Ohio Region would get much better service from the state, with more people concentrating on regional economic development rather than relying on a statewide economic development organization.

“These people all work for you,” Thompson said of the six employees who work for the Northwest Ohio Region, adding that it also allows regional development people to get into the 17 counties on a weekly basis.

Also during the Economic Development Advisory Council meeting, which was held at the Northwest State Community College satellite site on Fox Road, John Whittington and Russ Miller talked about their business, Van Wert Terminal, located on Hoaglin Center Road, which provides a site for the storage and transportation of liquids and off-loading off other freight onto trucks.