{"id":22368,"date":"2012-03-26T05:28:48","date_gmt":"2012-03-26T10:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/?p=22368"},"modified":"2012-03-27T06:23:01","modified_gmt":"2012-03-27T11:23:01","slug":"regional-econ-develop-takes-center-stage-in-ohio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/2012\/03\/26\/regional-econ-develop-takes-center-stage-in-ohio\/","title":{"rendered":"Regional econ. develop. meeting topic"},"content":{"rendered":"

DAVE MOSIER\/<\/strong>independent editor<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Gary Thompson, director of the Northwest Ohio Region of Jobs Ohio, speaks at last week's meeting of the Van Wert County Economic Development Advisory Council. (Dave Mosier\/Van Wert independent)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2019s where a relatively new agency, Jobs Ohio, comes in.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Thompson first talked about attraction (bringing a new company to a community) — \u201cthis is the sexy one that makes all the newspaper headlines.\u201d<\/p>\n

He then talked about expansion \u2013 helping an existing company increase its workforce and facility, and finally about retention, which he said resulted in most new job creation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the bread and butter of economic development right here,\u201d Thompson said, noting that retention is done by local economic development offices and accounts for approximately 80 percent of economic activity.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s only about 2.01 percent of economic activity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of (local) groups around the state that spend a lot of time on this,\u201d Thompson said, calling attraction \u201ca high risk activity with low reward\u201d for local development officials.<\/p>\n

He likened the way economic development agencies work to the way a football team works together. \u201cEverybody has a role to play and they play it at a different time,\u201d Thompson said, noting that his office or state officials most often get involved when a company is looking to a build a new facility.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

That resulted in a lot of top-down economic development, but didn\u2019t seem to work all that well in bringing new businesses into Ohio, mainly because state officials didn\u2019t know all the areas of the state as well as they should have.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Thompson noted that Jobs Ohio, a private, non-profit entity, was created by Governor Kasich\u2019s administration to provide a more responsive and quicker means to search for businesses seeking to relocate.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t care about the geographic boundaries, we simply listen to the customer and say \u2018what do you need?\u2019\u201d Thompson said, noting that the new state outlook on economic development is to provide a regional partnership for economic development.<\/p>\n

The benefits of regional partnerships, Thompson said, is they consider an entire region\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Basically, the regional outlook doesn\u2019t always sit well with some local economic officials, who want to be involved in attraction work.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people like that, some people don\u2019t,\u201d Thompson added. \u201cI don\u2019t really care one way or another because we\u2019re about trying to find people jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese people all work for you,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s where a relatively new agency, Jobs Ohio, comes in. Gary Thompson, director of the Northwest Ohio Region of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-30 23:48:39","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thevwindependent.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}