(uplifting music) (word bubbles pop) - Hello, and welcome to "The Journal."

I'm Steve Kendall Since its creation in 1993, the Wood County Economic Development Commission has cracked over 200, excuse me, $2.5 billion of private sector investment and more than 7,000 jobs bringing them to Wood County.

We're joined by the executive director, Wade Gottschalk.

Welcome to "The Journal," and thank you for being here today.

Wood County Economic Development, story of big success, obviously, just from those two numbers, the amount of money that's come in since the inception of the agency and the number of jobs created, and we know how important that is.

So talk a little about what you guys do and how you go about doing it 'cause I know people hear the stories, companies coming to Wood County, jobs coming in, investment in construction, that sort of thing, but kind of fill in overall what you guys do 'cause it's not as simple as I've made it sound.

- Right, well, thank you, and thanks for having me on the show.

So, yeah, we're a little bit unique in that we're a public-private partnership.

So our office staff are county employees, and we are the county's Office of Economic Development, but we also have a private nonprofit organization that's a partner as well, Wood County Economic Development Commission, and then they provide, you know, advice kind of to the county in terms of economic development policy.

They have a separate pot of money to do things, you know, a little bit differently, a little bit more creatively than maybe government can at times, and that's kind of our setup.

But what we primarily focus on are, you know, industrial manufacturing type of jobs, jobs that arguably pay a very good living wage that will then help to create other jobs and other investment in the county.

We've been doing this since '93.

I've personally been at the commission since 1990, or (laughs) not 1990, I was in high school, since 2001, and I'm a BGSU double alum, so very happy to be on the show here.

What we do is, obviously, we work on attracting new companies to the area, which is kind of the thing that gets the headlines.

That's what you hear about in the paper.

The reality is most of our work is spent working with the existing companies because it's far easier to kind of retain the company and to help them grow because they're already here, right?

They already made the commitment to Wood County.

They've already invested money.

They're already clearly doing business here and doing it well.

We wanna help them do it better if they can, and so, you know, the old Reagan phrase, "I'm from the government, I'm here to help," kind of as an insult, you know, we take that a little bit different tact - Different.

- on that and try to work on that as, well, what can we do to help?

And a lot of that is cutting through bureaucracy, especially for smaller manufacturers that don't have, you know, a national organization to rely on.

You know, we can help them, you know, cut through local and state government regulations that they need to work through it better.

Now we can't necessarily get them the answers they want every time, right?

But we can at least save them the time in finding the right person and getting to that answer that they need.

And so that's kind of what we focus on on a daily basis is working with those existing companies and then obviously you have the attraction efforts that make the headlines that we work on as well.

- Yeah, and you mentioned the fact, too, that obviously, in these arrangements, in these deals, as they progress, government has to be a lot more transparent than private industry.

So that's probably the benefit of having that sort of private group because they can deal in discussing things that, if you guys were doing it, it would have to be public information.

And sometimes, that creates issues with getting companies to say, you know, "Hey, we're gonna do this, we're gonna move here, we're gonna leave where we're at to move here," that kind of thing, which creates all kinds of situations.

And I thought you since, too, you mentioned retention because you say we always hear about the new things coming in, although you guys do a very good job of reminding us, "Oh look, First Solar's expanding.

This company's expanding.

They're gonna do this.

They're gonna do all of these other things."

So retention, obviously, you're in constant communication with the existing business to make sure everything's working for them, you know, they're not having any roadblocks along the way to just conducting business day to day for them, correct?

- Yeah.

I mean that's kind of what our primary charge is, right?

I mean, like the ebb and flow of the marketplace in terms of, you know, new projects out there, it varies, right?

I mean, there are times where it's very busy and you're dealing with multiple new leads, you know, every day or week, and there's other times where it slows down.

I mean, that's just the ebb and flow of the market, but those existing businesses are always here, and there's always something that we might be able to help them with, whether that's a workforce issue, whether that's, I said, a regulatory issue.

Sometimes they're just local service issues, right?

They're things like, "Hey, look, you know, the signal near that intersection isn't working properly for us," or, you know, "We need to have, you know, the road that leads to our business, you know, may have some potholes or something that need to be fixed that, you know, maybe were on the list," but maybe they didn't rise up the top of that, you know, agenda yet, and so we work with companies on those issues.

We work with them on training issues for their employees with our Ohio Means Jobs office locally here in Wood County to make sure that there are those opportunities for their workers to grow and expand their knowledge base and expand their skillset as well, and all those things are gonna help those businesses succeed and compete in a global marketplace.

- Well, and you mentioned infrastructure.

That is a big part of this, and obviously, I know you have lots of real estate, lots of areas available for companies to come in, but you make a good point that, okay, they've located here.

Now there's a lot of traffic coming in and out of their facility.

Maybe the road infrastructure caught up with it right away, but in some cases, oh look, they may come to you and say, "You know what?

We really need a left turn lane here to make this work for us and make it easier for everybody else."

So that's when you get involved then with county officials and state officials to deal with the infrastructure issues.

- Yeah, we've been very successful with that.

I work a lot with the Wood County Port Authority, very, very directly hand in hand with them.

They can actually build.

So we can't build them obviously.

We should build a new road.

They can, and they do, and they work with the Wood County Engineer's Office and ODOT very well, and another great example, that would be Deimling Road in Perrysburg Township, just north of the Amazon distribution center facility there.

That was a road that Amazon, when they came in, insisted that, you know, it wasn't really even a kind of regular road, right?

They said, "Well, we're not gonna use that because we really can't."

Well, it turns out that their employees, you know, realized that that could be a shortcut into the backside of the operation, and so it started getting used.

And so once we realized that was an issue, the Port Authority went out, was able to secure EDA money, and basically get grant money to pay for virtually the whole road, a little bit from the engineer, a little bit from the township, a little bit from the city, and then the Port Authority itself.

But a huge amount of that came from EDA and then other sources through the state of Ohio, and that allowed us to build, the Port Authority to rebuild Deimling Road, including two roundabouts to not only handle that growth, but future growth as well.

- Yeah, future, sure.

- And so those are the kind of things we do work on.

So yeah, we don't just build something, throw it there, and forget it.

We serve it once it's here and try to build that infrastructure up for not only our current, you know, population but also for the next guy coming in.

- Yeah, and that was gonna be the next question is obviously, when you create that kind of infrastructure, then it makes it more attractive for other industries, other companies to say, "Oh, look, that works for us as well," and that obviously is the attraction of getting somebody here, building, investing, and then that attracts other, if not businesses directly related to them but other businesses just in general say, "Oh, look, great location.

We hear good things about Wood County," and, in this case, as you described, up around Amazon, which is a big impressive area that's really developing, but that probably does, you know, you build it, they come and that kind of thing.

We've got just a moment.

We'll probably have to come back to this, but you talked about, of course, training for workforce because I know from the inception of doing the show, whenever I would talk to economic development people, the big question was workforce development.

We've got companies who wanna come in here.

We have companies here.

They're looking for employees.

They're looking for labor force, and we hear that in the news a lot.

Oh, there are plenty of there jobs out there, but there aren't necessarily people to fill them.

So maybe we come back, we can talk about how you guys assist companies that, and with your other partners, how you deal with the labor force issues.

Obviously, you can have a plant that wants to employ 700 people, but if they can only find 500, that becomes an issue, and that's not obviously what you wanna have out there.

"Oh, look, we don't have enough employees for your plant."

So we can talk about workforce development when we come back.

Back in just a moment with Wade Gottschalk, executive director, Wood County Economic Development, here on "The Journal."

Thank you for staying with us around "The Journal."

Our guest is Wade Gottschalk, executive director of Wood County Economic Development.

Last segment, we kinda left there, we were talking about labor force.

So talk about obviously training, labor force development, retaining labor force, attracting new people to come into the job market as you guys create these new opportunities for companies.

So talk about dealing with providing workplace development and workforce development for companies you're trying to attract to Wood County and the ones that are still here.

- Yeah, so I mean, I'll start by saying like, it's a challenge for everybody right now, and I have a graph that, I mean, viewers can see.

It shows the participation rate.

So this is basically the percentage of that by age cohort of that age cohort that's kind of in the labor force.

And as you can see, the 25 to 54, which are generally considered prime workers, it's near a record high, 83.7% I think right now.

The record was like 84.4 for like one month in the late 90s.

We're only a few tenths off the record high.

The labor force itself overall has been fairly stagnant at a lower level than its peaks, and if you look at the, you know, 55 plus, obviously that's way below what the overall labor force is.

Slight decline in recent years there, but the big issue that I think people have to understand is it's because the population's aging.

So there are more people- - Demographically, it's a natural, yeah.

- More people are in that 55 plus than ever before, as a matter of fact, 50% more.

We went from about 20% of the overall US population, very stable, 20% at 55 plus in terms of age, basically up through 2000, and then obviously, as the baby boomers started to get older and retire, that's now up to 30%.

So in just 25 years, we've gone from 20% of the population being - 55 plus, - 55 plus to 30%, and more importantly, from 65, which is still going up at a rate, we went from about 12% of the population being 65 plus to almost 18% of the population - Wow.

- being 65 plus.

And those people participate in the labor force at an even lower rate that's not on the graph, but it's about 22% or 23%, and so that's a big challenge, right?

Because the prime age workers everybody wants, they're all pretty much in, and so what- - If you look at that, yeah, 'cause I know you look at 2020, it said like 85% of the 25-54 available people were, when that sample was taken, already working - Yeah.

- in the workforce.

- So, you know, that's where you're struggling, right?

And so what you have to find is you have to either attract people to your region, right?

Or you have to incentivize people to stay in the workforce as opposed to retire, right?

Or you potentially have to find a way to get those few people that are not in the workforce in that prime age group to work, and that's a very big challenge because a lot of the reason people aren't in are things like education or childcare, things like that, and so those are sometimes, you know, those are decisions.

Elder care is becoming a more prominent feature in that as well, and those are challenges.

So what we've worked on through our Ohio Means Jobs office, Wood County and through Jobs at Ohio is working on, you know, how can we upskill the workers that are already in the market so that they can do a higher skilled job?

Because what that does is those higher skilled jobs tend to be more efficient.

So the more high skilled jobs you can recruit, theoretically, the less workers you need.

And since we don't really have those workers, they pay a higher wage.

They also provide, you know, the output that we need but don't necessarily require the same number of people.

Obviously, our unemployment rate in Wood County is like 3%.

So it's not as though people don't have work opportunities.

They're there, but looking towards the future, you know, we have to look at how are we going to keep and maintain that workforce?

How are we going to upskill them?

How are we gonna continue to attract investment in Wood County at a point when population growth nationally is at near historic lows and our population is aging?

And so that's one of the things we work a lot, and that's more outside of our realm because we're a two-person shop, but it is something that we work closely with our partners- - With your partners and people who that's their area of expertise and have the resources.

Well, you make an interesting point, too, because you look at the workforce demographically, and you mentioned elder care, well, there's two things cutting together there.

You have people getting older who then require that level of care, which could potentially then take prime 25-54 workers out of the workforce.

So that that aging of the population in general across the country, it's not just Wood County, it's everywhere, creates those other things.

And we've had people on from our center that deals with marriage and family science, that kind of thing, and they talk about the fact that you run into a situation, too, because people have had fewer children.

There are fewer people to take care of parents as they get older, maybe no children at all, and then it falls on maybe a brother, a sister, a nephew, someone like that.

So it cuts both ways into the workforce, people getting older, leaving the workforce, but then requiring additional assistance, which requires people who are in the workforce to devote some of their time to that.

And you talked about companies retaining existing employees.

Are they seeing the fact that they have to increase compensation and benefits to retain people?

Because obviously, the demand is out there, not just for competing in Wood County, but all over the state and the region.

Is that something you're hearing maybe from some of the folks that you work with?

- Yeah, we saw that a lot, you know, post 2020.

We saw that kind of increase a lot.

I mean, that was nationally.

I mean, really globally you saw that.

That's tailed off a little bit.

Obviously there's still, you know, there's always gonna be some wage pressure upward, but nationally, it's tapered off a little bit, and that's locally, too.

You know, as wages came up to a much more livable wage and a much higher wage, everybody kind of got on that same ballpark.

And so you're at a much more even, you know, keel across the playing field, and so we're still seeing some upward wage pressure for sure.

It's not what it was a couple of years ago though.

And so the inflationary pressures, just like the rest of the economy, the inflation rate has come down dramatically from its peak in '21, '22, and it's back down to a much more normalized, you know, 3% range, and that's kind of what we're seeing in the wage growth as well.

Benefits have come up again.

You know, some of that, you know, again, you know, catching up, you know, kind of post 2020, to get people back into the labor force or to retain those people that are in the labor force that might be approaching retirement, but that's kind of leveled off a little bit.

So while we are seeing wage pressure, it's not what it was, - What it was.

- and we're not seeing the same sort of labor shortage issues we saw a few years ago either, right?

We're not hearing as many issues still exist, but not nearly the quantity that happened - Yeah, right after the- - a few years ago.

- Yeah, right after the pandemic or during the pandemic.

When you look at training, obviously companies, as we know, it's always easier to retain someone than it is to train somebody new.

The costs are incredible.

Are you hearing anything like that where people are saying, "Look, we've increased our training"?

"We've increased our retention training programs to hold onto existing workers because obviously, we don't wanna constantly be training people."

I know there's an agency up in Lucas County, a public agency that has significant turnover.

It's a high stress job, and they train 20 people, and by after a year, maybe only six of 'em are still working, which means they're constantly training, which is an expense, a huge expense for companies.

So is that something, too, that you guys hear from some of your business partners?

- We hear that occasionally on the training cost increase, but it's not really something we get as involved in.

Again, two-person office, so we kind of focus our efforts, but we do hear that occasionally.

As jobs have become more skilled, more training is required for every job, and a lot of it's more specialized.

And so what you see is you see less of the old school of, you know, training somebody to work at my competitor because the skillsets are less transferrable now than they used to be in many cases because you're dealing on specialized pieces of equipment, specialized computer programs, those kind of things.

And so it's not that it's not transferrable.

It's not as transferable - As transferable.

- as it used to be where it was a more universal skillset.

So we're still seeing that.

We're still seeing the upskilling of employees, like I said before, because virtually, everybody's trying to get as efficient as possible, and so to do that, you have to, you know, train your employees to be able to operate with those new systems.

- Yeah, and we come back, we can talk more, but that was obviously one of the things that people say, well, companies, a plant or an manufacturing plant move in, but because of automation, because of robotics, as you said, fewer people but more efficient operation and better pay actually for positions like that.

So we can talk a little bit more about that in just a moment.

Wade Gottschalk, executive director of Wood County Executive Development, is our guest.

Back in just a moment on "The Journal."

You're with us on "The Journal."

Our guest is Wade Gottschalk, executive director of the Wood County Economic Development organization.

We left that last segment.

We were talking about workforce.

One of the things that came up when the state made big news with the Intel chip plant down in Licking County, and thank you for reminding me of what county it was in.

We were off the air.

There was concern.

There was some discussion like, "Oh, people will flee all of the counties in Ohio to go to Licking County to take these new jobs."

Talk about, you know, workforce mobility.

Is that really a thing with regard to even something like the Intel plant that that will suck jobs or workforce away from other parts of the state to a degree that would be a problem?

- Yeah, it's probably unlikely.

I mean, labor force mobility nationally is near record lows.

A lot of reasons for that.

I mean, part of it is a two-income family.

I mean, it peaked back in the, I think late 70s, early 80s.

As you've gotten two incomes, you know, you can't just take a 20% raise for one if you go to zero on the other, right?

So it's a little bit harder, and then secondarily, what we've had recently, too, is then, you know, housing.

Housing availability isn't really there, but more importantly, a lot of people are still locked into sub five, sub 4% mortgage rates at houses that are vastly cheaper than what a current house would cost.

So not only do you have to buy a more expensive home, but you're paying a much higher interest rate as well.

So labor mobility's a little bit more difficult for that.

You'll see executive level, you know, people move around a little bit more, but the general labor, I mean, we're not really seeing that, you know, in a regional basis, right?

You might see that people moving, you know, within the region to different jobs, but the, you know, people picking up and moving and buying a new house somewhere, that's really nationally just been on a downward trend for 40 years.

That's not really something that worries us anymore - Not really a thing anymore.

- for the Intel project.

We think we could benefit from, you know, suppliers and things like that that may locate here if they're within that range.

- Yeah, which raises a real quick question.

I know we haven't talked about this.

The development of US 23 or whatever it called between here and Columbus, that would be a big boon obviously to Wood County to have that access because that's a highway that's marginally effective for what it's supposed to do.

You guys are probably looking forward to maybe that project getting some kind of traction that would open that up because that then, as you just said, makes it easier for suppliers here to deliver product, not just to Columbus but all over the state then.

- Yeah, I mean, we've obviously been supportive of that for awhile.

I mean, that would be a big issue for all of Northwest Ohio to be able to have a direct access to the state capital.

You know, we're the only major metro that really doesn't have that, and anybody that's driven that path knows it's not really a good options to do.

I mean, there's different options you can take.

None of them are good.

So yeah, we've been in support of that for awhile.

We would still support that.

Obviously, that's down the road.

I mean, that's probably beyond my career, but it would be something we'd like to see, you know, keep moving forward as time goes on.

- Yeah, yeah, 'cause those projects, the gestation is sometimes, yeah, 10, 15, 20, 30 years, sometimes.

Closer to home, obviously, you have a lot of projects you guys have been involved in and developed.

So talk about some of the projects that people would see when they drive by a road here in Wood County and go, oh, like FedEx ground for one thing or the FedEx place over there just to the east of us a little bit.

Talk about the projects you guys are involved in right now.

- Yeah, so at the beginning of the segment, you opened up with kinda how much billions of dollars, and so that's really, I'm not saying an old number, but the way we count stuff, it's outdated.

So just since we've updated that, because we really count stuff when it opens, right?

So we have a lot of projects.

So to get an idea, that's more than doubled in terms of just the last few years of stuff that hasn't opened, been announced, but hasn't either it's maybe finished, it hasn't opened or you know, approaching that period, or hasn't even started construction.

And so we've been very busy, and that goes nationally.

I mean, provided an image you guys can see where it shows the- - Yeah, the investment in manufacturing industrial construction.

- [Wade] And so that's inflation adjusted.

So I wanted to make sure with the inflation we've had, people could see this is after inflation.

So, you know, basically more than doubled, right?

Just in the last two years, and that's, you know, an annual basis.

That's how much it's going into just the construction of new manufacturing facilities.

It's kind of an insane thing when you look at that trend.

See kind of how stable it was really for 20 years prior.

- [Steve] And then in 2020, after that, it goes up in a dramatic way, yeah.

- And we've been the beneficiary of that, and so some of that, you know, that goes into different categories of things, but, I mean, that's, you know, the Abbott, and some of this stuff's not in that number either, right?

Abbott Laboratories that, you know, Katie worked on in BG, I mean, that's not in there 'cause it hasn't spent the money yet, right?

The data center project that we worked on up in 582, - Up on 582 near I-75, yeah.

- you know, that's a billion-plus-dollar project, right?

That hasn't started yet.

So that's not even in there.

So there's a lot of stuff that's kind of in the queue yet that hasn't hit those numbers, but the investment's been, you know, kind of across the board, you know, really off the charts the last, you know, couple of, you know, two to three years really.

I mean, it was strong before.

So it wasn't it was weak before.

It was strong before.

It's now at a level that I've never seen in the 20, you know, plus years that I have, 24 years, I guess, that I've been here.

Never seen this kind of level of constant activity and constant investment coming in.

Not just the region but I mean nationally.

- National, yeah.

- You can look at it nationally across the country.

These projects are getting announced all the time.

Some of that's the data center boom, but it's not all data centers.

A lot of it's actual just reshoring and manufacturing investment that's going across all sectors.

- Ah, wow.

Yeah, so some of the projects locally, you mentioned a couple of 'em.

Anything else that people should, the ones that are here and ones that you're working on that you can talk about a little bit?

- Yeah, I mean, probably the ones, you know, that we can talk about, things like, you know, there's a proposed new Amazon distribution center that's in Perrysburg Township near the one that's in Rossford, actually.

That recently went through the tax incentive process.

Obviously, they haven't announced yet, so that's not something that could come, right?

We've offered them an incentive package.

We hope they make the decision to come here, but that's one that's been publicly, you know, out there.

The Abbott Labs project that most people have heard about by now, the data center on 582, you know, First Solar, while the projects, they're nearing completion on all of them, you know, they have a huge campus up in Perrysburg and Lake Townships.

It kind of spans across both townships.

That's multiple billions of dollars of investment and 2,500-plus jobs up there, and, you know, they're just a great corporate citizen to have and, you know, leading the alternative energy revolution globally, and they're right here in Wood County.

You know, we've had a lot of investment in other sectors, including a lot of the distribution side.

Obviously being as close to I-75, the turnpike as we are, it makes a lot of sense whether you're doing e-commerce or whether you're just doing, you know, store fulfillment like the Walgreens distribution center up in Perrysburg Township.

All those, you know, are doing very well.

We tend to be on a lot of search radiuses for those projects as well.

- Yeah, well, and earlier you talked about the fact that if you can get a company to locate here, not only is it hopefully then they expand once they're here, but other competitors look at that and say, "Well, if they think that's a good place for a distribution center," let's say like a Walgreens, another company might say, "Well look, we know the infrastructure's there.

They're there for a reason because it works for them.

It'll probably work for us as well," and you can see that every day, I think when you especially look at, as you mentioned, I-75 and the turnpike, which took, as we know, you mentioned, we were talking US 23, a long time to get an interchange at 75 and the turnpike, which would've seemed like a no brainer when they built 75 across the turnpike.

So those things do take time, but obviously, that's a selling point if you can say, "Look, here are the companies that have come here because of the benefits that we offer in Wood County."

That's gotta be a nice thing to have.

- Yeah, it is, and we don't even have to do that.

The sell actually occurs kind of before because they do it themselves, right?

When they, you know, site consultants, some of the site consultants are the same ones that work on, you know, multiples of these projects, so they already know not only that we're a great location, but more importantly, you know, we're a very business friendly county, and we make it very easy to put a new manufacturing plant or a new distribution center in Wood County.

We try to take as much time off that process as we can.

We kind of try to be as helpful as we can, and they remember that because a lot of this stuff is speed to market.

So when you talk about a project, you know, they're looking at saying, "Hey, we need to be open in 12 months."

There's a lot of places around the country that can't hit that kind of a deadline.

- Wow.

- We've proven time and again - that we can.

- We can.

- And so that then gets us more business, and then, you know, the real estate departments of these companies, while they may not directly talk to each other, I mean, some of these people, you know, move around, right?

So somebody might move from one company to the next.

Then they'll remember that, and then we might get another crack at that.

You know, the new company - Yeah, the new company, - they're at, so- - they say, "Hey, you know, I've got an idea here.

Have you heard about Wood County?"

Yeah.

- So that's why it's always important to, you know, have your best foot forward every project because you never know, you know, when the next opportunity with that person, that individual that you built that relationship may happen down the road.

- Yeah, yeah, great.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us, and you're always welcome to come on.

As projects come online or new things start to gel, please let us know, and we'll be glad to have you come on and talk about the success that is Wood County Economic Development.

You can see it if you drive through the county.

Just about anywhere, there's something going on like that, and obviously, have plenty of opportunities.

There's land available, site-ready sites, that kind of thing as well, so we appreciate that very much.

- Well, thanks for having me.

- Yeah, thank you so much.

You can check us out at wbgu.org, and, of course, you can watch us every week at eight o'clock Thursday on WBGU PBS.

We'll see you again next time.

Goodnight, and good luck.

(uplifting music)