If you bat .300 in baseball, you’re a Hall of Famer.
Bat .300 in economic development, it’s the same thing.
The bats are hot in Wood County’s economic development, which has also seen a lot of strikes as it takes swings at leads and misses.
“They’re not necessarily looking at us, but we have to treat them all the same and a lot of them are not necessarily in play,” said Wade Gottschalk, executive director of Wood County Economic Development Commission.
Gottschalk spoke of growth in the county at the Kiwanis Club of Bowling Green’s Thursday meeting.
“We’ve had a pretty successful run here over the last six or seven years,” he said. “We expect that to continue.”
Since 2018, 8,000 jobs have been created in Wood County with more than $3 billion in capital expenditures.
That number does not include the planned data center of Abbott Labs projects, he said.
Wood County had a 2.8% unemployment rate at the end of 2023.
The commission works on retention, expansion and attraction efforts and focuses on industrial businesses, which offer good-paying jobs and creates a tax base that helps local school districts keep their taxes low, he said.
The commission was developed in 1993 and Tom Blaha was the first executive director, Gottschalk said. He has been executive director since 2012.
They do most of their work with existing businesses.
“They’re already here. They’ve already chosen Wood County. We want them stay here, grow here and thrive here,” he said.
The commission also works on attraction efforts “all the time.”
In recent years, the commission has assisted the CSX intermodal facility, NSG Glass North America, First Solar expansion plans, Northpoint/UPS, the Home Depot distribution center, the Amazon fulfillment center, and now a data center project.
Northpoint, in North Baltimore, is still marketing its site but is competing with other good sites, Gottschalk said
The data center has purchased 700 acres north of Bowling Green in Middleton Township. Phase 1 will be a minimum investment of $750 million and two 300,000 square foot facilities.
“We expect a lot more out of that campus. That is their initial commitment,” he said.
Gottschalk would not identify the company, only said it was on the Fortune 200 tech list.
He said the commission works with Jobs Ohio, the Wood County Port Authority, the Regional Growth Partnership plus local townships and villages.
“We bring everybody to the room,” he said. “Our goal is to be able to deliver a project back to anyone in the country, from the time they say they want to go to the time they want to break ground.”
The commission is funded by $1 from every $1,000 sold in Wood County.
At the national level, unemployment was at 3.7% at the end of 2023, 2.76 million jobs were added last year, and the S&P 500 was up 24%.
The United States is experiencing the longest streak of unemployment being under 4% since the 1960s, Gottschalk said.
He said that there are 3 million more people in the labor force compared to pre-pandemic levels and workers aged 25-54 are at an all-time high.
“The economy has done very well since the pandemic,” he said.
Businesses still want to hire people but can’t find them due to a mismatch in skills and because people aren’t moving to take jobs. Interest rates for home purchases is impacting the mobility of the workforce.
Sixty percent of all retail sales happen online, and e-commerce has benefitted Wood County with the addition of the Home Depot and Amazon distribution centers.
However, Gottschalk said he expects that shift in sales to impact downtown businesses and how retail establishments work.
The direct impact has been a resurgence of spending on new manufacturing facilities – double pre-pandemic numbers.
“We’re bursting at the seams with projects,” Gottschalk said about economic development.
Inflation is always going up, and if it’s not, we’re in trouble, he said.
Deflation is a thousand times worse than inflation.
Inflation peaked in 2022 at 8% and was down to 3.4% last year with a target of 2%.
The question is, can the feds get there without causing a recession, Gottschalk said.
“Their track record says no,” he said. “But so far there is nothing indicating a recession.”
