and thank you all for joining us this evening we know you could be anywhere on a Tuesday night and we're glad that you're here um you know first it was Intel's announcement in January if it's plans to build a 20 billion dollar computer chip manufacturing complex in New Albany then today Honda announcing plans to spend three and a half billion dollars on a new electric battery production plant in Fayette County together these projects promised to bring thousands of high-tech high-paying jobs to Ohio all of it sounds like great news right well let's see what does it all mean though for Ohio's economic future could Ohio move from the Buckle of the Rust Belt to the hub of the Silicon Heartland we'll see about that and what other companies could bring their business to Ohio and call Ohio home as well let get right into it uh Bill and Fran uh Bill let's start with you and just give us an overview of kind of where things stood with Ohio's economy before Intel before the pandemic take us back to uh just a few years before that and kind of where things the trajectory that Ohio was on before okay we'll go back even farther being a aging baby boomer myself the golden era in Ohio for the middle class was appeared right after World War II and a lot of people whether they had a college degree or not could go work for a unionized go work in a unionized factory make good money send their kids to college have a vacation own a car and so forth uh and in fact Ohio if you compared Ohio to the rest of the country our workers made more on average than they did in fact if you use the most common measure of financial well-being which is per capita income Ohio was way up there in the period after World War II again because of our heavy our unionized jobs and industries like automobiles tires glass machine tools and all that all that well that started to change in the middle 60s and in fact that relative prosperity of Ohio compared to the rest of the country peaked at about 1969. so beginning in that period And I know some of you have our our report and there's a chart that shows Ohio's per capita income compared to the rest of the country and in 1969 it was above it and since then over 50 some years now there's been a steady decline and one of the things Fran and I looked at was why did this happen and there were a lot of culprits out there some people blame foreign competition some blame jobs moving to the South some blamed obsolescence and that kind of thing and all those had a factor but probably the single biggest Factor was we were a victim of our own success in that those factories became more efficient due to automation so Ohio now is producing in terms of value more in in the terms of manufacturing Goods than it did back then but it's doing it with a third with half as many people so the question is how do you bounce out of that and what's happened again for the last 50 years and Ohio's not alone in this it's happened to Michigan it's happened to some degree to Indiana to parts of Pennsylvania is those heavy manufacturing States although we've continued to grow have not grown as fast as the rest of the country have continued to lag behind and so that's a fundamental problem and then the question is how do you break through that and get out of it and what we Chronicle in our report is that every governor no matter which party who's been governor of Ohio since the mid 60s has tried to do that but they've only had mixed success so it's not friend I didn't mean to cut you off but it's not the idea I think there's this idea that Manufacturing in Ohio and other sort of Rust Belt states are it's a thing of the past right it's it but that's not the case it's it's the automation issue that has driven the just the decline in job numbers yeah it's a big part that's actually just what I I was going to jump in with it Ohio is still very much a manufacturing State we we still manufacturing is still a huge portion of our GDP but it's turned the its presence in terms of employment has shrunk so dramatically over that 50 60 year span that bill was just talking about and and what's also troubling is that where where manufacturing itself used to have a premium for wages and Ohio manufacturing had an even higher premium for its workers we've now lost that and so manufacturing has lost its premium and Ohio manufacturing specifically has lost its wage premium that it once enjoyed and so that's what has added to this decline in our our well-being compared to other states in the country but but it it does seem interesting and exciting that these two big Investments are about manufacturing yeah yeah and I wanted to we'll talk more about uh sort of the the skill level that's required for some of these jobs but as the number of jobs uh available in manufacturing has gone down now can you talk about where the the skill level for those jobs that remain uh what sort of training is required for them well so in some ways there's there is somewhat of a bifurcation going on in the manufacturing employment because on the one hand we need we need workers who have the technical skills to um to succeed in an increasingly high-tech Advanced manufacturing environment these are not the manufacturing plants of the 1950s these are all high-tech they have they have Machinery that are worth you know millions of dollars that that they need workers largely who can not only operate but also know how to repair and and so on the one hand those workers are in high demand and they can command really good middle income and upper middle income wages but but at the same time there's also been a lot of movement toward sort of low skill assembly work and and at that level those workers are competing now after after the pandemic May made us see Wendy's workers supposedly getting paid 15 18 an hour that's actually more than what many manufacturers are paying their their assembly workers when we talk about the decline in average Ohio incomes economic performance utilize it a few different ways in the 2018 report in the most recent one as well what's the most telling and maybe that's not a fair question but what's the most telling metric for gauging how well Ohio is performing a take it away I I guess the most telling part is that all the traditional metrics point in the same direction so there's per capita income you just take the total amount of income generated state divided by a number of people there's Gross State product which is the value of all the goods and services produced we had when we got reaction we love getting reaction from the public to our reports somebody said to us well per capita income is misleading because housing costs in Ohio are a lot less and money here will go a lot farther than it would in California or New York or somewhere like that or Silicon Valley where housing is really expensive so you're selling Ohio short so he said well that's a fair question we took a look at the data and in fact there's a series that's put out by the Bureau of economic research I think it is in the Commerce Department it does the same as the other series that adjusts for cost of living and what it showed is that in Ohio the cost of living for most other things is about the same the cost for housing is a little less but even when you take that into account Ohio still lags the national average and one of the reasons housing costs less in Ohio is it because we're losing people so there's not a demand for new housing so there's old housing you can buy cheap because people want to get rid of it so it it uh again points the same way the fourth measure is the traditional number of traditional measure of how many jobs are created you take a number of people working one year and you look at the next and what's the difference same thing we lag the the national average and I and I think we could actually layer on one more in that Ohio is an aging State I mean we went from I believe it was about 20 years ago that we had a peak of Labor Force participation which was around 69 percent of of working age adults were in fact working and are at least looking for work or working and now so during the pandemic we had plummeted down to 59 percent we have since climbed back to about 62 percent but but that we need work we have jobs moving in we need workers and maybe this will be a chance for us to hold on to some of our great export product which is sending all you great young people who often want to go to the coast to you know to find great jobs but maybe you'll find that working at Intel or or finding some other exciting job here in Ohio well let's talk about Intel the 20 billion dollar Licking County project officially broke ground last month and I want to just get your first impressions when Intel first announced they were coming to Ohio what you both thought of all this well I thought it was great news and particularly that Ohio had attracted a manufacturing entity that was different from what it had in the past so that opens up some opportunities I think it's also significant that Intel probably will have a lot of suppliers that want to move near there that will be helpful as well and again this is more of a high-tech thing so that's good as well but immediately once that happened people started talking about the new Silicon Valley and all this and my fear is in the development business it's a lot like sales and you want to sell what you're doing and that's important but it's very easy to get ahead of yourself and there have been some great development projects that have been announced and it's easy to announce them but they haven't come through both in Ohio and elsewhere and the comparisons that we made the report the big one was Foxconn in Wisconsin now that's a foreign company and I've always been encouraged and I think this is fair to fellow Ohioans to say that Intel is not Foxconn Foxconn had a very bad reputation for announcing things and not following through Wisconsin threw a lot of money at them it turns out they were supposed to do 3 000 jobs when it opened thirteen thousand jobs within two years I think it's been a couple hundred and they backed off a lot of what they promised in Wisconsin so that's a bad news an example that is often used in conjunction with Intel which I think is fair is Honda I was around when Honda was announced and it was going to be a motorcycle Factory that started with 45 employees and they hope to get up to 247. in 1979 when it was announced Bill did you buy one of those motorcycles off the line I had a bad luck with motorcycles which we won't go into but you wouldn't walk okay so Honda would eventually in Honda's 20th anniversary they had I think in Ohio 15 000 employees another 20 000 making parts so that's a tremendous success story but at the same time Honda came to Ohio Pennsylvania got jealous and made a deal with Volkswagen which is certainly a reliable country company they're going to put a auto plan A New Stanton to build vultan Volkswagen rabbits and that was supposed to employ 20 000 people well when it opened they did hire it did open they hired 3 000 people 10 years later the plant closed laid them all off why because the rabbit was not accepted by customers people weren't buying them whereas Honda was making Accords by then which was a tremendous success more recently Ohio and here in Ohio announced that pelotonia was coming to Northwest Ohio to build a plant for their exercise bikes that would employ 2 000 people and I think you know what happened to pelotonia after the the pandemic ended people stopped buying exercise bikes palatonia crashed they didn't build anything and that so you can have good outcomes you can have bad outcomes the sign so far with Intel that's a solid Corporation they've already broken ground I I'm really encouraged that Ohio colleges and universities have banded together to work with them to find students and other people to work in those plants so that's an encouraging sign the problem is the chips industry is very competitive and Intel has had its problems off and on staying competitive I looked up just before I came here because I was curious what the Wall Street analysts were saying Intel stock has dropped 50 percent over the last year what the analysts were saying and Wall Street analysts are not always correct by the way but what some were saying by some were saying sell most were saying hold which tells me there's potential there but it's not a given so you've got to see how that works out if intel is excessive Intel chips are as successful as Honda Accords it's going to be great if for some reason they're not we're going to have to figure out what to do well so I would say that my initial reaction since I'm from outside of Cleveland was jealousy like why not why not up with us why not give us some love but so I think it has the potential to be a really exciting win for for Columbus and and we hope Ohio we hope it it there's a lot of spillover effect that will that will trickle up to Cleveland and down to to Cincinnati and over to Dayton but um but so what as as Bill said it's not it's not a given none of these none of these projects ever are but some some really hopeful parts of this are that um you know maybe it changes the perception of Ohio you know that that that an auto plant couldn't because an auto plant is historic you know an auto plant Ohio has had Auto plants since the beginning of Auto plants and so and so this is new and this feels fresh like it and even though the semiconductor industry actually is pretty old and and if you look back a couple of years there are people saying you know has it become a commodity is it a mature industry but there was a recent McKinsey article saying predicting that the semiconductor industry because semi semiconductor chips are in everything around us as we as we found out during the the pandemic they're in not not only our computers but they're in automobiles and medical devices and and refrigerators and washer and dryers and everything that we use now seems to have chips in it I think there's something like 130 chips per person that are now being produced something like that it's some crazy number and and so McKenzie has predicted that there's going to be huge growth in the semiconductor industry over the next 10 years and it's going to be a trillion dollar industry by um by 2030 and and you know what is driving that so one is Computing and data storage like the cloud one is the other the the the big three or the computers and data storage Wireless technology so 5G and automotive and Automotive is supposed to double it's a its presence in terms of using semiconductor chips and one of the biggest uses of that is going into electric vehicles and and so this could be really a chance for there to be Synergy in Ohio because we're going to be poised to do electric cars look go ahead yeah I want to a friend mentioned the other parts of Ohio and I want to go back to that in a minute the other thing to understand is as positive as this could be by itself it will not change the curve for Ohio let me give you an example in the in the 1966 the governor Rhodes turned or the the Earth in a groundbreaking for what was going to be the largest and most efficient auto assembly plant in the world and opened here in Ohio in a in a farm near a town called Lordstown now when you say Lordstown now everybody thinks failure because the plant closed in fact that plant was extremely successful GM claimed it was going to start with something like 3 500 employees instead they they hired 6 000 within a couple years they had 8 000 by the mid 80s 20 years later they had ten thousand five hundred and everybody's talked about the Intel being the biggest uh development project in Ohio in dollar terms it is even if you just for inflation in terms of initial hires it's not was the Lordstown GM Chevy assembly plant and that plant produced for Ohio high paid unionized workers for 20 years before the curve started the other way but in that 20 years Ohio's per capita income compared to the rest of the country continued to decline well then Honda started gearing up and Honda has been a wonderful addition to the state of Ohio so what I'm saying is not Honda's fault not GM's fault but in that period Ohio's per capita income continued to decline so although Intel and the Honda expansion are great place to start the state is going to have to find some way because this is a big state to make sure that Northeast Ohio and Southwest Ohio areas that have traditionally been Appalachia that have traditionally been overlooked are starting to get some benefits from what happens here right just to add a little more context to what Bill said so so they have promised about 3 000 jobs at the plant they say that there will be one of seven thousand one-time construction jobs and then maybe 10 000 they're saying 10 000 new jobs from suppliers that are attracted into the area and and that's in the context of we have 5.5 million jobs in the state of Ohio so that's you know a drop in the bucket that's not going to change the mix but that's but that's why I'm sort of hopeful that if part of this is about perception part of this is people thinking there's something exciting going on in Ohio and that they want to make it their choice of where to live and that and so to add to good jobs it's also a reasonable cost of living and no hurricanes and you know like we we need to be selling selling our story here in Ohio that that this is a good place for workers and and I'm hopeful that that's what we're seeing here and Bill I think you kind of alluded to this earlier that we kind of shouldn't put our or shouldn't count our chickens before they hatch as far as whether this is going to be the the next Silicon Valley you know the Midwest here but what are the odds that this turns out to be something like that or something a hybrid situation something different the key term you said is something like that yeah um as friend mentioned the the chip industry and semiconductors have been around for a long time if you want to look to the Future it's not the industries of the past but where what are the things that are just an idea in somebody's head that's going to germinate and become in the future and that's where as important as it is to make sure the Intel project gets off on the right foot and the Honda expansion gets off on the right foot the state of Ohio needs to do a couple things one is then to nurture the smaller Industries you know Amazon started in Jeff bezos's Garage in Seattle what you want is the next Jeff Bezos to working in a garage in Akron and that thing whatever it is that he or she is doing becomes the next Amazon the other thing and Fran alluded to this this is the first time in my adult life that there have been more jobs than there have been people looking for them the states that are going to succeed are the ones that say to employers come to our state and you're going to get the skilled workers you need and you know again we're the state's already cooperating with Intel to make sure they get the workers aid but that needs to be broadened and uh Fran and I pointed out a lot in our pay paper about what the state needs to do a little differently in terms of developing Workforce well and I'd like to just point out that there tends to be a lot of me too ISM in Economic Development circles and if you if you Google it you would probably find that there are dozens and dozens of places across the country that call themselves silicon something including silicon holler in Eastern Kentucky so so what I think we need to do and granted it's hard not to call ourselves silicon when we're making chips right but um but what what we also have to do is celebrate what we are in Ohio and not be afraid to say we're the place where we make things and we and we have we have some really flashy things that we make and we have some things that that you might not even think about and might seem gritty but are really important to to how the economy functions and we need to celebrate a little bit more who we are and not be afraid that we're not as keeping up with what other places are doing and and just make the case to other companies because because that's ultimately what economic development is about is about the products that we produce because that's how we have jobs and that's how we have GDP and good per capita wages and we just need to be a little bit more willing to say what we're good at yeah you know one of the things our colleague Ned Hill is fond of talking about is it's important to get existing companies to come here or expand here but you also want future entrepreneurs young people with an idea and a burning desire to be successful to say this is the kind of environment where I want to come and Thrive and the state and the society there will be accepting of me and supportive of me and I'll be able to accomplish my goals and I can raise a family there are a lot of different ways to go about this and we have to have the basic building blocks which are the intels and The Hondas but we can't be satisfied with just celebrating that we need to go farther and I want to we're about halfway through our our conversation so I want to at this point start to bring some folks up from the audience if you have a question feel free to line up in front of the microphone there and we'll get to you in just a moment but we were talking about um sort of selling Ohio right and obviously the the Intel deal was a very lucrative and competitive process to to land this fish what is it about Ohio what what do we bring to the table that a California that an Arizona a anywhere else in the country doesn't doesn't have well some of it is um that we had open space for them to be able to create a campus that I think is about supposed to be a thousand acres so we had a thousand acres that they could build on so that's important and also important is access to talent I mean people people are Regional assets and so and so we have a major university that is producing talent in areas that they that that are is beneficial to the bottom line of an Intel succeeding and and so and so we have resources that are desirable part of it is also I'm sure cost um we have lower costs and other than perhaps other competitive States but I think I think the land and the access to talented people are what are are part of what sold us I think that's a big part and the interesting part on access to trained people and I'm an OSU graduate so I want to be supportive of OSU and I'm sure OSU being here helped convinced Intel could get Engineers other people but part of the advantage of Ohio is within two hours you also have I hate to mention those two places up North Michigan and Michigan State that produce Engineers you have Carnegie Mellon two hours to the east you have Purdue and IU two hours to the West you have the University of Kentucky so this it's a good and you have a strong two-year sector Columbus State and the other technical schools so you've got a good educational infrastructure here the other thing Ohio offers is a geographic centrality so if shipping costs are important then you have that one of the overlooked things that Ohio and the other midwest states have is high quality clean abundant water which I think has become more and more of an issue we need to protect that to be able to use it to continue to lure people and the other thing is I think this state it has its moments but uh reflects stability which if I were an employer I'd want to have and you're not going to have a lot of hurricanes and crazy weather you also there's going to be an interesting test I think between some elements of the legislature who feel very strongly about some social issues and this big company coming in from California I looked on their website and a lot of what their website celebrates is diversity welcoming of all people and you got some elements in the legislature that certain people they don't want to welcome so that how the state manages that is going to be extremely important as well so you're seeing kind of a culture Clash potentially Brewing there yeah I wouldn't call it a clash yet but there's a culture as Fran mentioned for this this state has been losing population if you want to gain jobs you have to convince workers that are employers that the workers are here if you've got the workers are here that means you need to be growing people not having them go away so that tension I think is better would be a better way to put it and and they're different people willing to accept different things and we have to accept that as part of our society but at some point if you become too hostile to either immigrants or people who have different sexual preferences or whatever that can affect your Economic Development as well and I think that also some of our our Legacy our Legacy is both a manufacturing Powerhouse so we know how to work with our hands and also our agricultural history I I I've been in um focus groups with manufacturers of um who talk about how they actually like to move into farming communities because they know that those are people who are willing to just sort of get in there and and take things apart they're not you know they're they're just not afraid of Machinery to work with with to work with their hands and that's something that we have not every not every state has that history we've been talking about the kind of the overarching theme of this with the long slow decline in in some of these economic metrics that we've been talking about Ohioans are heading to the polls next month and essentially new state leaders uh at the Capitol uh could have a new governor could have the same Governor we're going to find out but what do they need to do I guess is the million dollar question to I guess land the plane with Intel with Honda and to make sure that these uh these benefits are felt across the state yeah I think the to summarize what we've been talking about if if I were to advise the new governor what that advice would be or what friend my advice would be since it's our drawing paper would be number one make sure the Intel project proceeds successfully you got permits you got workers you got a lot of things that could go wrong you want to make sure they go right number two is this whole Workforce issue one of the things Governor Kasich did I think was really a positive he created that work group on the workforce in the future yeah and really that to give that some make sure you've got the workers then available and the skills that we need the third thing would be to deal with the Forgotten Ohio and there's they're geographically forgotten Ohio there's geograph they're people that are forgotten in Appalachian in our inner cities and there's a great opportunity if we can bring those people up and give them the training they need and want they can become successful members of society that's a that's a plus and then the fourth item is what we talked about earlier is don't forget about the little guy the man or woman in a garage somewhere working on the great idea for tomorrow because that's where the future is going to go and you want in Ohio that's attractive to that kind of person or even existing companies yeah I mean we have we have to be be able to do all of this while also still supporting the com the the existing companies that we have we can't factoid that that reminds you of is I wondered how intel was started intel was started by two Engineers who worked for Fairchild semiconductors in California and they're unhappy with something that Fairchild was doing or not doing so they set out with I think six other people and started Intel that's what you want to happen here well and I would I would add I mean this kind of we address this sort of as part of Forgotten Ohio in our in in the reports but we've got to tackle the drug issue I mean that that is what has contributed to losing large numbers of people I mean literally in that we've we've had so many deaths due to opioid addiction but it's also keeping them from being part of the workforce that we need them to be and then I guess I would add that I think governor dewine and lieutenant governor who said they get to take a Victory lap on this I mean they they scored uh big time for our potentially big time for the state and and if you've noticed any of their ads that they're running a lot of them focus on Technical Training I know that that's been a big focus of lieutenant governor who stud the the like the tech cred program where they're providing support for many for employers who are trying to allow their their workers to gain some sort of technical credential and so that is where a lot of the focus is right now is trying to figure out how do we identify the right kinds of skills and the right kinds of workers to be a success and and some of that is not at the four-year level a lot of that is trying to figure out you know we have a lot of people who've had some some dabbling with college but have not succeeded to earn that four-year degree so how do we get them the kinds of credentials that are really going to open doors to good middle class kinds of jobs and this is a huge opportunity for that just a plug Ohio State's College of Engineering program they recently in the last year or two started a Bachelor of Science of engineering technology that is being offered at the regional campuses like lima and Marion and Mansfield and I think one's coming online soon in Newark and that is to try to train those workers that are going to be able to function in an increasingly high-tech manufacturing environment and so that's exactly the kinds of focus on skills that we need right now I wanted to ask you a little bit more about this idea of the Forgotten Ohio and I grew up in Brown County Ohio which is in in Southwestern Ohio Cincinnati and it's a very rural sort of agricultural based Community not a lot of high paying high-tech jobs there I guess my question is sort of two-fold for folks you know in those parts corners of Ohio where you know just this kind of infrastructure uh for jobs doesn't exist yet why should they be excited about an Intel or even a Honda for that matter and then the other part of the question is you know are there any success stories we can point to where you know things have turned around for these forgotten parts of the state good question I um part of it is if for example if Honda goes to Fayette County now Fayette County is fairly wealthy but the the counties around it will be affected as well so I think that's that's part of it uh part of it is one of the things that was in the last budget both federally and nationally are both Federal and on the state level is getting high-speed interconnection internet connection out to more rural areas so they have more of an opportunity and I remember somebody is involved in uh revitalization in in Ohio in small towns told me that um she found that the generation which is Generation Z now that's coming out of college I don't know whoever it is the more recent graduates some of them have been talking to her they want to start a business of their own and one of the things they love are refurnished Loft spaces in old towns like the chillicothes of Ohio that have a certain appeal so in it so that goes back to Fran's point in addition to making sure Honda and Intel are successful and the other existing employers are successful we need to find those ways to become attractive to those young entrepreneurs and Ohio has a lot of wonderful small towns that are easy to live in and are a great place to raise a family that maybe with just a little bit of State help in their own help can then do some things to attract some of those younger people but you also have to set a reputation of a state that is welcoming to Outsiders yeah well so a fun fact I spent the first four years of my life living in Brown County as well so what are the odds of that so so what about you Bill so um so well you know one sort of sad reality about people who live in remote communities is that they are often willing to drive large long distances to access good paying jobs and so I wouldn't be surprised if you see people from Brown County and Adams County and other pretty far-flung places that if they can get a job at an Intel or a Honda plant they would jump at that job as as far as places that maybe have seen some success in in thinking about ways to turn pretty devastated Regional economies around I think Findlay often tops the list of of desirable locations and site selection magazines for their their size and part of what they've done is they didn't want to fall into the Trap of having of being a company Town anymore so they go after smaller companies they don't want the huge I mean I don't know if they would turn them down if that I don't know but they don't go after the big huge employment sectors they want a diverse mix to make their Regional economy more resilient and then you can look at Marion I mean Marion is still trying to turn things around but Marion was the was the quintessential company town and that it was dominated by the Marion steam shovel I don't think that's exactly the right name but but the the shovel that built the Panama Canal they made the shovels that built the Panama Canal and and so when the shovel company went under went uh was bought multiple times and eventually left and they in their whole Regional economy was pretty devastated but they have sort of thoughtfully looked at what are their Regional assets and one of their Regional assets assets is access to their rail system and so they have purposely gone after companies that uh that that's an asset for and so they're seeing successes I mean it it takes time it takes time to completely rebuild your Regional economy but but they're seeing some green shoots that are really starting to spring up so it can be done got our first victim here a brave soul if you want to say your name and uh your question my name is Matt Young thank you very much for this conversation well you're carrying our report that's a good story I think it was five or several months ago there was an article in the dispatch about the comparison or about the Intel plant that went into Arizona I believe that was a big expansion effort for Intel to go into Arizona and they talked a little bit about the um the way that affected the area I didn't know if if you had researched into that at all I'm curious to think of how Vettel is or how Ohio is similar or different politically or economically than than the site they chose in Arizona and how we might change as a result of this I did read that article which was very interesting the impression I took away from it is that Intel is a fairly good neighbor that one of the things one of the things I did and the same thing will happen here it put a lot of pressure on the local school districts because you have all those people coming in they're going to want their kids to have a good education and Intel actually put up some money to help build the high school one of the challenges we're going to have with the Intel project is that you've got New Albany on one side which is a fairly wealthy fairly sophisticated politically plugged in community I think they'll do fine through all this but then you've got Johnstown which has gone through some turmoil under city council which I think they've got behind him and some other smaller communities and school districts farther out in in that area and they're going to need some assistance I think that they're capable of dealing with this but they're going to need a little bit of assistance from the state and from Intel to help manage creating the school slots and also Building Homes and there's already a shortage of of homes and workers to build them so there's going to have to be some coordination there and there's going to be some a little bit of turbulence at first the key is to stay ahead of it as best you can and and and work with Intel in a positive way and so the effect on the local community will be large and and I'm sure that there are people who would probably prefer not to have the Intel plant in their own backyard but um but there will also be spillover effects that we need to be mindful of of communities uh you know that have some connection to Central Ohio I I did a a different report a few years ago where I was talking to the economic development director and one of the neighboring counties and he was saying or actually about like an hour from Columbus and he was saying that they are desperate for new housing stock and yet that they can't get any developers to come in there because for the same cost of what it takes to build a house they can build one in the Columbus area and sell it for a much higher price than what they can in a more rural community uh you know an hour away from Columbus so those are going to be there are going to be downsides and we need to be mindful of that they're going to be tensions and and and challenges but but we hope overall the result will be positive let me tell one story real quickly sure because this is fascinating I was talking to somebody who's plugged into the construction industry in central Ohio and he said he had a friend of his who wanted us to cover his cement his patio and what he said to the friend was find a way to do it with flagstone because for the next two years all the cement in central Ohio is going to one place now it's a bit of an exaggeration but not totally yeah go ahead uh Mark barbash and it's not an exaggeration I was talking with someone from the construction trades who was estimating that the Intel construction was going to take up the equivalent of three years worth of construction for all of Central Ohio um first of all I applaud you on the on the Forgotten Ohio Columbus 2050 report said that between now in 2050 the population of Ohio is going to go down by three percent the population of Central Ohio is going to go up by 25 which means that not only whatever growth is occurring is occurring here but people are moving from other places to come to Central Ohio um I want to stay with this topic about housing I was talking with a an employer from uh from East Central Ohio South of uh south of uh Canton a successful employer employing about 150 people who said I could hire 27 more people in wood but I can't find anyone who will build a house that they can afford in my semi-rural County how does housing I mean we're all we're all facing this issue we're about inflation about the cost of construction and the not necessarily increase in wages to afford how does housing fit into the strategy that you talk about in terms of the role that the governor or the state like it's like you ought to play boy good question I one of the encouraging things I've seen and I think I've seen in Columbus and some other places in Ohio elsewhere in the country is when a company or employer comes in and particularly developer and wants to build housing in a very expensive area part of the deal is you don't get the tax breaks unless you also do a certain portion of more affordable housing so in other words using the power of government not to control everything but the leverage the market and make it work better to meet the needs of people is one way to approach that I think it's also going to take some careful planning part of it is transportation so there's there's available housing in different parts of Ohio and in central Ohio but people can't get to work areas easily and I was really encouraged to see the coda the central Ohio transit authority has expanded apparently with the agreement of I think it's Licking County in the areas out there their service area so they're going to take a Central Ohio wide look at how to improve public transportation and that kind of thing because if you don't have good public transportation out to that Intel plant everybody's going to drive there and will look like California so there is no easy solution but I think first is recognizing the problem and then secondly figuring out how we can make the markets work better to help address that problem um I don't I don't know that much about Central Ohio housing issue although I was driving in at around 3 30 and there was just a backup heading north out of the yeah 315 I guess out of the Central City already at 3 30 and I'm like my goodness how is this going to be when you add you know you bring in these big this you know this big employer maybe they should have rethought Cleveland because we have lots of housing up in Cleveland that people are welcome to come to come partake of um I know that uh in talking with the some of the people in Marion they are were sort of considering themselves to that they're becoming kind of a bedroom community of Columbus and so they have retrofitted to try to bring back their downtown they've been retrofitting some of the old retail buildings and turning them into Apartments um for you know young workers that want that kind of lifestyle and if you throw in the option of of some remote work you know who knows how extensive that's going to remain but if but if people don't have to drive an hour every day of the week then then and you've got good connectivity then maybe that opens up some some opportunities to go into some of these very Charming small towns that we have across Ohio and bring some wages much needed good paying good paying job wages into those communities because and where there is housing available she makes a friend makes a good point it one of the things Ohio has because it's been around a while or a lot of old buildings you can turn that from a detriment into an asset by investing and improving those buildings and making them attractive and especially with remote work and if you've got high-speed internet then that all starts to link together and you you begin to build an infrastructure that supports moving the high-paying jobs more broadly distributed across the state quick time check we've got about 10 minutes left for any questions I've got a couple of Guardians fans up here on stage and I've beat the evil empire promise them we'd be done by seven uh but uh yeah go ahead hi there my name is Sean Remington Remington electric and electrical contractor Fayette County so a lot of big news yeah a hot wind it is from WSU and I was like oh that's interesting because in my town all I've been talking about is people is the I was actually born in California but I grew up in Fayette County since I was seven so I still have family in Silicon Valley and that kind of so kind of having an outside perspective and I come in and I'm always telling people like a community located in three major cities so not to go on and on but there's a lot of things the housing supply chain issues is a thing we're dealing with in our industry a lot the trades is something that comes up so the way the education system kind of really focused on um you know the difference between white collar and blue collar jobs where it turns out some white collar jobs can be outsourced by algorithms faster than blue collar jobs so they kind of got that backwards and um so yeah a lot of I'll limit it but I guess my to have a question not to go on and on is uh and I haven't got a chance to read the report so um I would imagine you're seeing a lot of you're anticipating a lot of um it's kind of what you're seeing the mass access out of California to Dallas with what Tesla is doing any anticipation of kind of you know I hear these claims that Columbus is the new Silicon Valley the Midwest um over the next 10 years like do you see other large Silicon Valley companies moving this way and and and the food as well um California is running out of water and I'm talking to Farmers a lot too is like you know corn and soybeans has been a commodity for a while but uh supply chain issues taught us that we probably want to grow food here so anyway so thank you yeah good and let me mention one thing because you mentioned being an electrical contractor one of the points Fran and I made in our report we're both college graduates we think have people with four-year degrees are important to Ohio's economy but we need to develop an understanding among young people that we need electricians plumbers roofers and those are by and large good paying jobs that provide middle class living style and we have a shortage of them we need to find some way better matching people and skills all the way up and down the the skill ladder and I think there's a tremendous opportunity uplift a number of people and if we can't get those skilled workers we can't build all the things we want to build and that sets us back so there's a massive Gap right now they told when I graduated 99 that there was going to be a gap in the trades and right now you cannot my phone rings off the hook there's not there's we're in trouble in a sense of all this in all this development is going to happen there's no skilled trades to do it so there's a there's a lack there's all this development happening but there's not so these companies it doesn't matter if you give them all the money in the world they don't have the tradesmans they don't have the journeymans to do the work so it's but I assume part of what they that what they the calculation is is that people will come in from outside to do the job right right but there's development going and I I think they'll have we call it Road Warriors I went on the road to pay for my wedding and uh we spent time in Texas and guys do travel you know you saw what happened in North Dakota with the oil fields it was a massive boom yeah there will be that but kind of in trades of it takes five years to really train someone to be confident and so it's not something you can tool up quickly so I'm not being negative but I'm I'm positively optimistic but it's a lot of lot and flux happening a lot of well well you're you're you're actually um I mean this is a soapbox of mine too is that I think that we need to be far more respectful of all people's talents and and and the whole notion of calling people uneducated voters because just simply because they didn't have a bachelor's degree I I thought was really insulting to workers and so and so we need but we also need a a push toward making young people aware of what jobs are out there and really being frank about what are the job prospects of different Majors but just different career paths and that usually start that has to start at a younger age than what we typically do I mean I I'm part of a of a mentoring program in Cleveland where we go in and are trying to just simply provide career awareness to 8th graders because there's all sorts of research that says kids start making decisions and they make decisions about classes that close off certain paths to them at a pretty early age actually and so we need to be giving them real advice on what paths are and what and how they can go about getting to something that's a good job as an electrician and and actually Bill had said something earlier that that he had seen a stat that that a lot of these Intel jobs 70 of them are supposed to not require a bachelor's degree and there's some research uh recently I think out of burning glass that was that said that that um in help wanted ads they're seeing increasingly jobs that had required a bachelor's degree no longer do and so that I think that's a sign of what of some shifting mindset that's going on and maybe I can ask uh sort of talking about the education piece of this and I know one of the issues sort of facing Ohio right now is uh math proficiency at the middle and high school level those test scores um not where they need to be post pandemic what does that pretend for sort of the future career Readiness of the state as we're trying to attract more workers into these whether it's whether it's an electrical field whether it's um you know a four-year degree or Beyond whatever it is that is a good question I mean the the uh there there have been the studies that that the literacy and the numeracy skills declined dramatically a following uh remote learning for kids and so that to me that should be front and center of what schools should be focusing on because if if kids can't read and they can't do math then then they're going to have a hard time connecting into the modern Workforce because you know it used to be that maybe you could leave and not not have a high school diploma or not have some of these skill sets but you but you just can't right now they have they need them in order to be able to to compete effectively yeah people tend to see the competition between states for attracting jobs as as tax incentives in fact I think more and more it's going to revolve around who has skilled workers that are able to do that fill the jobs that we need yeah uh perhaps the last question we've got just a few moments left take the mic yeah I'll make this quick uh hi I'm Jackson I'm a policy analysis major over at OSU and I noticed that you emphasize unionization a lot when you were talking about what made these good paying jobs in the past and I also noticed you reference how the chip industry is very competitive and I don't know if it's more competitive than the Auto industry which is historical reunionized but do you think that with that competitiveness there's still a chance for a newer unionization drive that reinforces those wage gains and uh maybe do you think there's any other kind of policies like sort of like worker ownership or consumer ownership that could enforce that uh wealth that's a good question I I think uh as everyone's aware of the degree of unionization across the country has dropped over the last 50 years some companies though aren't unionized and treat their employees very well Honda being an example they they tend to keep up with it I I myself am a union member I was a member of retail clerks Union when I was a kid I'm a lifetime member so I'm I'm pro-union you want to give employees and where unions tend to grow is where employees are unhappy with the way they're being treated and you aren't having that as much right now in manufacturing as you are in Starbucks and some of these other places and I think what what the government should do is not tell people whether they should be in a union or not but make sure there's a fair chance if the union wants to have an election and the people can vote or not vote to join a union to make that option available so I think a mixed uh Society where we have both unionized jobs and ununionized jobs is a is a fair way to go but I think that's something that's going to be in flux for for some time I think the other thing the pandemic showed us is one of the things I I it to me was just fascinating is how much we depend on people in low-paying jobs that do things like stock food shelves or work in a restaurant and I hope out of that comes a recognition of the dignity for all people Fran's point about looking down our nose of people that don't have a college degree is just the wrong way to go about it that every every job is important so it's kind of around the periphery of your question but I understand what you're saying I think unions are a good thing in general but that it needs to be a decision that the employees in that particular industry make and you can have unionized employees in efficient operations in some cases you have bad management bad unions you don't but the unions I think add a lot to society in terms of adding equal opportunity and making sure the little people if you will are treated fairly and I'll just add just that definitely we talk about in the report that that unionization was part of why we had these the strong middle class in Ohio for for a certain period you know before we started having a competition from the south and competition for low lower cost countries and competition from Automation and so um and so they they were an important part of why Ohio had those High per capita Inc incomes but more recently the the legacy of being a high Union uh State even though it's not really true that much anymore I mean we Ohio's union union membership has declined dramatically the same as it has across the country but just the legacy of of being known as a high Union area is sometimes harmful when the state tries to attract other companies to into the state because because companies think that there's a certain mindset there that is not going to be um to go along with all that they want the management wants and so sometimes it rules us out and other places that that are other industrial heavy industrial areas that have a past of being um you know unionized high percentage of union membership it it's it's been a little bit of a drag on on us being able to make the case to other companies wanting to locate here so it's a little bit of a double-edged sword thank you thanks and we're just about out of time but in the last just a few seconds maybe you could both just sort of dust off your crystal balls a little bit look down the road and Intel and Beyond sort of looking at where this takes the state any predictions prognostications whatsoever that you would want to make I guess I would say the single most important thing for the next Governor even more important than Intel being successful is making sure we're closing the gap between the workers we need and the skills we're producing think that can give Ohio a huge competitive advantage I would Echo that I we need we need to focus on our people and uh and we need to make sure that we have the workforce and are helping young people go down the paths that will reward them in the future and then I think I would just as another prognostication I think I'm going to pick the Indians in four games the Guardians excuse me Guardians there we go well that's about as good a place to leave it as we possibly could have and that is our time thank you Bill circurity and Fran Stewart from Ohio State University's John Glenn College of public affairs give them a round of applause thank you and thank you all for joining us tonight have a good night