Ohio Gov. Strickland Releases Strategic Economic Development Plan

COLUMBUS, OHIO: As the race for the White House heats up, and with an eye to the economic times that have hit Ohio hard with job losses, rising poverty exacerbated by higher costs for fuel, food and education, the unveiling Wednesday of Gov. Ted StricklandTed Strickland’s strategic plan he hopes will turnaround his home state towards a brighter future will bring cheers from supporters but hoots from his critics who say he’s done little in his first two years on the job to restore the state’s once mighty manufacturing might.

With as much time in the chair of governor of Ohio as that of Sarah PalinSarah Palin, the first women governor of Alaska who will become the first woman nominated by the Republican Party for vice president, Ted Strickland, who inherited a state full of economic problems following 16-years of Republican rule from the executive branch to the legislative branch, his plan to grow the income of Ohioans, create and retain jobs for them and expand productivity through innovation is being sold as a “bold, practical, and forward-thinking plan to change the trajectory of Ohio’s economy by purposefully redesigning our business climate to increase the global competitiveness of Ohio’s employers.”

This grandiose rhetoric applies to those companies who are still in business and who haven’t moved their jobs out of state or offshore. Considering that Ohio’s lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs since the onset of the Bush presidency, the task is daunting and the results may not come anytime soon.

Struggling to overcome the devastating effects to so many communities from jobs that have moved to other states or other countries, Strickland, a poor boy from a hard-working rural family living in chronically depressed southeastern Ohio who went to college, earned advanced degrees and served a decade as an Ohio congressman, forged a partnership with Republican legislative leaders that hopes a $1.57 billion economic stimulus plan to create thousands of new, good-paying jobs will do the trick to keep elected and community leaders from having to peer into the dark abyss of further economic decline.

Reflective of the bromide that it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness, Strickland says its time again for Ohioans to “believe in ourselves” again. As the competitive global market sorts the wheat from the chaff, making winners of those who can compete and losers of those who can’t, Strickland’s development department, run by his Lt. Governor, Lee Fischer, is saying that while difficult choices are to be made amid a scarcity of resources, Ohioans must work together, be optimistic while being realistic and reinvigorate “what is authentic about Ohio.”

“In a sense, our plan is The Ohio Story that will be told years from now to our children and grandchildren. A story of how Ohio moved from rubber to polymers, from gliders to turbine engines and lunar rockets, from bicycles to biomaterials, from glass to solar panels, from petroleum-based products and power to bioproducts, fuel cells, hybrid vehicles, and wind turbines. A story of how we changed the trajectory of Ohio’s economy by purposely redesigning our business climate and retooling our economic engine. A story of how Ohio built a global home of innovation and opportunity by focusing on the best of who we are and what we can be.” [Ohio Economic Development Plan]

As a certified economic development financing professional myself, having achieved these credentials through the demanding and rigorous programs of the National Development Council and the Ohio Department of Development during the 1980s when I worked to create jobs in Downtowns and neighborhoods, the strategic options, with their 15 performance targets and measurements for economic outcomes seem all to familiar.

The key fundamentals of economic development haven’t changed since I was actively involved in the field as a practitioner with both large and small chambers of commerce. In short, they still entail keeping the business you have, helping them expand and attracting new ones along the way.

For Ohio today, a state that still has considerable manufacturing might despite having lost in the neighborhood of 280,000 manufacturing jobs to other locals that are not likely to be recaptured in the short term, and maybe not even in the coming decade and beyond, the task Strickland has set our for himself and the state is indeed tantamount to sending a man to the moon. Counting new jobs created is a complex and calculating process, one that is more art than science. The $1.57 billion in state funds that state leaders like Strickland and Senate President Bill Harris (R-Ashland) and House Speaker Jon Husted (R-Kettering) said would create 57,000 new jobs in the next five years, may already be lagging, given the state the prospect that more jobs will be gone once large corporations like package-handler DHL and automotive giants like Chrysler, Ford and GM continue to cuts jobs as consumers recoil and rethink the cars they use and the miles they drive, as gasoline prices rise with the cost of crude oil prices.

So while 57,000 jobs may have been the target months ago when the pact between Democrats and Republicans was struck, the future number of jobs to keep the state in a steady state may be far higher, when recent jobs cuts and those that still may happen are factored in.

But either way, Ohio has few if any good choices to make to keep restless Ohioans from wondering each day whether they or their friends or family will come home with no job and no health insurance. Governments at all levels are also suffering under the strain of reduced revenues due to consumers spending less because they have less to spend. Schools, which rely on locally approved property taxes for their funding, are being denied requests for more funding, be it for operations to pay teachers or capital bonds to build schools because Ohioans are looking at their own pocketbooks and wondering how they are going to make ends meet. Health care and education costs are real and rising, so Strickland’s plan, while it is welcome and well-thought out, isn’t likely to open the flood gates to business moving into the state anytime soon.

Poverty in the US, as it is in Ohio, is up. Some critics of the current standard say the way the federal government measures who is poor needs to be changed from how it’s been measured in the 1960s. Eligibility for various federal poverty programs would likely increase if a new standard was arrived at, but such a change isn’t given good odds to be approved this year.

Poverty in Ohio is on the rise, further complicating Strickland’s noble experiment to reinvigorate a fatigued economy.

However it’s seen, the rejection by GM last week of Ohio’s offer of $56 million to keep its auto plant in Moraine, near Dayton, operational past the deadline GM gave to close it, 2010, shows that not even a hand-out can deflect or delay the closing of a plant and the 2,400 jobs that hang in the balance there.

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