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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > July > 12
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Ellen Belcher: Find them jobs, NCR’s people will stay
You can bet that NCR Corp. employees who don’t want to move to Georgia, and those who are skeptical the company intends to take very many Daytonians when it leaves, aren’t sitting still.
Neither should Dayton be — or area employers.
This is an opportunity for Dayton businesses and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to easily recruit top talent that is here and likes Dayton. Recruiting is expensive and time-consuming; here’s a chance to do it cheaply and to have confidence that new hires will be happy where they’re living.
If all the institutions and people who say they want to defeat the brain drain don’t step up in the wake of NCR’s move, then their talk is just talk.
On Monday, June 29, Sinclair Community College organized a meeting to discuss how to pounce on the problem of keeping NCR employees in the community.
More than 1,200 people work for the company; many have long tenures here and professional skills. Not all of them can follow NCR to Georgia because they have spouses who have jobs here, or because they have family members they want to be near, or they don’t think it’s the right time for their children to change schools.
In the end, people will make agonizing personal decisions based on what’s best for them — not what’s right for NCR or Dayton.
But holding on to people who are on the fence about leaving, or who would stay if they could land a job, can’t be left to chance. Dayton employers have to reach out to precious home-grown talent.
Because of the Base Realignment and Closure process, Wright-Patterson is getting hundreds of new jobs and seeing an influx of defense contractors.
Among the skills both the Air Force and contractors are looking for are project managers, people with procurement experience and IT professionals. These job descriptions overlap nicely with what some NCR people do.
More specifically, NCR’s IT people are schooled in Oracle, the complex and sophisticated software program that Air Force operations run on. What NCR employees do with database management, for instance, is wholly transferable and relevant to military applications.
Most important to the NCR people: Wright-Patterson is in the middle of managing a massive project called ECSS — Expeditionary Combat Support System.
It’s a wholesale overhaul to integrate more than 400 Air Force computer systems. The Air Force and their contractors can’t have too many Oracle people.
NCR’s leaving creates a problem different from the job loss that the Dayton area has gotten good at dealing with, says Deb Norris, vice president of workforce development and corporate services at Sinclair Community College.
Local leaders and officials know how to reach out to people in manufacturing who lose their jobs (because that’s been happening for so long). There’s a good road map for getting people to the county’s Job Center and to Sinclair.
But now, instead of working with people who need training, the challenge is to work with those who are already well-trained.
New approaches and different outreach efforts have to be invented to get people placed. They could include private job fairs, virtual spaces where employees can anonymously leave their profiles so local employers can contact them and informal networking events.
The Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce has offered to take the lead on the efforts to market Dayton to NCR people and to mine chamber contacts to let employers know that NCR people are in the hunt. It can’t be taken for granted that everybody knows the gold mine that is here.
The chamber’s job isn’t going to be easy, because NCR will want to hang on to some people as long as it can before it cuts out. And NCR is not going to be eager to broadcast just how many people are being told they’re no longer needed. Employers can’t jump on this chance if they don’t know the specific qualifications and skill sets the employees have.
Nonetheless, this is the chamber’s chance. It has to show what it can do when a problem hits and that it knows how to do important economic development work that makes a difference.
It will need help, but the pressure is on to show urgency, make things happen and account for what it does.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Economy, Ellen Belcher, Local Business, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
Editorial: Strickland couldn’t be more wrong
Gov. Ted Strickland is recklessly, obstinately and selfishly putting Ohio on a horrible course.
He refuses to give up on his plan to help balance the state budget by allowing as many as 17,500 slot machines divided among Ohio’s seven racetracks. He hopes that permitting the so-called video lottery terminals will raise almost $1 billion.
Going with the slots avoids having to cut state programs by that amount or raising taxes.
There is so much wrong with the idea that it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s keep it simple:
— Ohioans have voted against casino-style gambling four times in the last 19 years. That the governor thinks he can dismiss those powerful statements — unilaterally — is amazing for someone who fancies himself humble.
— The language allowing the expanded gambling is being written in a matter of days and hours. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the governor’s people have thought of everything they should have to protect the interests of Ohio or local communities.
— The public vetting of the governor’s decision has been less than what would be required to pass a resolution naming a state worm. The brief hearings that occurred in the Senate only validated the fear that there has been no serious thought put into the details of the proposal.
The lottery director, who will be charged with overseeing the gambling enterprises, didn’t even know how his job description was going to change until a few days before he was insisting that his agency could be an effective check on the sophisticated gaming industry.
— States that allow gambling have elaborate regulatory apparatus to make sure that governments get their fair share of gambling proceeds, that communities are not run over by gaming outfits and that corruption isn’t rampant.
Ohio’s protections will be an afterthought — decided after the horse (no pun intended) is out of the barn.
Meanwhile, there’s the matter of how this measure may affect Montgomery and Warren counties.
Lebanon Raceway is reportedly interested in moving from Warren County, sensing that the county commissioners there are hostile to allowing slots at its track. (The county commission owns the land the raceway is on.)
The governor’s people have contacted Montgomery County commissioners to ask how this community feels about a horse racing track with slots in its backyard. It’s not clear how they could possibly know, considering that there has been absolutely no public discussion of the idea.
At the same time, state Rep. Clayton Luckie is eager to say that he’s the person who got this whole conversation going about the Lebanon track moving to Montgomery County. He points to his friendship with the Lebanon Raceway owners.
Meanwhile, Warren County Commissioner Pat South says her county would like the raceway to stay in that county, just not at the fairgrounds if slots are going to be allowed.
The faux casino in the Dayton area would face competition from River Downs near Cincinnati, and Scioto Downs and Beulah Park near Columbus. So it wouldn’t be much of a destination. If the market is saturated, that complicates the task of attracting developers who are eager to dump big bucks into a venue for purposes of making it special.
(Rep. Luckie says he wants federal stimulus money to be used to finance the development. What do you want to bet that’s not going to happen?)
With the governor’s effort to blanket the state with these places, what we have is a desperate leader proving his unwillingness to use his bully pulpit to speak truth to taxpayers.
And who knows whether the state will ever be able to undo all the ways in which we will surely get snookered.
This is not the Ted Strickland Ohio elected.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Montgomery County, Ohio government, Suburban Communities
