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Roundtable: Is the Dayton area economy in trouble?

By the Dayton Daily News

Eleanor Stocks, president of the Greater Dayton African American Chamber of Commerce: I think the Dayton economy is in trouble. In fact I think it has been spiraling down for a number of years. I go back to 1992 when I first opened a store in the Arcade. Many of you may have read about that. Upon opening that operation, they closed it down, so that was the beginning of my life — on a downward spiral.

However, it appears that during that time, it was a lot of effort being taken in Dayton to see what we could do because Cleveland was also in a similar situation, and they had surveyed everyone in the area and they brought in community leaders to the Victoria Theater to talk about what we can do to change this thing around.

Obviously what they thought is what we are doing today. They ranked the arts very high, so now when we look at our downtown Dayton, we do see the Schuster and all of those activities in the evening, but we have not seen the major kind of development.

We know that Dayton is in trouble because of the high unemployment, and when we look at Dayton, we look at the county — the county is roughly about 7.1 percent. So all of those suburban communities are also in the same bag that we are in. We have limited job creation. We are not seeing major entities coming into Dayton that are really making a change and being able to attract jobs with the exception of a few things that we will talk about later. We have an inability to attract large Fortune 500 companies to this area for a number of reasons, and those reasons will be discussed later on as we move forward in terms of what components are causing people not to want to be here.

And last but not least, we see a growth, of course, in the service end, but we see a reduction in the manufacturing end, and so all of us are really sitting on pins and needles hoping that we will not see Delphi and those other auto influences leave this area, because we will be greatly impaired by that. So we are in trouble.

Wes Wells, executive director of the AFL-CIO: I don't think we're in trouble, I think we're in crisis. But it's not just the Dayton area, but the State of Ohio. And a lot of this is brought on by outsourcing the jobs to countries like China. Over the last three years, we have lost 750,000 jobs to China, and they pay 25 to 50 cents per hour. A good resource of that was Newsline I think on Monday night. It says on their report that we have lost over 1 million jobs since 1990, since opening up trade with China. China's eating our lunch, and there's no doubt about it, and there's nothing being done by the administration.

But by the same token, the outsourcing of all these jobs — over 300,000 jobs here in this state alone over the last three years — is putting our city in crisis — all of our cities in crisis. We have to do something to get control of healthcare costs in this community especially, otherwise, we will be losing employers such as General Motors. You know, that's a crisis for General Motors, when we're paying $1,500 for each car that's built. These are things that we have to consider.

Debbie Feldman. Montgomery County administrator: I would agree with what Wes said with regard to the manufacturing end of things. I think it's more of a mixed bag, though. When we say 'the Dayton area economy,' we're talking a bit more broadly than the city of Dayton. And when we look at it from the perspective of the county, we see communities within the county frankly doing well. The county's own sales tax this year alone is up 5.8 percent. This is the first time our sales tax has been up in probably five years. So something is happening, and I think it's a mixed bag.

The service sector, many of the smaller businesses in the community, seem to be doing better. They seem to be responding to some of the national trends. Clearly the manufacturing end of things, particularly automotive, is certainly hurting.

The city of Dayton itself is facing major, major challenges, but when we talk about the area's economy, I'm not sure there's as clear-cut an answer as there is for the city of Dayton alone.

Stanley Earley, assistant city manager for city of Dayton: It's the word 'trouble' that I'm having trouble with. I think we have a long-term trend that's the major problem, and the trend goes back to 1971 when we had the enormous loss of NCR jobs. If you sort of tracked us from then to today, you have a steady decline in manufacturing jobs and a steady decline particularly in transportation-related manufacturing jobs. Some of that is related to the economy. We are still over 15 percent manufacturing, and the country is down to about 11 percent, so we're still very vulnerable and we're still going to see some downward pressure there.

I think there have been a number of very good things done. I have some real concerns about some of our governmental structure ... the way the tax structure works and that sort of thing. But the broadest problem we have is that we are a heavily manufacturing community at a time when that section of the economy is declining, basically permanently, and that's the thing we have been fighting against. It's something we have to always work at.

David Gasper, Third Frontier Advisory Board: I have three thoughts on it. One was in my first Frontier commission meeting, somebody made a comment that the good news was that Michigan lost more manufacturing jobs than we did in Ohio, so we didn't finish last in the race, we finished second to last, and we're celebrating. So I think that does indicate that we've got a little bit of a crisis.

I had another individual who described the job losses that have been happening as the equivalent to the Irish potato famine. So there are really some bleak-type pictures, I think, that are being presented.

The third element is, I think we're losing more than just manufacturing jobs. I think there are some overall costs in terms of some world competition that's happened just almost overnight that is almost changing our way of life and it's really impacting our whole area. We are bouncing back, but I do agree with the comments that some of these long-term trends are something we really have to address.

Tom Traynor, economics professor at Wright State University and producer of the biannual newsletter, The Wright State University Regional Economic Report: The job losses are not unique to our area, so that's an important thing to remember. It's true of the industrial Midwest. What's going on here in this area we see throughout the rest of this state as well as throughout Michigan, Pennsylvania.

But it is not something that is going on nationally. It is something we see that is going on in the traditional manufacturing portion of the national economy. If there's any silver lining in what's going on, it seems like the job loss in the last several years seems to have flattened out. In other words, employment early this year was roughly the same as it was last year — it might have been a couple thousand higher — but it was essentially the same. Flattening out would not normally sound good, but when you look at it representing the end of a significant decline in employment, that's actually somewhat of an improvement.

To piggyback on what Dave said, our service sector is also under-performing. There is growth there, but service sector employment is rising at a much slower rate than it is nationally. Certainly the manufacturing employment has been declining rapidly, but one of the problems is the fact that other parts of the country have been able to look to the service sector growth to make up for the loss of manufacturing employment, and that hasn't happened here. And some of the companies that we might have looked at five, six years ago as potentially growing a lot just haven't done so.

I think an interesting point is that if you follow average incomes in the area, they haven't been declining all that rapidly. I'm not sure what the story is behind that, if it's that lost jobs are turning into population loss, as people are leaving the area, I'm not sure. But per capita income and average earnings per worker in this area remain close to the national average, and when you include the fact that cost of living around here is lower than the national average, our real standard of living here isn't that bad on a per-person basis.

Richard Stock, moderator and University of Dayton researcher and economist: So if you've got a job, you're in pretty good shape.

Christy Reynolds, civilian employee at WPAFB: Do you think that some of the kinds of jobs that the service industry might offer would offer the same kinds of security or wages and benefits that people in manufacturing enjoy?

Tom Traynor: Typical economist's answer is , It depends. In restaurant, hotel, and hospitality, no. But healthcare, the opportunities can be pretty good. So we are experiencing growth, for instance, in the healthcare industry and those tend to be pretty good jobs. We've also experienced growth in the past eight years in the hotel and hospitality industry. It's been flat — it didn't decline along with others. But this is an industry with jobs that are less secure, have higher turnover, less benefits. The service sector is a huge range of industries. It really just sort of depends on the industry. So, some of the service sector jobs are quite good and some are not.

Richard Stock: And from our point of view, there is no new manufacturing job that is going to pay the kind of wages that is traditionally associated with manufacturing, so going out and seeking high-paying manufacturing, it doesn't exist.

Tom Traynor: One thing, too, is that any individual who loses a good-paying manufacturing job often has a skill set that doesn't transfer particularly well over to the service sector.

Richard Stock: So to summarize, you could probably say, yes, we are in trouble for a set of reasons that have to do with our industrial history. From a numeric point of view, the region's down around 20,000 to 30,000 jobs depending on how you count the region, from the boom, whereas the rest of the country by contrast does have more employment at this point than at the peak of the boom in 2000.

What are some of the strengths in this region?

Donald McLaurin, mayor of city of Trotwood and president of the Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority Board: I think we have a strong medical facility growth here in this region. I think Wright-Patterson offers a tremendous amount of opportunity there with high-tech jobs coming from the innovations there. The other thing we have here is higher education. Our higher educational facilities are on the path to educate and train workers for new types of jobs. We have strong political leadership here that I think is increasingly important if you are going to change the way the economies and the dichotomies of a region operate. The same thing about land. I think with all of the energies of the City of Dayton and the surrounding suburbs, you talk about the land use that they have, that is another important strength that we have here. I think we have some strengths, we just have to use them wisely.

Bill Russell, vice chairman of the board of trustees of the Community College of Warren County: I'd like to expand on the comment on higher education. My background, I may have mentioned it, I have 32 years in higher education. Here in Montgomery County, we have the University of Dayton, Sinclair Community College, and, of course, Wright State up the road. So the quality of those institutions is apparent. And one of the things we found as we were exploring alternatives in Warren County to bring higher education to Warren County is that Sinclair Community College is one of the premier community colleges in the country, not just in the state, but in the country, at a very low cost.

I think that relates to the problems we are having in Ohio in general, because in general this is a very high-cost state in higher education, and we see that our participation in higher education is reflected in that. So when you talk about creating jobs, I think education is a huge issue that we need to deal with, not only in the Miami Valley, but in the state as a whole. That was the genesis of our discussions in Warren County, that it was a workforce development issue to bring education to the citizens of Warren County, and we discovered they wouldn't go to downtown Dayton, they wouldn't go to downtown Cincinnati, they wanted it close by. So I would agree that higher ed, everything is in place here.

One more point about that is that we believe that a high percentage of the jobs that are needed in the 21st century economy are not necessarily bachelor degrees. We think somewhere in there if 60 percent of the jobs require a two-year degree or maybe a certificate program so that our employers can hire people to do the technical kinds of things. We have it here in Dayton with Sinclair Community College.

Gregory Horn, city manager of city of Centerville: Most of the strengths have been enumerated, I would add a few additions. I think the I-70/I-75 crossroad location that we have, obviously there are some major improvements underway there now, with some of the 75 corridor improvements through the community. That'll be of assistance, as well. I think our abundant water supply is still a plus to us. I believe that the Cox International Airport, even though I know it has its ups and downs, I think it's still potentially a real plus, because you've got a lot of the different carriers now that are regionalizing and looking to get into airports where they can provide quality cost-effective service that is located well, and I think Cox has a lot of potential there.

Eleanor Stocks: All of those points are well taken. I think as we look at the healthcare, we see technology hopefully is going to move in. I was in San Francisco a few months ago, and it seemed like it was Dayton in 1945. People were hustling and bustling. There is no major manufacturing business, it is built around the Silicon Valley, and folks are vibrantly working. And I think as you were talking about the trends that we in the Midwest probably need to start refocusing on how we reshape our trends here, so that we can survive.

Another thing that I think really is a strength is a history of our inventors. We don't have a niche — well, aviation is a niche — but we need to have a niche for Dayton, Ohio. And the Wright Brothers, I think we talk about that when we go to Washington and all those sorts of things, but we really need to build an industry or build some interest around that so that Wright-Patterson Air Force Base when they come in for the museum, there will be this element that's going to say, 'I'm going to Dayton, Ohio, because.' And when I go to Dayton, Ohio, there will be restaurants downtown, I can go to the Schuster, but I can do some other stuff besides that. I think we really need to begin to focus on how we can take the history of all of these people who've invented all kinds of things locally to elevate that to some kind of museum or something that will cause some kind of an attraction.

David Gasper: I thought the point about innovation was really great. I also feel that Ohio has a large number of entrepreneurs as well. And when you look at it, especially as the economy begins to evolve, small businesses create many more jobs than large businesses and small businesses are much more loyal to an area than large businesses are. So General Motors will move a plant to Mexico in a heartbeat; never once in my career did I ever consider moving anything to Mexico or outside the area. So there's a certain amount of loyalty, so that is really strong and we do a good job of fostering that. I think we need to foster that a little bit more.

The other area that we really touched on, but Wright-Patterson is really a tremendous boon to this area, not only because of employment, but because of some of the things they do at Wright-Pat. I'm concerned about some of the things that are going to be happening with the BRAC commission, but some of the jobs that come in that are scheduled to come in for BRAC could really help us significantly with growth in the bio-medical industry, which I think is going to be important when you look at some megatrends.

Wes Wells: In my earlier comments, I did not want to paint a picture of doom and gloom, because we have a lot of strengths in this community and that is especially true in the labor-management and relations that we have in this area. It's true with our educational institutions we have here. They are second to none in the state.

But folks, let me say, you know when you talk about just this region being hit hard — absolutely we've been hit hard. But, by the same token, it's not just manufacturing. Over the last three years, we lost 2.8 million manufacturing jobs in this country and they're not all from this region or the state of Ohio. They're all over the country. Now, folks we do not have a national or state policy on jobs or economic growth in America. That's No. 1. But by the same token, the strengths that we have in this area, labor and management has worked very closely in retaining jobs, and especially General Motors and Chrysler jobs. I was part of the Chrysler, you know when we put together a labor-management team to save the Chrysler plant here in Dayton. Our people done a very good job with that, and we retained a lot of jobs here in Dayton, and now Behr (America, which took over the Dayton Thermal Products plant from DaimlerChrysler) is investing a ton of money, $100 million right now, which Stanley knows about — And those are all manufacturing jobs. Don't tell me that manufacturing is lost in this community. We've got to go out and work to get those manufacturing jobs into this community. Those are good paying jobs.

Now, we work on a two-tier system. On the same token, it is hard to work with management when we go to them and tell them that one of our major healthcare providers that is proposing a 45 percent premium increase in one year.

Stanley Earley: Basically, it's assets. We have the hospitals, the medical care industry, the Air Force Base, the water — we have a high quality set of assets. We also do have another aspect which, you know it's funny, Wes said this and it's my impression, coming back to the community after being away for a number of years, is that we really fight around here — a lot — but in the end we want to come up with a practical decision. You know, when the building's on fire, we can at least stop fighting long enough to get outside. We're not going to just burn, and not everywhere is like that. So I think we have physical assets and institutions that we've built up over time and we have a relatively cooperative culture. The structures aren't necessarily cooperative, but we have a relatively cooperative culture.

Willie Walker: It seems like (our strengths) are a hidden secret. ... We don't do anything about publicizing our strengths at all. You don't see any ads. I go to other cities, I see other states advertised, I see other cities advertised. I've never seen Dayton advertised and talk about some of the things that have been enumerated.

Stanley Wright: One of the strengths that hasn't been mentioned, but that is an interesting one in connection with the transportation — ground transportation on the interstates is one thing, the airport here in town is another thing, but we are one of four metropolitan areas in the United States that have three international airports within an hour's drive. There are only three others, Washington, New York and Los Angeles. We've got some really unique assets, and that's just one that's out there.

David Gasper: There's a couple of other things that we kind of take for granted because we're Midwesterners and that is that we live in a Midwestern area where cultural values are very different than you may see on the East Coast or the West Coast. You know, this is a great place for people to raise families, you hear a lot of people who leave the area and come back because this is a great place for your family. You know, when I was in New York I would always make a point to tell people that in my entire life, I never commuted longer than 15 minutes to work and everybody looked at me as if I came from another planet because that's usually about an hour less than what the typical commute was in larger cities. I add an hour each way each day quality of life that I add compared to other areas. That's a nice thing about Dayton, Ohio.

Wes Wells: I think our strengths should be advertised. As I travel across the country, almost in every big city, I was in Kansas City last weekend, the news media is selling Kansas City. They are really selling Kansas City. The real strength that we have here, and it used to be publicized, it's not anymore, is the 90-minute market. And all of the things we have going for us here. And the only thing I see, negative news sells stories. Positive news don't sell stories.

Eleanor Stocks: I would say in the next 10 years we are going to see a lot of construction. It is all over the state of Ohio. It is with our school district. It is also with the Ohio Department of Transportation. There is going to be close to $2 billion of construction, which means as we begin to look and reshape where we will find work, we need to start gearing up and setting up and taking advantage of these great opportunities. We don't want to overlook that within the next 10 years, there will be jobs in construction.

What are the area's weaknesses?

Christy Reynolds: One of the weaknesses that I see a lot when I tell people that I live downtown is that you either get one of two very clear reactions: Either people are interested and kind of want to know about it, or people still harbor some preconceptions of what downtown is like and are shocked and ask you if you have any safety concerns. So I think there's still the reputation that Dayton is still this kind of gritty, run-down city and why would anyone want to live downtown? And I think there's a lot being done to change that, but it's still quite prevalent I think.

Bill Russell: Ohio is 28th among 50 states with regard to retention of college graduates. So, we're a low-college-going state to begin with, and once our residents graduate, they go other places. What can we do about it? I see that as a negative not only for the area but for the entire state.

Christy Reynolds: (36:50) The college graduates who I graduated with a couple of years ago, the ones who are still here, work in those kinds of lower paying service industry jobs. And the ones who have found more gainful employment are in Toledo or Cleveland, but the people who stay local, just the handful I can think of now — my associate in the ZZ top T-shirt, who works in Smokey Bones BBQ in Centerville — and others working lower-paying construction jobs and unskilled service industry jobs, so I definitely agree. (37:33)

Donald McLaurin: I'd like to add to that, because I also have listed attracting young adults or college graduates to stay in this community. And I think that is a direct result of losing your headquarters and corporate entities in this community here. Over the years, I've been here for the last 27 years, what I've seen is headquarters moving out, the ultimate decision-makers leave with the corporate. And so you have a situation here where you don't have a lot of corporate headquarters anymore. Also, the same thing is happening in the banking industry. The decisions are being made somewhere else. And when you've got a young, energetic college graduate, he wants to get where decisions are being made at a higher level. I think that contributes to why they want to leave our community. (38:40)

Debbie Feldman: I think the reality is, we have some really stiff competition out there. And the fact is, as the mayor said, we have lost a lot of corporate headquarters — why is that? For the most part, they have gone to very large cities. And that competition hurts us even more because there are so many cities in the state of Ohio. A lot of the cities that we compete against are the primary city in their state. Oftentimes we find when we are working with a company to try and attract them here, we're not competing necessarily against that company or that other city, we're competing against that other state. And our state has Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland and all the other cities, and we constantly fall below that radar screen in the state, and it really does hurt us. The competition is extremely tough. It's tough in the country, because it's being pulled worldwide. I just got back from China, and I can tell you, there is a palpable pull there, energy there that you do not sense in this country, and you sense it everywhere you go in a country like China. So we can't stand alone. We need our state and we need our country to be working with us. And I'm not sure those are all aligned in Ohio the way they are aligned in some of the other states that we compete against. (40:34)

Stanley Earley: There's also something that we do in this region that we need to do better. Maybe because of that, even regionally, we're sort of fragmented. When UPS decided to buy Emery and they consolidated in Kentucky, and frankly, looking at the business model they were talking about, they clearly lined this up from Day 1 and a few million dollars here and there didn't make any difference. Kentucky put $20 million on the table before the deal was ever done for UPS to expand. Ohio doesn't really do that very well, and I'm not sure the competition between the states is really a healthy thing. But we are sometimes unarmed in a knife fight. And the other thing is that in our region we sometimes have a lot of cooperation within Montgomery County, and I think we have cooperation sometimes county to county, but we sometimes have investment where we use our incentive money to create large complexes that are really relocation of retail or that kind of thing, which don't bring added wealth into the community. Specifically, the whole question about what happened around The Greene and so forth, I realize there is value in that project, but if I look at the choice for a region to say, Are we going to do that kind of thing for higher investment or are we going to try to work with or retain or explore or enhance industries that bring additional net value into the community? It is tough, but I think we are getting better at it. But I think we're going to have to get better at it faster because, as Deb said, the competition is really rough. 42:47

Tom Traynor: In terms of students leaving the area, this is just casual observation, but I tend to notice that the very best students in our economic programs get offers from this area, but their best financial offers, not just in choosing another city to live in, but their best financial offers, it seems like companies in other cities are taking our top students more seriously than the companies in the Dayton area. They seem to get better offers and seem to find that firms are more excited about them in Cincinnati or Columbus or some other locations. It seems our best graduates leave the area, they might remain in Ohio, not because of one city being more exciting to live in, but because they're getting recruited by other places. The other comment is about fragmentation. You know, I've lived in a couple of other cities where there is a more holistic approach to developing infrastructure for a metropolitan area, whether it would be like Indianapolis, where the city has more or less sucked in the entire metropolitan area so it makes a coordinated effort at economic development, or Minneapolis, which is more like Dayton, you have Minneapolis, St. Paul and all these suburbs, and so the bulk of the population doesn't live in the central city. But they have this multi-county council that makes major decisions on highways, airport, these kinds of decisions about development that need to be made in a broad community-wide way, those cities have passed the authority for those decisions on to that group. And here when we want to have a development project like the I-70/I-75 improvement, it is sort of up to a single group to gather the support for that one project and then maybe they'll go on to become interested in other projects. There isn't a sort of single governmental body that has the final say on those kinds of decisions, what our priorities will be, and that tends to hurt us.

Eleanor Stocks: You've just hit the nail right on the head in terms of fragmentation. It seems like it's not only in the region, but in the city structure, where we are finding that people are seemingly unwilling to come together around helping not only the city of Dayton, but helping their communities as well. One of the things that I had put down earlier, was a vision — the vision for the city, the vision for the region, because people are talking about this regionalization now. But I'm not really seeing real cooperation between those entities. I am seeing people interface with each other, but they're not generally committed to a common goal that ultimately will benefit all of them, and that's the misnomer, because as we are seeing growth in other suburban smaller communities that are in an upward growth trend, that is going to level out eventually, and what we are seeing in some of these suburban areas such as Centerville and others, you are seeing retail, you are see housing, but you are not seeing major industry or major companies. We do need to see if there is a way that we can begin to work together around a common goal, and hopefully this will come out of this forum.

Stanley Earley: I do think there is a great deal of cooperation between the local governments. But I also think that within Ohio there are certain ways that government taxation structures are put in place that make it remarkably difficult. Frankly, I think people cooperate to a high degree, but I also think there are a lot of disincentives that are structurally based on how we do local government in Ohio. So you are likely to have things that appear to be or in fact are better in some other regions. I honestly think the personalities in this community work quite well together. In jurisdictions where one is predominately Republican and the other is Democrat, black and white, and you get very good cooperation, but you have structural disincentives that limit that, and that's Ohio.

David Gasper: I have one more comment about the weaknesses that hasn't been brought up, it's sort of a cultural one. You talk about the Midwest is a great place to live, but one thing that works against us and we need to change it, we got away with it for years, is that Ohioans are very humble and very self- disparaging. And I can't tell you how many people I've had who've come move to Dayton and say that this place is a great place to live until every native Daytonian told me about how crappy this place was to live. One of the things we really have to start doing as a mindset is stop putting ourselves down about where we live and what we believe in. That almost needs to be an entire phenomenon. We do it in the area, because we have made efforts to try and advertise Dayton outside of this community, we did it with Inventing Flight, but as soon as we bring people in, we start telling them what a terrible place it is, we're undoing all those things we need to do. It's almost the psyche of the entire community has to start coming up somehow.

Wes Wells: (51:12) I have been around for a long time, about 45 years as an officer of the labor movement, and I have seen a lot of changes in Dayton. In the 1970s, I saw us to the point that a lot of people were taking the position, The last one out of Dayton, turn the lights out. Remember that? Then we started a program, Buy what Dayton builds. Remember that one? Support Dayton. Now, I agree with what you said, David, we've all got to be a salesmen for this region. We've got to sell this region, and we've had to sell the city of Dayton. One of our weaknesses, I think, is within our complete region. I think one of the things we need to do is establish a regional office of economic development, which includes all stakeholders within the region. We've got to get some dialogue started if we're going to retain jobs, not just in Dayton, but the whole region. (52:07) One of the things we started back in the 1970s was the Labor Management Council, and that council was chaired by Dave Ponitz. .... The thing we concentrated on, was not just bringing new jobs, but retaining the jobs that we have. We have to be able to work as labor and management together to keep those jobs. That's important. Because each one of those jobs generates three or four more other jobs in creating industry.

Donald McLaurin: Does the region now not have a mechanism working together to retain those jobs?

Wes Wells: I don't see that, from a labor perspective. I've worked with the city to retain jobs — but those jobs move from one community to another. They moved, for example, from Vandalia to the city of Dayton ..., and there were a lot of adjustments made in that contract to retain those jobs.

Richard Stock: Are existing efforts to retain local business and workers adequate?

Donald McLaurin: I would like to say on behalf of Trotwood, the county has a Business First retention program that we've been working with for the last five or six years to help retain our jobs, and they've done a fine job with us. And we are extremely grateful that we are in that program. So, from our perspective, our retention program is one that we had not had before, and so I know that we are glad to have that type of program, so it's working out for us.

Debbie Feldman: The Business First Program, which all the jurisdictions in the Montgomery County and actually some outside of our county, participate in, I think it is a good program. It is a systematic way of ensuring we are visiting our local companies and are determining what they might need from us as government to help them grow, whether it is labor force issues, tax issues, investment, incentives, but the reality is, we are not growing jobs. So I don't think you can grade us an A, and so the question becomes why? As I have been doing this now for a while, I really debate in my mind how much can government do and how much does the private sector do? Can we lead the private sector or do we just ensure that we have the environment that when they want to grow, we can support? But there seems to be, every time this issue comes up, it seems to be a focus on what is the governmental world doing to make jobs, and I guess I am beginning to wonder how much can we do? I think we try to put as much in place as possible. I think we are not maybe as effective with the biggest companies in town. But part of that goes back to this issue, they're not local. And I can tell you, it is very difficult to get a visit with one of these corporate presidents anymore. We've tried over and over and over again, and oftentimes never get anywhere, because they are not here, they are not local. But the local businesses, the smaller businesses, are extremely interested and grateful for the support they get. Again, we have some systems in place, I think they could be better. But at the end of the day, if you don't have results, then I don't think you can give yourself an A or even a B.

Greg Horn: I think we have several programs that work on a local and regional basis pretty effectively .... but I think the tools are here to pull those groups together, if it's a Delphi situation, if it's something to do with BRAC ... I think we can pull together when those kinds of opportunities are there. But I think it is very difficult to have a single super-organization that is always kind of ready to go on call because a lot of times there are county boundaries. You know, we have gone through this so many years in this region — every five years there's a different economic development tool, there's a different name, a different acronym that's formed. These two counties are in, these two counties are out. Six months later, it dissolves and something else replaces it. I think we should get less hung up on structure and names of organizations and more to kind of coalesce and bring the forces together based upon need and the different situations.

Stanley Earley: It's not so much retention; there's retention and growth. I believe we are doing better than most communities in terms of level of effort and sophistication of the effort. But we still have some not strong national firms that have been losing market share, that have been losing jobs. If you look at UPS and you look at Emery, if you look at what happened there, frankly over many years, one firm was very strong and one firm was not very strong. And the truth of the matter is, if it had been the other way around, there would have been 4 million square feet already here as opposed to in Louisville and it probably would have been moved the other way. So we have to make sure we do the best we can, we have good systems, but it is going to be tough to deal with some of the national weaker industries.

Willie Walker: When you talk about historical Piqua and you drive all the way down to the bridge going into Kentucky, it is a helluva region. You look at all of the development along this corridor, you have Wilmington who is not going to have enough workers, and it seems like we should be able to come up with something that would allow us to transfer some of this workforce between some of those areas that do not have adequate work force. Someone made a statement this morning that we have 36 economic development entities in this entire region. I do know one thing that we have done pretty good at, that the Dayton Development Council through its leadership, has done a very good job in focusing on the Base. If we could take that same effort into some other priorities that decided in some form or another, it seems like we could use that same type of energy on some of these other areas.

Debbie Feldman: I think there is an increasing recognition that we need to ignore boundaries, and the Job Center, which has been well known here in Montgomery County, but what people may not realize is, we are actually in a partnership with Clinton County, Highland County, Greene County. Just today, staff at the Job Center were meeting with people at DHL in Wilmington and talking about their workforce needs. They have been working with them. They are absolutely connected with them in trying to ensure that the employees of our county are connected with jobs regardless of where they are. Obviously we need to not just have the four counties, we need to have six or seven counties working together. There is a recognition and mechanism to ensure that we can get our citizens to the jobs, even if the jobs are here. We are focusing on people, making sure they can get to work, making sure they can reach some of these jobs. Some of our folks don't have the ability on their own to reach that. We have to make sure they can get there and recognize this is an opportunity for them. Some of that is beginning to happen.

David Gasper: The Economic Development Coalition has tried to focus on those three things. They have also tried to protect the jobs at the Base. They focused on the Base and tried to develop a lot of programs for entrepreneurial centers. Clay Mathile has put a lot of effort into that. They have also tried to track the businesses and bring headquarter operations here and that is a long uphill battle. If you look at headquarter operations, they are all going to New York or Chicago. — If you look at it, Dayton has actually held very well, because Akron has lost all of its headquarters, Toledo has lost all of its headquarters, some of the other cities in Ohio have faired very poorly. When you look at the number of headquarters in Dayton compared to many of the other cities in the United States, we have done fairly well in that area. But there's still more that we can do. I'm personally concerned about were we really effective with the BRAC commission, because other communities that are supposed to have jobs coming here have always been very successful — San Antonio has fought — So we've done some of those efforts, but could we be doing more? I think there's a lot more that can be done, but there is a lot in place already.

Richard Stock: How important is the city of Dayton to the economic vitality of the region?

Greg Horn: I think it is key for a number of reasons, some perhaps are symbolic, but symbolism is important, as well. We talked about some of the negatives as far as the headquarters. What people think of Dayton 50 miles away or 100 miles away is obviously what they think or our region. People 100 miles from here don't know anything about Trotwood, they don't know anything about Centerville, but they know about Dayton, but it is imperative that Dayton has a good image. Normally if you are going to have a corporate headquarters or a large firm established here, they are going to be representative of Dayton as well and that is going to be their main connection to the region. I think all of the things we talked about for strengths, airport, transportation, those things are tied directly to the city of Dayton. I think it is imperative we have a good relationship to the city of Dayton. We have our difficulties and differences from time to time, but I think a tremendous amount of cooperation goes on, much more than a lot of people give credit for. The city is the key. I think the relationship with the city right now on a governmental standpoint tends to be more respective. I think the city of Dayton has made a great effort in the last couple of years to reach out and kind of embrace the suburbs, and I think there has been about as good of cooperation as we have had in a number of years.

Tom Traynor: I think we can think of metropolitan areas around the country that have managed to grow with a central city that's in much worse shape than the city of Dayton is and other metropolitan areas that have healthier central cities. It is hard to say how key it is to the metropolitan area. I think that all of the points that Greg made are quite valid because Dayton carries more weight in the opinion of outsiders than the metropolitan area as a whole. I think for that reason, it is extremely important. Obviously, being the governmental hub of the area, it is important that the downtown area do well. It is hard to put a real picture or hard statement on how important the central city is to the area. One thing I would like to comment on is that it is important for the whole region to care about the city of Dayton. I see the region sort of separating out its good features and negative features by community in some way, and people are leaving Dayton behind sometimes, which is creating a great burden on the city. Anywhere from the rate of unemployment and poverty that that city is experiencing compared to the rest of the region. I think the rest of the region should be more willing to take a look at the city of Dayton as part of its community and be able to take that on. From an economic growth standpoint, I mentioned earlier of how I have been in other communities where the whole region sort of took out a lot of infrastructure responsibilities. The city of Dayton is in charge of the airport, it is not a regional responsibility, it is a city responsibility, so the community needs to be supportive of the city of Dayton's efforts and infrastructure development because that affects the whole region. So in as much as the city controls some key infrastructure decisions, that's pretty important, and the region needs to be working to be supportive of that and be sure the city is cooperating with the city and looking at the overall region's needs and not just the city's needs.

Ken McCall, Dayton Daily News staff writer: So when you're talking about supporting the city, are you talking about some kind of revenue sharing? Are we talking about redistributing tax dollars?

Tom Traynor: I don't know if you'd call it revenue sharing as much as you'd talk about passing along some of the responsibilities to more of a county level or metropolitan level. That might result in some kind of revenue sharing, but I wouldn't favor city-to-city revenue sharing as much as passing authority to more of a metropolitan-wide level. (1:10:51)

Ken McCall: Minneapolis was mentioned before, and they actually do have a mechanism to share revenue region-wide based on percentage of growth in new business. Is that a good idea?

Tom Traynor: Something like that always depends on how well it's carried out. So it's potentially a good idea, but the devil's in the details, depending on how that's carried out. Louisville has a sort of similar set up. They have a governmental body that is above the county level and below the state level, and in Minnesota, the Minneapolis-St. Paul area makes up more than half the state's population, so it's a somewhat different story than here. But the citizens elect representatives from their county to this council, and based on the population of your county, you may have some difference in representation. Then that council makes a whole variety of decisions for the metropolitan area. So the cities have passed some down to the counties and the counties have passed some down to this metropolitan council, they call it, to have the authority to make primarily infrastructure decisions. And as much as there's cooperation around here on infrastructure, having a single office or place where those decisions are made can allow those decisions to be made much more quickly.

Debbie Feldman: I think there is really two levels of question there, one is how important is the downtown to the economic vitality, and then how important is the central city overall to the economic vitality. I think the downtown symbolizes a sense of place for the region. All vital places need a gathering place, a point where everyone comes together. If you remember right after 9/11, the community needed to come together. Where did they come together? They came together in downtown Dayton because that was the place that people thought of when they said we wanted to be with our region, we want to be together. When they come to that place, they want it to be a positive place, they want it to look good, they don't want to see boarded-up buildings. They want it to have a sense of vitality to it. The vitality then reverberates to the whole area. I think despite a lot of our issues, the downtown does still look positive. When you drive through our downtown, you don't see a lot of boarded-up buildings, you see a relatively positive place. You know there are a lot of issues underneath that, we are all working on them, and there are a lot of risks. And there has been all kind of job loss. I think it is hard to really feel vital about your region when you have a declining, boarded-up downtown. I think the city overall and its issues of vitality to the region are more to do with being a drain on the region with respect to poverty. When you have all the poor folks concentrated in a community, you bring a lot of social issues that ultimately are going to make the whole body sick. If we ignore them and just assume that they are not the problem of the region, and that they're just the problem of the city's, I do believe we won't be healthy. We can't be healthy when a part of us is sick. For that reason, the city overall is important to the region.

Richard Stock: The other thing that struck me, when we talked about young people leaving, but there is an element to which you sometimes sense that young people leave because they have a sense of the region not being progressive in some sense. When you try and get after that, there is a notion that culturally we're backward, that we sit there in an extremely segregated city. That if there's an interracial couple, they think of Dayton as a place where it would be impossible for them to live long-term. And lots of young people assessing where they want to be and how they're going to act when they see some real deep trouble with regard to cultural issues that the region fails to acknowledge. So I'm wondering whether part of our issues have to do with this issue of ignoring both the race and class boundaries that cause us to be so segregated and are tied into this issue that ignoring the central city's issues holds us all back.

Stanley Earley: Obviously, I'm probably the least objective observer, but I think the city of Dayton, I think there are three different aspects: There is the downtown aspect, which I very much agree with. But I would also broaden that. The city of Dayton has a large number of assets, and by those assets I don't just mean assets that are 'city owned', for example the airport. But, also the majority of, say, the hospital infrastructure, the University of Dayton, Sinclair College, NCR's world headquarters, all of those assets and many others are within the city and are actually pretty much close to the central corridor. The health of the city and the health of those institutions within the city is very critical to the economic health of the whole region. It's partly locational, it's partly history, it's partly the role the city government plays, but that's a critical element to the overall health, strength and ability to grow that the region has.

The third aspect, I think that we really do have issues that are broader than Dayton, but you touched on it when you talked about the race and class issues. One of the things that's happened in this community and, this is my bias, but it appears to me that the separation between rich and poor, not just in terms of average income, but the physical location has gotten more and more. When I grew up here, everybody took the trolley at some point, and they shopped at the same four department stores, and there was a real inter-connection between communities. Nowadays, aside from the average dollar difference, we live in a community where many folks live in a neighborhood that was designed for their socio-economic group and then they work in a business or office or manufacturing park that was designed for their population and then they shop at a shopping complex that's really aimed at their economic group. And we wind up losing the inoculation of knowing each another, we wind up losing that interconnection, and we wind up with problems of people that aren't me being, it's not me, it's not my problem. I see that as something that is getting worse and something that our national culture that has frankly pushed. And that's something that this community can still address and do things to deal with. But it affects the city of Dayton, and certainly neighborhoods within the city of Dayton, more than many other communities, but it is a problem for our region.

Eleanor Stocks: It's key to the region. I can understand how the suburban communities are very much interested in the regional concept because of the advantages to them, but when I look at the city of Dayton, we have the largest population in the area of the surrounding suburban communities, you have the centralized district of utilities and the use of major utilities that help to support these other entities, and last but not least, you have the major interstate accessibility. That is also an important feature and factor and as he had said earlier, we are nationally recognized. I can look at a map and it is rare that I will find Kettering or Centerville on it, I'm sure I can find it, but it is not going to be one that most folks are going to know about. My concern that I have with this regionalization, I think it is going to be important for collaboration and discussion, but I don't want to see the loss of autonomy here in Dayton. Dayton represents a city where you have diversity in terms of your leadership. We're not finding that, certainly throughout the county. When you look at the county, we see about 14 percent African Americans in the area. We don't want to lose that, that is important. There should be a benefit for the city of Dayton to be in association with you. What would be the revenue stream or what would be the benefit to Dayton of cooperating with you because it should be a give and take where we both gain from the experience, either financially, either some kinds of goods or services, or some kind of mechanism. I think as we talk about, yeah, let's all of us coming together, I think we really need to assess how we all roll this thing out and ensure that there is going to be everything the city wants and whatever you want and hopefully we can come to that happy medium.

Wes Wells: I agree with Eleanor, I think the misconception of Dayton and our region is of utmost importance. I know that any company that comes into an area and they're thinking about locating or doing business there, they look at the core city, they look at the educational facilities, they look at transportation, they look at labor-management relations in that area, the availability of skilled workers. They look at, for example, the downtown issue. That's a real negative that has to be addressed, and we have to make a positive out of it.

If you are King or Queen of the region, what is the first thing you would do with the respect of dealing with the economy?

Christy Reynolds: I agree with what Debbie said about the importance of having that centralized place in the community that people feel they can go to and feel they can be comfortable going to. I think a big part of that is revitalizing downtown with having some sensitivities towards those who might be displaced by those efforts and I think a big part of attracting businesses and residents to downtown is addressing some of the healthcare and substance abuse issues of the homeless population. I've read somewhere that there are about 400 homeless people who live downtown and I know this is not a very macro issue, but we have been having a lot of our stuff stolen, and I think that is just prompted by the desperation of the homeless condition and I think before people like business owners or people like my parents feel comfortable with moving themselves and their businesses downtown, a lot needs to be done to include those who are disenfranchised.

Eleanor Stocks: I really have a concern about small business development, and I think that really represents the lifeblood of a community, and we talked about the larger companies, but we kind of missed out on those small businesses. Those are the folks that set up businesses and we can walk from one block to another and be a part of them. We definitely need to establish venture funds that will address that segment of the population. There are venture funds that are out here, but are not for the small operations. They are for medium-sized companies and larger companies, but there is not an injection of any venture money to help the growth of small businesses and certainly if we could have that with the strong concentration. Because we see many small businesses in Centerville, that's mainly what I see. Also in Trotwood. They are building communities off of small businesses and small retail, some chains, so we do need to see that in Dayton, and I just hope that somehow there could be such a fund outside of the Angel Network Fund that would be for a smaller group of folks where we could access this money and we can also provide the kind of support we need for businesses so we can see that kind of growth and development. I think we need that layer.

Debbie Feldman: I would get together a group of people who really did understand what makes economies grow. I would work with them to develop a plan and I would implement it. That would be something that would cover the region so that if we didn't have all these sectional and statutory reasons for all these differences which exist. If they didn't exist, if you didn't have a state with all these incentives for non-cooperation, if you could just have a place that was one place where you could focus your development, and that would include commercial, resources downtown, so you could build a strong downtown, you could identify places for residential and agriculture and really develop a comprehensive plan and then be able to implement it. It is something we just can't do under this governmental structure. To me the region that makes sense is Montgomery County, western Greene County, southern Miami County, northern Warren County.

Donald McLaurin: If I were king for a day, the first thing I would do is break down all of the boundaries that deal with economic development. In other words, any and all jobs that come to the region, every entity could expect to get a benefit from it. I would just break it all down. If you brought a certain-sized business to Centerville, Trotwood could expect to benefit, because we are all going to work to make sure that business comes to this region. Not only that, but I would not give any incentives for Centerville's business to move to Trotwood. No incentives whatsoever. Therefore, we are not competing amongst one another. My region would be any region that one of my congressional representatives that represent something in my county would connect to, every region that one of those representatives represented. Every entity within that region would have the opportunity to work with me to bring a business to this community outside of this region.

David Gasper: You keep hearing this regionalism as a theme. The reason why regionalism is a theme is because it is a burden to business. And that's why it continues to come up. It's really a structural problem instead of a people problem, but it forces communities to compete internally. What happens is, businesses have to deal with that internal issue. When they deal with that, it makes them less competitive in global markets, it creates less profits for business, and creates less wages for their employees because they are adding overhead to their businesses. Multiple tax rates, and these things. If I were king, the first thing I would do is at a state level let's make a regional government. Make tax rates consistent, services shared, let's redefine the boundaries. The second thing I would do is I think healthcare when you look at megatrends and demographics is going to become a big issue. Not only through Dayton, but the United States as well. And wouldn't it be interesting if we could do something really radical in terms of healthcare, because healthcare is really strangling businesses, consumers and retirees, If we could do something here to make our healthcare in Dayton, Ohio, more competitive other areas in the country, wouldn't that give us a competitive advantage for our labor force and our business enterprises here? And quite frankly, healthcare is so broken ... that even simple fixes might help.

Bill Russell: I agree with everything that has been said. I think we really need to invest in a very significant way in all levels of education and really start with the youngest. We are losing children along the way at every step of the way. Yes, they may still be physically in the school buildings, but in the long run they've checked out because they don't have hope for the future. And I think along with that, we need to create the kind of 21st century jobs that will allow them to stay in the community and prosper in the community and raise their families in the community. So there are all kinds of quality of life issues around that such as healthcare — the healthier people are, the less burden they are on the healthcare system. Also, I heard a speaker once, and he said, We need to take care of our children, because if we don't take care of them and if we don't give them the tools they need, we're going to be taking care of them in our prison system later on. It costs us $40,000 a year to keep someone incarcerated. Give me $4,000 or $5,000 a year to send them to Sinclair Community College. And we'll solve a lot of the problems we've been talking about.

Stanley Earley: I actually live downtown too, so the nice thing is when we leave here tonight, I have a five-minute walk home. But I think a lot of the stuff that Deb said is very close, because the structural issues ... I'd have to be king of the region, but I'd need a lot of state power. Because I've got to break down the revenue structure for local governments that's set up, you got to do something. Another issue that is related to that is not a government tax issue. We've moved into this economy where you have throwaway buildings, you can build a Wal-Mart and decide in five years that it's irrelevant and build another one right down the street and leave the other one vacant. We have to have incentive structure to make that kind of activity irrational economically or that there's a cost connected to it that pays for the damage that causes. The other thing that we have to do is the increased separation of rich and poor in this community has to be addressed in a long-term manner. I'm not talking about a Band-Aid issue. There has to be a fundamental structural consideration as we move forward, and I guess it's going to take more than a day. The final thing, we have so many problems with young people who have come from destroyed households. The issue of dealing with families and children, especially those who are very young, and by very young I mean under 5, maybe under 3, and I don't know how to do it, but for those children to be able to get an opportunity to have a decent healthy start, and a decent, healthy safe start. I don't know how to do it, but if we could do that in our region, I think, in the long run, we will make ourselves a place where everybody wants to be.

Wes Wells: I don't think the state powers will do us any good, I think we are going to have to have some national powers. The first thing we need to do is do everything possible to sell Dayton as a good place to live, a good place to work, and a good place to do business, as well as our region. When we look at the negatives of doing business, not just here in Dayton, but any place in the country. I remember NAFTA when it came into affect, the jobs lost because of NAFTA. It is hard for us to compete with Mexico at $2 an hour, and they pay no healthcare benefits to their workers. It is even harder for us to compete now with China that pays from 25 cents to 50 cents an hour with no healthcare whatsoever or any other benefits. And what the young lady said earlier, I think when you talk about China, you better do a good job, you don't have much of a choice, it's that simple. You have to have a national healthcare package. We've got to have that for businesses to survive in this country and compete in a global marketplace. You've got to have fair trade. These trade agreements are destroying our business in this country.

Christy Reynolds: I have not been to China, my father just returned from a trip to Shanghai, and what he describes is more of a hustle and bustle that was not part of desperation but part of optimism and growth. It was not the way he characterized. It wasn't activity that if you don't do it, they're going to cut your hand off in the town square, but it was more of construction and development and growth that drove that kind of (feeling).

Greg Horn: Our country would develop an energy policy. In 1974, I delivered pizzas at a university in Ohio during the height of the oil embargo and I delivered them in an electric car. If you would have told me in 1974 that our country, 31 years later would not have an energy policy and we would be at war and all of the problems we have over energy, I wouldn't have believed it. We have actually regressed in the last 31 years. That would be my No. 1 national issue. From a local issue, I think I'd say we have to eat the monster a bite at a time. I don't think we will see uni-gov or a metropolitan government in the next 20 or 30 years. But, I think we can see consolidations, collaborations and increased cooperation and I think we need some changes in state legislative government. I've been in local government for 30 years, and most have been in Ohio, and I think Ohio is kind of going in the opposite direction of where we are going today. I don't want to pick on townships like I usually do, but we've got urban townships in this state that are virtually unheard of anywhere else. So what we're talking about, uni-gov and metropolitan government and breaking down barriers, consolidating our tax structures, we've created tax (problems). People look at me and say, Centerville that's where the money is, and I would beg to differ with you. We're probably a much more balanced community than many folks would realize. What we're seeing in the state is enormous concentrations of wealth in urban townships, that's where a lot of the changes will have to be made. I would try to eat the monster a step at a time. In our area, we need to build upon the successes we have made, whether it is in our downtown area, or collaboration with U.D., Miami Valley Hospital, and NCR, or Grandview and the redevelopments that are going on over there, whether it's Cox Airport, whether it's a new quality entrance and attractive area for the region as you enter the Wright-Patterson Air Force museum, which I think we desperately need, I would say we would pick up those 8 or 10 measures that we've made good progress on over the last few years and really attempt to build upon that and have some successes in those areas.

Tom Traynor: From my perspective, it's infrastructure, infrastructure, and infrastructure. Solid education, educational development of young people in the area, good transportation resources, consistent government policy and tax policy. A supportive environment for entrepreneurship and small business development, good healthcare.

And we want to remember the role that luck plays in all of this, because the city of Dayton, from my perspective, if you look at the history of the area, the city is fortunate to be as big of a community as it is. Most cities this size, you can look toward some sort of seaport or like Cincinnati along the Ohio River, as a geographic reason for becoming a large city. Dayton is sort of fortunate that it had Charles Kettering, John Patterson and the Wright brothers. If you look back a generation or so ago, you would see a huge chunk of the employment was directly descended from those three people.

There's an element to which you can't make those people just pop up. You have to recognize that most of the growth we've had here has been from within. They didn't bring those businesses here, in the case of the Wrights and Patterson, they grew up here, and in the case of Kettering, he came here right out of college. So most of the economic growth we've had here has been from within, and we certainly want to encourage that. And I think that's still true today. The reason Microsoft's in Seattle, well Bill Gates grew up in Seattle. Those are the difference makers. It's not that Seattle offered some kind of tax policy, not that he hasn't won such things over time, but ultimately the difference maker for them locating here was that it was his hometown.

So the more we can support education and support the ability to have a well-educated labor force that remains here and is interested in staying in this area, I think the better off we'll be in the long run. But we can't say when the next John Patterson will come along. It might be next year, it might be in 50 years.