Dayton-area companies committed to add 3,880 jobs last year

Dayton-area companies committed to add 3,880 jobs in 2018, 1,800 more than the previous year, according to the Dayton Development Coalition.

A big win for the region was the announcement that Wright-Patterson Air Force Base landed the F-35 fighter jet sustainment program last year, which will pull 400-plus jobs from the Washington, D.C. area to this region.

“It’s going to be here a long time,” said Jeff Hoagland, president and chief executive of the Dayton Development Coalition. “This is going to be a 50-, 60-year program. A lot more jobs will follow this.”

Companies in the 12-county Dayton region committed to retain 13,363 existing jobs in 2018, Hoagland told members of the I-70/75 Development Association on Friday during a meeting at Sinclair Community College.

That’s more than the 10,200 jobs retained in 2017.

“Dayton has stayed strong in a lot of our key areas,” Hoagland said. “I think we’ve diversified a little bit.”

Wright-Patterson, one of the world’s biggest Air Force bases and the state’s largest single-site employer with nearly 30,000 military and civilian employees, was in competition with Hill Air Force Base and other Air Force installations for the F-35 program.

The base last year also won a $182 million expansion for NASIC, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center. Construction should begin in coming months with a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contract award, and NASIC itself has grown by 100 jobs a year for the past 15 years, Hoagland told his audience of local development professionals.

The commitment of jobs last year from Dayton companies entail expected capital investments across 36 projects totaling nearly $855 million, a bit less than the nearly $950 million in capital in 2017, according to the coalition and JobsOhio numbers Hoagland presented.

New annual payroll attached to 2018 commitments totalled $202.8 million, well above the $112 million in payroll reached in 2017.

In partnership with JobsOhio, the state’s private, non-profit development corporation, the region has commitments for nearly 22,500 jobs from 2012 to 2018, while helping to project 69,371 existing jobs, according to the coalition.

That represents 206 regional projects in those years.

Looking ahead until 2023, the coalition is projecting three percent growth in Dayton-area logistics jobs, and four percent growth each in jobs tied to the aerospace and data management sectors.

In the bio-sciences, which offer average annual salaries of nearly $59,000, the coalition is projecting job growth of 12 percent.

In Vandalia, AxoGen Inc. of Alachua, Fla. last summer bought a building at 913 Industrial Park for $5 million. That project is expected to create more than 220 new jobs.

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