Welcome to the Business Journal Archives
Search for articles below, or continue to the all new BusinessJournalDaily.com now.
Search
‘Make It in Mercer’ Campaign Makes New Jobs
MERCER, Pa. -- In 1998, the newly elected mayor of the city of Harlingen, Texas, C. “Connie” de la Garza, seized upon a great campaign tactic: deliver 2,000 new jobs by the year 2000.
Just how to bring those jobs in was entirely another matter. To fulfill that promise, the city launched a nationwide search for an economic development specialist who could keep de la Garza’s promise.
“They went into panic mode,” laughs Randy P. Seitz, today the executive director of Penn-Northwest Development Corp., based here. “They did a search to find somebody to come up with a plan to help him reach 2,000 jobs.”
That search turned up Seitz, a native of Buffalo, N.Y., who that year took the position as the city’s economic development director and began working on a plan to add jobs in southern Texas, just north of the Rio Grande River and the Mexican border.
Seitz researched the region and found that just across the border in Mexico, thousands of U.S. companies – including those on the Fortune 500 such as Black & Decker – had relocated their manufacturing operations there.
Not only did Seitz develop a new program that met the 2,000-job threshold, he helped build southern Texas into a supplier hub to these major producers that consisted of 27 new manufacturers, three filled industrial parks, and more than 10,000 new jobs.
Today, the executive director of Penn-Northwest – the economic development arm for Mercer County – would like to see western Pennsylvania grow as a vibrant manufacturing base for producers and suppliers from all over the country.
“I came in January 2012 and put a plan together by that April,” Seitz says. That plan, spearheaded by the campaign slogan “Make It in Mercer County, Pennsylvania!” is already producing results.
Between April 2012 and June of this year, the development organization has helped eight local companies expand, which resulted in $92 million in investment and 488 more jobs.
These projects range from a $650,000 expansion project by Northeast Manufacturing in Greenville to a $72 million project by GE Transportation in Grove City, Seitz reports. “These were just local companies that had the need to expand,” he says.
As for new industry, part of the Make It in Mercer project was to identify those sectors of the economy in expansion mode across the country, Seitz notes. “It’s all about taking companies like GE and showing the rest of the world that if they can make it in Mercer County, than you, too, can make it in Mercer County,” he says.
As of June, the push elicited 120 new leads, Seitz reports. These contacts in turn led to 13 new site visits. “Out of those 13 site visits, we had eight new companies locate to the area. They range from small startups to big companies like Noise Solutions,” he reports.
Noise Solutions, based in Calgary, Canada, is remodeling a former 30,000-square-foot warehouse in Sharon so it can begin operations by October. The company manufactures noise suppression turnkey systems and equipment for industry and has a sizeable client base among the oil and gas companies operating in the Utica and Marcellus shale plays.
The Noise Solutions project, estimated to have an investment of $5.4 million, is expected to create 30 jobs at first. “We’re excited to be a part of the area,” reports Scott MacDonald, company president. “The whole area has been fantastic. The skilled workers and the Marcellus and Utica are very key to our customers here.”
MacDonald says assembly work at the plant should begin by Oct. 1 and his company has already hired 15. “Penn-Northwest was fantastic to work with,” he says. “They helped facilitate, organize and get us in touch with the right people.”
Penn-Northwest helped arrange site visits and introduced the company to job-creation agencies and groups, MacDonald says. The company settled on the Sharon site because of its proximity to colleges and universities, the availability of skilled labor, and the ability to ship Noise Solution products to its customers in the Utica and Marcellus.
“It enables us to manufacture in Sharon and ship to the continental U.S. and eastern Canada as well,” MacDonald relates
“They’re hitting the ground running,” observes Scott Andrejchak, Sharon city manager, of Noise Solutions. “We’re excited to see some growth coming to the city. This is one big part of the puzzle of bringing in good jobs.”
Andrejchak praises Penn-Northwest and the active nature of its “Make It in Mercer County” campaign. “Their system and strategy seem to be working, and there’s more to come.”
Seitz reports that $44.7 million of investment was generated from the eight new companies establishing themselves in the Shenango Valley, and they collectively are expected to create more than 450 jobs.
“This plan we put in place last year has effected nearly 1,000 new jobs,” he adds.
Penn-Northwest identified several business sectors that stood a good chance to grow in the western Pennsylvania region, Seitz says. Warehousing and distribution, manufacturing and machine technology, health services, and business and professional services: “Those were the clusters that stood out to us,” he says.
Seitz also wants to present Mercer County as friendly to the oil and gas industry and entice producers. “But in the long run, we don’t want to end up as a ghost town,” he cautions. “When the oil’s gone, we want industry to still be here.”
The solution is to court companies that use large volumes and quantities of natural gas in their manufacturing processes, Seitz explains. “If we can convince those companies to come here, we think that they’ll be here far after the boom is gone.”
Manufacturing remains the core of the region’s economy. So communities trying to persuade major producers to do business in their backyard have to provide more than the usual tax breaks and incentives packages, Seitz allows.
“Every state has incentives,” he says. “In today’s age you’ve got to have something that distinguishes you from everybody else.”
In the case of Noise Solutions, Mercer County found itself in stiff competition with neighboring sites, some in Ohio. In addition to the tax incentives available through Pennsylvania, the community provided a low-interest loan to cover 50% of the cost related to the installation of new equipment – on top of the 50% already covered by the state.
“It’s those things that a community has to do in order to compete,” Seitz says. Keystone Opportunity Zones, which all but eliminate property and inventory taxes for new projects, coupled with a community’s input for low-interest financing, is just as competitive as many of the programs that Seitz administered in Texas. “It’s equally as competitive as any of the other states are doing,” he remarks.
While the agency spends considerable time attracting new business, it must still pay close attention to established companies that could be considered at risk. “We want to meet with them early on and be proactive in that sense,” he says. “We want to help those companies do several things.”
Penn-Northwest can provide resources for a business to develop a new product, or find ways to secure new equipment to replace older, obsolescent machinery, he says. “If they have an existing product, and they’ve maximized the market they’re in, we want to be able to provide the resources to help take their existing product into a new market.”
The nature of business has changed over the last 20 years, Seitz notes. Moreover, that change has been rapid of late, so fast that long-term plans made long ago have sometimes failed to anticipate what has become a very fleet-footed marketplace. “I learned 10 years ago that this idea of five-year planning, 10-year planning, doesn’t work too well,” he says.
Instead, Seitz wants to refresh Penn-Northwest’s master plan each year. “We made a commitment as an organization that we would put a significant amount of money toward a marketing campaign,” Seitz says. Also, the development agency wanted to enhance its brand awareness to the community and extol Mercer County’s assets. “We came up with this hypothesis that Mercer County was an affordable solution for corporate expansion – anywhere,” he says.
Companies throughout the country looking for opportunities to expand have to understand there are lower-cost options that help their bottom line, Seitz says. Land that is commanding $60,000 an acre elsewhere can be secured for $3,000 an acre in Mercer County, he relates, while leasing rates can be delivered at $3 to $4 a square foot.
“We are a low-cost alternative that I think anybody looking to expand needs to explore before they write that check,” Seitz says. “We can save them tons of money.”
Central to this is the “Improvement Movement” team, the moniker adopted by the Penn-Northwest staff who oversee business attraction and expansions.
The agency has established strong relationships with site selection firms such as C.B. Richard Ellis. Advertising specific to cluster industries, direct mail, and the use of social media and the Web have become critical tools as well.
Penn-Northwest’s website (Penn-Northwest.com) is designed to make it easy for companies to get answers to their inquiries and address their needs.
“It’s not about Penn-Northwest as much as it is about the fact you can make it in Mercer County – and here’s the information to do it,” Seitz says.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story appears in our September 2013 print edition.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
CLICK HERE to subscribe to our twice-monthly print edition and to our free daily email headlines.