JobsOhio plans to double grants to $300M to bring new business to state

Photo: Columbus Bureau

By Thomas Gnau, Springfield News-Sun Staff Writer
​Ohio’s private development corporation plans to double loans and grants to attract more jobs the state, according to the leader of JobsOhio.

Traditionally, JobsOhio – the state’s private development arm — has spent about $150 million in grants and loans from profits drawn from state liquor enterprise sales, its main funding source. That number will approximately double in the future, J.P. Nauseef, JobsOhio’s president and chief investment officer, said at a recent JobsOhio board meeting in Youngstown.
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“We’ll be roughly doubling that on an annual basis, from $150 million to $300 million a year,” Nauseef said.

JobsOhio contracts with the Division of Liquor Control to run day-to-day liquor sales. Net profits from that are used for economic development work.

Details of that approach should be revealed in the next year or so, a JobsOhio spokesman said.

And Nauseef emphasized that JobsOhio will also focus anew on an area of large concern to Dayton, federal military installations.

The Dayton area is home of one of the nation’s largest Air Force bases, Wright-Patterson, where much of the Air Force’s research and logistics work is anchored.

Said Nauseef: “We’re going to build a stateside program to drive federal missions, workforce retention and expansion and attractive.”

“These strategies, we’re going to start working on some now. But we’re always willing to listen and learn and evolve and make them better,” he added.

The goal is make Ohio “the top state in the nation” for military installations and missions, families and veterans.

That work will add up to 10,000 new federal jobs in Ohio in the next five years, at a cost of about $3 million to $5 million a year, Nauseef said.

Kristi Tanner, the JobsOhio senior managing director who was an instrumental member of the state and local team who brought Fuyao Glass America to Moraine five years ago, is assuming some new responsibilities, Nauseef also said at the Youngstown meeting.

Tanner will be focusing on bringing new investment to underserved areas of the state. She will concentrate on “areas that have suffered the most over the last 10 to 15 years, areas that have been hit especially hard by the economy,” Nauseef said.
Fuyao Global Chairman Cho Tak Wong has credited Tanner’s work with helping to persuade him to build an auto glass factory in a former General Motors plant in Moraine. At one point in the process, he invited Tanner to Russia where Fuyao opened a plant in 2014.

Fuyao’s Moraine plant today has more than 2,300 employees and is considered the world’s largest single-site production facility for automotive glass.
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The next JobsOhio board meeting will be March 17 at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.