(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to The Journal, I'm Steve Kendall.

Bowling Green State University Center for Regional Development works with and brings together stakeholders from communities and organizations to further economic development in the region.

Here to talk about that and some of the initiatives they currently have underway is Dr. Russell Mills, the Senior Director of the BGSU Center for Regional Development.

So welcome to The Journal Dr. Mills.

- Thank you, Steve.

- Now I did a quick synopsis there of what the center does but could you expand on that just a little bit, that sort of an, it's a nice description but it doesn't really tell the full story about what you folks do.

- Great, thanks Steve.

Yeah, so the Center for Regional Development's been around since the 1980s at Bowling Green State University, we're classified as an interdisciplinary research center but we serve 29 counties in Northwest Ohio all the way from Williams county up in the top corner of the state and all the way down to Delaware county, just outside of Columbus and what we do, we do a lot of different technical assistance and applied research projects with communities.

We're really involved in data analysis visualization to help them understand their local economies, their workforce situations.

We do quite a bit of economic development planning activities.

So we're in communities on the ground helping them convene their stakeholders to develop economic development, community development workforce some of the plans.

We also do quite a bit of program evaluation work, so helping local nonprofits evaluate social service programs, community development programs, et cetera.

And then we also do our state of the region conference which most people know us for, which is a pretty large economic development event we put on in Northwest Ohio, you know, here.

And then I would say the final thing we do really is we help communities with economic development projects and trying to find grants, particularly through the Economic Development Administration, the US Department of Agriculture, USDA.

So we assist communities as they're looking for grant funding to assist with their economic and community development efforts.

- Ah, yeah, so it's quite a range of activities.

And as you said, it touches not only businesses but communities and nonprofits as well.

So one of the specific things and it's something that's just in the process and recently happened, BGSU was awarded what was called a Workforce Grant.

So talk a little bit about that and how that will be implemented and how you're part of that.

- Yeah, so this is a partnership that started during rate, actually following the pandemic.

So myself, I started working with Joe Luzar who runs the North, the Northwest Ohio Workforce Initiative through the Regional Growth Partnership.

The Regional Growth Partnership, RGP is the Jobs Ohio affiliate for Northwest Ohio, whose responsible for job attraction efforts.

So I started working with Joe and my team did at CRD working with Joe on trying to identify ways we can optimize our workforce development system, even before the pandemic.

You know, there was Steve you and I have talked about this before, you know, there was a lot of focus on re-skilling people to find the, to find different jobs and helping match the skill sets in the region with the job openings that exists at the time.

That focus has changed quite a bit post pandemic.

And now it's really, you know, taken on a much greater importance giving some of the economic trends we're seeing.

So the grant is $555,000 from the Economic Development Administration, Jobs Ohio actually provided a hundred thousand dollars of matching funds and the work's going to fund us developing a coordinated workforce strategy for Fulton, Lucas, Wood an Ottawa counties in Northwest Ohio to identify a group of common metrics for workforce development.

So are we moving the needle on our workforce system on improving things like labor force participation?

Are we moving the needle on things like income and wages?

Those types of things that you can actually measure.

And then that'll all be sort of wrapped into a plan that we will use to optimize and identify the best practices in the region in terms of workforce development but also looking nationally for model programs that we might want to adopt here in Northwest Ohio.

So it really is, it's a joint effort between us, RGP and Jobs Ohio and we're very excited, you know, to do this.

And this is part of how, you know us as the center really tries to fulfill BGSU's mission of advancing the public good across Northwest Ohio.

- Yeah, and the nice thing about the university is you're sort of a neutral party in all of this because as we know competition for everything regarding economic development among jurisdictions can get, is pretty cutthroat.

It's pretty brutal.

So you need a place where people can kind of come to work together and not feel as if someone's coming with an agenda who's in charge.

And you guys are that sort of neutral party in those kinds of discussions.

- Yeah, that's an important point, Steve, you know I think that's one of the values of a university, right?

We work with partners all across those 29 counties that I mentioned and our ability to do so is because we are viewed as a competent, neutral arbiter with expertise in these types of processes and programs.

And so we really are one of the sort of, you know, uninterested, I mean, obviously we're interested in the outcomes but you know, uninterested in terms of the specific outcomes of who gets credit and all those kinds of things.

So we really do try to fill that void across our region.

And, you know, I think that's, that's really what drives a lot of our mission at CRD.

- Yeah, and if you look at the region you mentioned the counties, Fulton, Lucas, Wood Ottawa that's that tier of counties, there's a lot of travel back and forth people that live in Fulton county work in Lucas county, vice versa.

So although we look at them as individual counties the reality is it is a very regional thing.

And as you said, you expand well beyond that as well.

When you look at pulling people like that together, who typically do you go to first in those jurisdictions?

If you're looking at Fulton county, who's your person or what organization do you typically deal with first?

- Yeah, sure.

So, I mean, it's usually the, you know the Economic Development offices.

So, you know, when in Fulton county would be back go Roy, of course, who I don't know if you've had on the program before but you had a lot of different economic development people on the program, at one point or another but then there's also the job, the Ohio Means Jobs or the OMJ offices in each location who do a lot of that workforce development on the ground work.

There's also, you know, networks of partners who do a variety of things, right?

So in the nonprofit sector, you know I would say in Lucas county though a big part of that is Goodwill, Cherry Street Mission.

There's all these organizations that do sort of, you know in different neighborhoods or in different places types of workforce development activities.

And so that's just, and then there's obviously the educational institutions, the higher ed institutions.

So there's quite a network of people that work on this.

And one of the interesting things that Joe Luzar who I mentioned at the Regional Growth Partnership had done prior to us getting engaged was, you know RGP had formed this macro-coalition of actors to bring all these people to the table together.

And then we stepped in to help move that work forward by applying for the CDA grant and also, you know actually doing the work of developing the strategy and you know, the metrics, et cetera.

So that organization and coalition had already been in place as part of the work Joe was doing with RGP.

And, we're able to add our capacity to help move that forward.

- Yeah, now when we come back, I know we'll talk a little bit more about the workforce grant, but there's another issue because one of the things we've talked about too, is that Ohio is a typical sort of state.

There are metropolitan areas, there are regional areas, there are rural areas, that sort of thing.

So there's another initiative out there too.

So we come back, let's talk a little about that which focuses on development in what we would call rural regions versus urban regions.

So back in just a moment with Dr. Russell Mills, the Senior Director of the BGSU Center for Regional Development here on The Journal.

Thanks for staying with us here on The Journal.

Our guest is Dr. Russell Mills, the Senior Director of the BGSU Center for Regional Development.

One of the other initiatives which is fairly recent is something called Re-imagining Rural Regions.

Talk about that and explain what the purpose for that is.

And who's involved in that as well.

- Great, yeah, Steve, so the Re-imagining Rural Regions are what we call the R3 Initiative really came from our Cares Act grant that we got during the pandemic.

And as part of our scope of work for that grant we were looking at ways to basically implement recovery and resiliency plans across Northwest Ohio, in some communities.

And as we started our conversations about how to do that, we, what we decided and what we really wanted to to assist communities with was talent attraction.

You know, one of the particular challenges the rural communities have is that, you know, they're really, they're good at bringing in jobs, right?

We've seen a shift lately to manufacturing jobs, transportation logistic jobs, are moving more outside of the major metro areas to suburban and sometimes ex-urban, you know, rural communities because of the advantages of the, of supply chains that they can get, transportation access, et cetera.

One of the challenges they face however, is in terms of finding enough workers.

And for the longest time, many communities believed that and rightly so for much of history that if you had jobs, they would come, right?

The workers would follow the jobs but as we've seen, you know, I would say in the last five years, 10 years, workers are looking for more than just a job in determining where they're going to live.

Right, they want different cultural amenities.

They want, you know, different spaces where they can work with the concept of what's called a third space.

You know, not work, not your home, but like a coffee shop, a bookstore, a brewery, a distillery all those kinds of things that you see in many communities that are going up.

And so the idea here is to, you know, how do we deal with this in our rural communities, right?

Because if people aren't just looking for jobs anymore, they're looking for these types of what we call place-making attributes, you know how do we help communities build those things?

And so the Re-imagining Rural Regions Initiative is an attempt to do just that.

So there's two phases to this, the first phase which we just are starting and we've just selected the three communities.

They are the City of Marysville, the City of Van Wert in the Village of Gibsonburg in Sandusky County And so these three communities will be our initial cohort of the R3 initiative.

And what we're doing first, in the first year is doing a place-making process with them.

So going through their communities, identifying what the needs are, what the assets might be that they have in place that they could transform into some of these types of projects.

We're bringing our team at CRD and also our Center for Public Impact at BGSU to help with, you know grant writing support and those kinds of pieces.

But I would say the real innovative piece of this is we've just hired three BGSU graduate students.

And then next year we're gonna be hiring a team of BGSU undergraduate students to take into the community to then help the communities identify or not, excuse me, not to identify but to implement the projects that were identified through that place-making process.

So let's say, you know, we go through, right?

And there's the one community says, well, we're really one thing that would really help our community is a dog park, for instance, well, maybe, you know we then would take our, our graduate student team lead and then our team of undergraduates and they could perform research on best practices in dog parks, help identify funding sources for the community really to move that project towards implementation.

Because a lot of these really smaller communities don't have the capacity to even have somebody look for grants or to do this kind of work.

And so, right?

We're not only convening but we're also helping begin the process towards implementation with some of our, you know, our students and potentially even faculty members of the university.

- Right.

Well, and you make a good point because in many of these communities and there and a lot of them are relatively small, as you said, they don't have the staff to look for these kinds of things to even begin to talk about what we should do or not do and this, so you can supply that sort of a resource for them to help them along with that.

And then they can picture that in their community.

Now you mentioned the fact that workers don't necessarily go where the jobs are, the way we used to believe they would.

Is that a demographic thing?

Is that an age group or is it, is it spread across the entire range of ages?

- Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of factors that play in that decision.

You know, I think one of the things that's interesting in our region, right?

You have two fairly large universities here in the University of Sligo in Bowling Green State University, which, you know draw a lot of students from Northwest Ohio particularly from our rural communities.

You know, obviously a lot of students are also going to two year institutions Owen's, Northwest State, et cetera, but a lot of them will stay here for college, right?

But then when they're done with college, they often and we see this in the demographic data, you know our region really struggles from, 25 to 35, during that, in that in that age period we see a significant outward migration of people to Columbus, Cleveland, Chicago, larger Metro areas.

And you know what you could argue is that that's for wages, right?

You know, the people have student loans, the wages are much higher in those places.

So that's where they, you know, students, or they just want a change of scenery, right?

You know, they've lived in the rural communities.

They've lived in Northwest Ohio their whole lives.

They want of change the scenery because they, a lot of these places do have amenities that our region does it.

Right, and so the idea here is if we can engage in these kinds of place-making processes to make their home towns more attractive, right?

To have some of these different things, you're never gonna have the same assets that you'll have in Chicago obviously, or Columbus.

Right, but the idea is to make them, you know, to produce enough of these spaces to make it a place that students, former students, graduates, young workers and we're not just talking about college graduates we're also talking about high school graduates from local communities wanna stay and live and work and have a meaningful, interesting life in their community.

- Yeah and one of the things I know that when we've talked with students here to some degree, of course it's very anecdotal is that they're looking for a balance in their life that typically, maybe people of my generation, maybe your generation, although we might have valued that it wasn't as important to factor with them it's like, as you said, they want all these other amenities and they want a quality of life to match, to work with their job position.

Isn't oh, the jobs there and I'll deal with the rest of that kind of is an afterthought.

That's a, as you said, a major part of where they look to find a job and where they go is all of those other aspects around that.

So it is important that this initiative to try and help rural areas and regions develop that so people will stay here.

- Yeah, no, that's, that is sort of the inspiration behind this.

And I, as I talk with our students here who, you know, work at the center obviously, and the BGSU, you know I hear the same thing of, work is a part of my life, it is not my life.

Right, and this is a very generational thing.

And, you know, the pandemic has only expedited this, right?

And now, and I actually wouldn't say just expedite it, I think it's broadened it right, to even older generations now.

And I think that is why we're seeing such a shortage of workers across the United States.

It's not that people sort of have have had their cost benefit equation of how much they wanna work and how long they wanna work and where they want to work altered because of the pandemic.

But also because a lot of communities are making these kinds of efforts to sort of change the balance of where you have to live.

You've seen, you know, during the pandemic you've seen quite a shift in the economy in the US sort of map of where people are living, right?

You've seen a lot of people moving out of major metro areas, often the first ring suburbs because they want more space, they want these kinds of amenities that are often expensive or difficult to get in the inner city or a larger city.

So there's really this sort of weird dynamic, right?

Your rural communities don't have enough amenities.

The larger cities are unattractive to folks anymore because well, obviously because of health reasons, with the pandemic and sort of that, but also because of expense and those things.

And so you're seeing this sort of outward migration to smaller cities, metro, you know, smaller metro areas.

And so Northwest Ohio can absolutely gain from that and benefit.

We just got to position ourselves in the right way to do that.

- Yeah.

Now when we come back, let's talk about some of the economic indicators and a little bit more on this too, because it's interesting the fact that you mentioned that people are leaving and to a significant degree, a measurable degree, leaving large metropolitan areas looking in the suburbs or to smaller cities, but we come back, let's talk a little bit about that.

And also too, in our region what the economic indicators look like as we work our way out of the pandemic and those sorts of things too, because you of course your organization, the Center for Regional Development gathers huge amounts of data which allows you then to analyze it and help all these communities.

So we can talk about that when we come back.

Back in just a moment on The Journal with Dr. Russell Mills, the Senior Director of the BGSU Center for Regional Development.

Thank you for staying with us around The Journal.

Our guest is Dr. Russell Mills, the Senior Director for the BGSU Center for Regional Development.

As we were talking that last segment, the pandemic has changed the way a lot of people look at their jobs, look at their perspective jobs, look at jobs they're either thinking about staying or leaving.

One of the other things that you guys are really focused on at the center is measuring all of the things that go on in our economy and one of those being workforce but talk a little bit about how things have gone in the region with regard to the pandemic and how we're progressing and how that's all coming out, because obviously you guys are gathering numbers all the time on this.

So talk a little bit about that.

- Yeah, Steve, I think sort of it's important to start nationally and look at sort of, you know, the overall trend, right?

So prior to the pandemic, we have roughly 150 million jobs in the US economy.

And then in April of 2020, right?

During the initial wave of the pandemic that number one time to 130 million jobs, we lost roughly 20 million jobs and not one month.

Now 7.5 of those came back right away in June.

Right, so, you know, after, through may and June, those came back, as things started to open up, we got a better handle on the virus.

We developed treatments initially.

And so businesses were able to sort of open again in June of 2020, but over that period, we've only added another 6.5 million jobs since June to today, right?

So we're still down, the is economy still down 5.7 million jobs on the whole since March of 2020.

And this past month in March 2021, the US economy only added 266,000 jobs.

So that's part of the equation.

The other part of the equation I think is very important is labor force participation.

And that measures how many people were actually in the economy who have a job or who are actively seeking a job.

And that number in February of 2020 was 63.3%.

And today in April, 2021 or sort of the most recent data is 61.7%.

And so we have 3.4 fewer million workers in the labor force than there were in February of 2020.

There are over, there's also over 3 million Americans who have been unemployed for over 27 weeks in April of 2021.

So we have quite a few more people today that are unemployed for longterm.

In Northwest Ohio, there's roughly 18,000 less people in the labor force in March, 2021 then there were in February, 2020, and this is important, 16 of our 17 counties that are in the RGP region, right?

So what we consider north of what the state considers Northwest Ohio, 16 of those 17 counties have seen a decrease in their labor force.

And then Lucas county, obviously our largest that number is 7,500 fewer workers who were in the labor force.

And of course, some of that has to do with the other people we lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A lot of it has to do with people with childcare responsibilities, or people who have health concerns who can't go back to the labor force.

So there's a whole myriad of reasons that exists for this phenomenon, but it's really interesting.

And you know, when you look at the numbers in the unemployment side you would think it's a very rosy picture because unemployment is where it was pre-pandemic pretty much, right?

I mean, it's a little higher in some places but the point is right, we've actually, unemployment rate is low but we've seen a decrease in employment.

So employment is 2.75% lower between now and in February of 2020, which means that the the decrease in the unemployment rate is simply because there's fewer people in the labor force.

And so this is, this is a predicament that we're in.

It's a fairly unique and unusual one and one we haven't seen in quite some time.

- Yeah well, and it's interesting because I don't know that in our lifetimes there's ever been a labor shortage and that's almost what this, it feels like that as you said there are so many fewer people for whatever reason, not seeking employment.

And at the same time, you see a lot of employers with hiring signs out.

So it's an interesting, an interesting dynamic.

And as you said, one, we haven't really seen before.

And it's just, it's unusual because I don't think any have ever thought, well years ago the discussion, what would happen when the baby boomers all decided to leave employment?

Which of course, a lot of us have not done when people thought we would that was supposed to be this big turner, but what will we do there won't be enough people looking for work.

This, the pandemic has kind of created that sort of dynamic in a way, that there are fewer people looking for work and yet there are jobs out there, at the same time you're trying to work with workforce development to change skills for the jobs that are there.

So it's a real combination of things coming together here.

- Yeah and I think it's important to also recognize that we've just had some of the large, actually a couple of the largest, if not the largest economic stimulus' the federal government's ever undertaken.

And when you think about the amount of money that's now available in the US economy, demand for products, services is going to go through the roof as we, you know, particularly now this summer, since the you know, the CDCs mask mandate has changed you're going to see an explosion of, I think travel, tourism, spending.

And I wonder if there's gonna be enough workers to accommodate all of this demand, this pent up demand, that's being fueled by the stimulus dollars that are out there, you know as sort of a, as a statistic to look at this, right?

In March, 2021, the, you know the Bureau of Labor statistics indicated that we now have the highest number of job postings ever, of job openings, 8.2 million, right?

And so that is unheard of.

And prior to the pandemic, there was 7.1 million opening.

So what you have as more jobs now with a smaller labor force to compete for those jobs.

And so that's why we're seeing wages increase quite a bit.

You're seeing, you know, the demand and the competition for workers resulting in higher wages which is what an economist would always tell you should happen in an economy.

But then of course the result of that would be in the worry is inflation, right?

If the cost of labor goes up, that's one of the main inputs into any kind of product you're building or any kind of service you're providing, then that would typically be passed on to consumers.

And so that's why there's such worry at the Federal Reserve Bank and across the US economy of inflation occurring.

But I, again, I think it's important to really highlight the reasons for the tight labor market, right?

You know, school across the country schools there's still plenty of schools that are closed, childcare places are operating at less than full capacity because of restrictions or because they can't find workers themselves.

Right?

And so with those kinds of childcare problems that are out there that's really keeping a lot of particularly women out of the workforce.

Also the general, you know the unemployment benefits, you know, which were being provided the extra $300 per week, You know, a lot of observers and employers have noted that they think that's a particular reason for that.

We'll see because we'll be able to, state start rolling this back, we'll be able to sort of have a natural experiment of the states that left it in.

If they keep struggling while the states that remove it do better in terms of getting people in the workforce.

So I think it's gonna be an interesting couple of months here to see if that actually pans out.

And if people begin to enter the workforce again if there really was those employment benefits but I don't particularly think so.

I think people's perceptions of work have changed, the plight of frontline workers in particular during the pandemic, you know is it worth your life going out to earn $10 an hour at the grocery store?

Right, I think people's cost benefit equation has changed, how much they're willing to risk and do those kinds of things for work.

And particularly if there are government programs that are supporting them, not doing that.

So.

- Yeah well, and that, and we've got just a short amount of time here, but that it's an interesting point though, it's a change in a way that no one anticipated, no one was, I don't think before the pandemic anybody looked at it and said, oh, there's gonna be this sort of cultural change in people in the workforce that said, oh, you know work's not the only thing.

I mean, yes, there was some of that as you got into the younger demographics, but as you said it's become now across the board.

And I don't think any business, any industry, any organization saw that one coming at all.

And yet here we are.

And now we have to figure out how to make that all work again and childcare being a big one, because that in some cases you can spend more for childcare than you can make working a job $10 an hour 30 or 40 hours a week.

So that becomes problematic, real problem.

- And don't forget about health insurance, Steve, right?

I mean, I still think health insurance is a major issue.

You know, employers are realizing that, they can pay even 13 to $15 an hour, and then it isn't moving the needle because of the lack of healthcare benefits and the cost of those benefits.

And so I think that's still a major, major problem for employers that we haven't really talked about that I think will start to come back again here in the public dialogue over the next year or two, because I don't foresee these numbers changing drastically and rebounding until some of these structural issues are addressed.

- Yeah and someone said, this is the new normal I guess.

So we'll have to leave it there I guess.

Dr. Russell Mills, Senior Director BGSU Center for Regional Development, thanks for being with us.

And again, we'll continue to reach out to you as these different things take place.

And we see just how much our economy and our workforce and our approach to work has really changed in just the last year or so.

So thanks again for being here.

- [Dr.Russell] Thank you, Steven.

- And you can check us out at wbgu.org and of course, every Thursday night at eight o'clock here on WBUPBS.

We will see you again, next time on The Journal.

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