Site Selection Magazine announced Wednesday that the state had won its 2009 Governors Cup with 381 projects, described as new or expanded corporate facilities. Texas was second with 374 projects and Michigan third with 371.
Ohio for the fourth year in a row has won an award for leading the nation in corporate facilities projects.
Site Selection Magazine announced Wednesday that the state had won its 2009 Governors Cup with 381 projects, described as new or expanded corporate facilities. Texas was second with 374 projects and Michigan third with 371.
"Ohio fought hard in 2009 to win new projects and to expand existing operations in the state," Mark Arend, editor in chief at the Atlanta-based magazine, said in a statement.
Gov. Ted Strickland, Lt. Governor Lee Fisher, and Ohio Department of Development Director Lisa Patt-McDaniel publicized the honor Wednesday at Alcoa's Cleveland Works in Cuyahoga Heights. The company received $20.6 million in public funding to help pay for a $68 million project to rebuild a damaged 50,000-ton press, which it said will protect 700 jobs and eventually create hundreds more.
"Economic achievement only thrives when commitment and collaboration at the federal, state and local level is attained on a daily basis," Fisher said in a statement.
The magazine also ranks corporate projects in metro areas. Cleveland, which ranked ninth in 2008 among metro areas of more than 1 million, failed to make the list this year. Akron, ranked second in 2008 among cities of 200,000 to 1 million population, also failed to make the list in 2009.
However, Dayton, with 46 projects, topped this year's list of smaller metro areas. Greater Cincinnati, with 89 projects, ranked sixth.
Three Ohio towns with populations between 10,000 and 50,000 placed in that category. Wooster was second with 13 projects, Ashtabula sixth with nine and Findlay 10th with six.
During the four years Ohio has nabbed top honors for projects, unemployment has soared. Jeff Finkle, president and chief executive officer of the International Economic Development Council in Washington, DC, said this isn't necessarily a contradiction.
"My guess is that it may not represent a ton of jobs today, but it probably represents a lot of jobs in the future," he said. "When a company builds a facility, it is anticipating a larger workforce."
George Zeller, an economic research analyst in Cleveland, said Ohio has to create even more jobs.
"The fact that we won this award is a good thing, but Ohio has still lost 10 percent of its jobs since 2000," he said.