MORGANTOWN — A panel of local business leaders shared some insights on business growth during a Wednesday luncheon gathering at WVU.
The Pittsburgh chapter of the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) held its second-ever Morgantown meeting at the Erickson Alumni Center. SMPS serves the architectural, engineering and construction industries and drew a room full of area professionals to its luncheon.
The meeting was called Take Me Home Country Roads: Revisiting the I-79 Corridor in North Central West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania.
Moderator Steve LaCagnin, president and CEO o the Morgantown Area Chamber of Commerce, opened the discussion with some comments on the new MAP — Morgantown Area Economic Partnership – organization.
Led by the chamber, he said, MAP includes the Monongalia County Development Authority, the Monongalia County Economic Planning Authority and the Campus Neighborhoods Revitalization Corp. It just hired a new president and CEO, Russell Rogerson, and will operate “under one roof so we can do economic development efficiently here with a single plan.”
SMPS acknowledges the reality that while the Morgantown-Clarksburg corridor is part of West Virginia, it’s also a Pittsburgh satellite.
Panelist Brandon Mendoza is executive director of NAIOP Pittsburgh, a chapter of the national developers group. Pittsburgh is seeing its best investments numbers seen in decades, he said, but compared to other benchmark cities, “We’re nowhere near the levels that we need to be.”
Pittsburgh advanced form bottom of the second tier of cities to the bottom of the first tier. “We’ve got a lot to celebrate, but now we’ve got new peers and new challenges.”
Jim Estep, president and CEO of the High Technology Foundation in Fairmont, said the foundation’s core focus is knowledge sector jobs.
“No matter how successful we are in West Virginia,” he said, “with the petrochemical growth, we truly can’t be a diversified region if we don’t participate in a meaningful way nationally in the knowledge sector.”
He explained again the tech park’s federal anchor model, where major agencies support extensive contract work. For each new recruit, “it creates a business case for companies in that industry to want to come to our region. … As the critical mass of that business case grows, it eventually reaches enough of a size where it will form the basis of a new sector – the knowledge sector.”
The park covers 400 acres, he said, and in the next month or so they’ll be launching a development effort to put a new road system in the park’s third phase. He’s talking with agencies to bring them here. He tries to recruit operations seeking to leave the D.C. area, where the tight concentration of federal agencies poses security risks. This part of the Appalachians is “far enough but not too far” for those agencies to relocate.
Panelists addressed some of the challenges to ongoing growth.
Mark Nesselroad, COO and chief legal counsel for Glenmark Holdings, talked about the Pittsburgh-Clarksburg corridor operating as a single region and the value of MAP in coordinating growth,
“As more and more of that gets done,” he said, “if we can get the governments and townships and counties and cities to start working together, that helps. If they don’t work together and they’re competing, that kind of [becomes] a threat.” If they have competing tax structures or widely varying permitting structures, that threatens growth.
Estep said the number one challenge is the workforce demographic, with so many educated and skilled workers leaving in past years. “It’s left our region somewhat behind the curve a little bit.”
He encourages state and local governments to be proactive in workforce recruitment, he said. If there is no regional workforce recruitment plan, “that could make or break the opportunities that are facing us.”
Mendoza said the skilled labor shortage could drive up labor and project costs at some point. Two cracker plants — Shell Chemical’s going up in Monaca, Pa., northeast of Pittsburgh and PTT Global/Daelim in Shadyside, Ohio, between Wheeling and Moundsville and still not officially under way – would draw up to 10,000 construction workers.
“Right now we haven’t seen that increase in costs yet,” he said. He’s trying to research how that might happen and what they can do about it.
The shortage could also affect WVU, said panelist John Thompson, WVU’s associate director of Design and Construction Services. With two major WVU projects in the works, he’s asked potential construction managers if cracker and other major projects are going to drive up WVU’s costs.
“It’s a good problem to have, but it is a problem of [not enough] people going into the skilled construction trades.”
Thompson commented that steady decreases in state funding and accompanying tuition hikes have pushed WVU’s out-of-state tuition above Pennsylvania’s in-state, which affects enrollment, “which really drives the bus for our growth.”
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