More companies, fewer jobs as COVID year a mixed bag for EDCUtah

By Brice Wallace

The 2020-21 fiscal year was a mixed bag for the corporate recruitment and retention efforts of the Economic Development Corporation of Utah (EDCUtah).

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization won 37 projects for the state during the July-through-June fiscal year, topping the prior year’s 32 wins. However, those projects are expected to create or retain 8,306 jobs over the next few years, far short of the 13,489 jobs reported for the 2019-20 fiscal year.

“A great year, by any measure,” Theresa Foxley, president and CEO, said of the 37 wins while briefing the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity (Go Utah) board during a recent meeting. “But certainly a far better year than we would have expected, given all of the turmoil related to the pandemic.”

Capital investments from the 37 projects are expected to reach $912 million, down from $1.22 billion in the prior fiscal year. The amount of square footage occupied by the projects is projected at 4.3 million, up from 3.1 million. And the organization had 164 net new projects, thanks to a boost in February and April, compared with 153 the prior year.

“Our average month prior to the pandemic, we would have anywhere between 12 and 13 projects …. so really the first half of our last fiscal year stayed pretty flat and close to average, with the first quarter of the calendar year really picking up,” Foxley said.

“I think what happened during this period of time that you saw was vaccines began to roll out, [and] consumer and business confidence was increasing as a result of some of the changes to the pandemic. We’re, of course, monitoring that now as new variants are coming into play.”

The pandemic is still having impacts on corporate recruitment. A recent site visit by prospective new company into Utah was converted to a virtual visit. “So a lot of the logistics and work flow of our team, we’re just continuing to adapt to these changes and remaining flexible,” Foxley said.

Foxley said two themes emerged during the fiscal year. “One, it was much better than we ever expected, and, two, it was better than we expected because of the types of projects that we had which were primarily manufacturing,” she said.

Before the pandemic, about 30 percent of EDCUtah’s active projects involved manufacturing. Now the figure is well over 50 percent.

But technology-based projects shrunk as prospective companies had employees working from home and were “trying to understand how the ongoing work-from-anywhere dynamics would impact location decisions,” Foxley said. Still, the number of tech projects in the pipeline grew as the fiscal year advanced.

Likewise, there was an increase in interest from international firms due to the pandemic’s impacts. They included firms trying to address COVID and supply-chain disruptions “and those firms that are trying to bullet-proof their supply chain through additional facilities,” she said.

EDCUtah’s fiscal year matches that of the state. Go Utah, at the time known as the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED), said in June that its 2020-21 fiscal year featured smaller numbers across the board when compared to the prior fiscal year but higher figures than those of the years prior to that. For 2020-21, GOED had 19 companies receive tax credit incentives, with job creation projected to be 8,595 over the next few years. Capital investment was projected at about $456.3 million.

EDCUtah and Go Utah numbers differ because not all of EDCUtah projects go through the state incentive process.

EDCUtah’s plans for the current fiscal year include corporate recruitment missions to San Francisco, New York City, Southern California, Chicago and Austin. It also hopes to return to in-person meetings with companies and their site selectors. Foxley said she is “super-excited” to resume the in-person program. While virtual meetings worked better than expected, they were still virtual.

“I think we can do that for some period of time,” she said of virtual work, “but really there’s nothing quite like the contacts and connections that you can make in-person.”