Just three mos. in, job growth & retention nearing all of last year

By Brice Wallace 

July is known for fireworks, and that month started the state’s job-creation and job-retention numbers for fiscal year 2022 with a bang.

A mere three months into the July-through-June 2022 fiscal year, both the Utah Office of Economic Opportunity (Go Utah) and its economic development partners, the Economic Development Corporation of Utah (EDCUtah), are reporting figures that are topping or on their way to topping those of entire previous fiscal years.

So far, Go Utah has incentivized projects expected to create about 11,000 jobs over the next few years. That’s already higher than the entire 2021 fiscal year, when job projections reached 8,595.

That figure for fiscal 2022 is “by far over 2021 and we’re only three months into 2022, so it’s good to see those numbers go up,” Daniel Royal, Go Utah’s director of corporate growth and business development, told the Go Utah board at its September meeting.

While Royal cautioned that the activity likely will slow, Go Utah could end up topping the fiscal 2020 record of 13,364 new jobs.

Meanwhile, in the first three months of fiscal 2022, EDCUtah has worked on projects expected to create or retain 6,695 jobs. The figure was 8,306 for the entire fiscal year 2021 and puts EDCUtah at about 74 percent of its FY2022 goal of 9,000. In fiscal 2020, its projects were linked to creating or retaining 13,279 jobs.

“All in all, it looks like 2022 is a better year for projects,” Royal said of Go Utah’s figures. “I think as [COVID issues] are winding down, of course the delta variant is going up, people are looking for a place to put some money, so we’re glad they’re choosing Utah to put that money.

“Of course, we’ll see what happens the rest of the year,” Royal said. “We still have nine months to go, and of course during the winter, things slow down, [and] during the early spring, things start to pick back up.”

Colby Cooley, vice president of business development at EDCUtah, showed slides at the meeting and described the numbers for new and retained jobs and for capital investment as “pretty crazy for being only a few months into the fiscal year. … It looks a little bit strange but is accurate, and so we do anticipate having a banner year.”

Go Utah already has set a record for incentivized companies’ capital expenditures, at nearly $1.2 billion, outpacing $1.13 billion in fiscal 2020 and surpassing the fiscal 2021 figure of $456.3 million.

The fiscal 2022 projects are expected to generate new tax revenues of about $460 million. The figure last year was nearly $330.8 million and the record is $591 million in fiscal 2020.

New total wages are currently at over $9 billion, nearing the fiscal 2020 record of $9.7 billion and up from $5.2 billion in fiscal 2021.

As for EDCUtah, its nine project “wins” so far puts it 26 percent toward its goal of 35 for FY2022. It had 37 wins in fiscal 2021. At $820 million so far, it is 82 percent toward its goal of $1 billion in capital expenditure for fiscal 2022. It reached $912 million last fiscal year after hitting $1.22 billion in fiscal 2020.

The square footage for its projects is 830,000, putting EDCUtah at 33 percent of its goal of 2.5 million. The figure was 4.3 million square feet in fiscal 2021.

EDCUtah also has 127 active projects, with 75 being companies in manufacturing, while information and IT were next, at 13.

“July was super-busy for us this year, and there were a couple of months before that in the last half of the fiscal year where we were getting 22 projects a month, 20 a month. That’s just crazy,” Cooley said, adding that a normal month prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was 10-13 projects.

The primary incentive used by Go Utah is the Economic Development Tax Increment Financing (EDTIF), which allows companies to receive tax credits of up to 30 percent of the state taxes they paid over a certain period, up to 20 years. Their contracts with the state are post-performance, meaning they receive the credit only if they meet their job-creation obligations.

The figures reported by Go Utah and EDCUtah never match because not all of EDCUtah projects go through the state incentive process.