Downtown Living Blog

At the eye-popping cost of between $67 million and $100 million, NetJets was persuaded not to go South.
The near-miss — the company was poised to move to Raleigh, Orlando or Fort Worth — would have been a blow. Gov. Ted Strickland's administration and the City of Columbus will argue to their death that a recent Columbus Dispatch headline that screamed "2,000 jobs saved, 800 on the way" could just as easily been "2,000 jobs lost."

But, wow — up to $100 million in state and local incentives. That's $21 million more than what the Taft administration put on the table in 2006 to try to entice Honda to build an assembly plant in Ohio — also with 2,000 good-paying jobs. Ohio lost that bidding war to Greensburg, Ind.

NetJets, a Berkshire Hathway subsidiary, is the leader among businesses that sell fractional shares in private jets. It ferries executives to their business meetings and the rich and famous to the Super Bowl much the same way that the not-so-rich call a cab. It's an expensive way to fly, but not as expensive as buying your own jet.

Many analysts say the market for speedy light jet travel in a global economy is in its infancy and could be a spectacular growth industry. The push to keep the company in Columbus was driven by that bet, but also because the city and state don't want to lose a company that caters to the jet set — think Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who are among NetJets' customers.

After all, being the operational home of this sort of outfit is so un-Rust Belt.
Maybe more important, though, letting a company that's already in a community — particularly one with this sort of footprint and work force — is a hundred times worse than losing a competition for new jobs that aren't already part of a community's fabric and economy.

Another take-away from the success is that Columbus is figuring out how to market its airport and ensure that business around it is booming. For crying out loud, it's even moving its radar station to give NetJets room to expand.

By contrast, bringing development to Dayton's airport is something this community has not figured out how to do. The open space and more than a few vacant buildings there are testament to that.

And growth isn't happening just at Columbus' main airport.
At Rickenbacker Airport, the effort is on to make it an international logistics hub, with trains, planes and trucks depositing and picking up everything from apparel to automotive parts. The development — which has been being nurtured now for almost 20 years — is still handsomely subsidized by Franklin County taxpayers, but the considerable new infrastructure at the old Air Force base that closed in 1980 is creating all sorts of economic development possibilities.

Location is a big part of the Rickenbacker equation, but Dayton is as blessed as Columbus in this regard. While Columbus is at the intersection of Interstates 70 and 71, Dayton's airport and lots of acreage near it is at the juncture of Interstates 70 and 75. Somehow that transportation nexus ought to be paying off.

It's also more than a little ironic that Columbus is promoting itself as an aviation center based on being a multi-modal transportation hub; becoming the home to a company that caters to high-end airline customers; and having Skybus Airlines for cheap fliers.

Meanwhile, Dayton's far richer aviation assets never quite translate to the economic development and marketing advantages that, by all rights, this region should be claiming and promoting. When you're home to the Wright brothers and the Wright-Patterson engineers who conceived the Stealth bomber, isn't that sexy enough to leverage and do something with?

Good for Columbus that it kept what it has. And if its success helps Ohio be seen as an aviation magnet, that certainly isn't bad for Dayton. But that city sure is getting a lot of mileage out of its tiny slice of the state's aviation assets. Call it doing more with less.

Ellen Belcher
is editor of the
Dayton Daily News
editorial pages. Her telephone number is 225-2286; her e-mail address is ebelcher@DaytonDailyNews.com.