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Kasich: Ohio top job creator in Midwest

Ohio Gov. John Kasich delivers his State of the State address at Wells Academy/Steubenville High School Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2012, in Steubenville, Ohio. The first-term Republican made his plea for legislators to put politics aside and focus on what�s good for Ohio in his State of the State address Tuesday in Steubenville.

AP Photo/Tony Dejak Ohio Gov. John Kasich delivers his State of the State address at Wells Academy/Steubenville High School Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2012, in Steubenville, Ohio. The first-term Republican made his plea for legislators to put politics aside and focus on what�s good for Ohio in his State of the State address Tuesday in Steubenville.

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By Laura A. Bischoff, Columbus Bureau 9:40 PM Tuesday, February 7, 2012

STEUBENVILLE — Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Tuesday said that jobs in manufacturing, logistics and other industries are moving back but the state needs to revamp public education and align workforce training to match job openings.

“This is not sustainable. America has been falling behind and Ohio is stuck in the middle and we need to fix it. I have to spend the next year building consensus,” he said of public education reforms. Kasich said he is anxious to see how Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s new K-12 education reform package works.

Kasich noted that only 65 percent of students in Ohio’s urban districts graduate high school and 41 percent of high school graduates end up taking remedial math and English classes in college.

“We can change urban education in Ohio and we can change urban education in America. And that is worth fighting for and worth risking for,” Kasich said to applause from the crowd of 1,100 people.

“We have a long way to go,” he said.

Kasich said he is asking four-year universities to commercialize their research, collaborate to avoid duplicative programs and step up the graduation rates. He is also pushing community colleges to align courses with available jobs and he is asking businesses to forecast what sort of skills they need in future employees so that they can be trained.

“Now folks, if we can train, if we can educate, forecast, use our location, use our great people, use our resources, use our assets, we’ll be number one state in America. We’ll be the most powerful state in America. I have no doubt. We have the scale, the size and everything that we need,” Kasich said.

Normally, governors deliver the State of the State address to a joint session of the General Assembly at the Statehouse in Columbus. Kasich moved the speech 160 miles east to Steubenville High School and Wells Academy, an adjacent school with 215 preschool through fourth grade students. Wells Academy boasts the highest scores on state achievement tests: 100 percent of third and fourth graders tested met the state standards for math and reading last school year.

Kasich said Ohio needs to use Wells Academy and other successful schools as blueprints for overhauling those that are failing.

Kasich spoke for 83 minutes without extensive notes or a TelePrompTer as he skipped through a long list of what he has done and what he still wants to do as Ohio’s 69th governor.

Ohio’s economy is showing evidence of a slow turn around. The state’s unemployment rate hit 8.1 percent in December 2011, down from 9.5 percent in December 2010 just before Kasich took office. Honda, Chrysler, US Steel and other companies have announced major investments and hiring plans. And the state’s sales tax and income tax revenues are running slightly ahead of projections, according to a monthly financial report due out next week.

“We got to pick off these companies one by one to bring these manufacturing jobs back to Ohio,” Kasich said. The governor said Ohio has picked up 43,500 new jobs and climbed from being ranked 48th in job creation to number nine.

“We are alive again. We are out of the ditch,” he said.

One Hamilton company, ThyssenKrupp, received a shout-out from Kasich during his speech.

Kasich praised the work of the state and local officials in developing a plan that prevented jobs going to Mexico to open a new line to manufacture shock absorbers which will now stay in Hamilton.

Joshua Smith, Hamilton’s city manager, said he appreciated the way Kasich’s staff and the city worked together to develop a model that may be used to keep other businesses in the city.

Smith credited Fabian Schmahl, president and CEO of ThyssenKrupp Bilstein of America, “for being very aggressive in pushing us and the state to work together.”

Smith said the state provided $750,000 from the Third Frontier program and the city provided a $100,000 nonrefundable loan if it made its $5.9 million capital investment and added 60 jobs to the current 180 jobs already there.

Smith said the new jobs to be created would be in the $14 to $15 an hour range.

But Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern said in a press conference on Monday that credit for the turnaround belongs to President Barack Obama and former Gov. Ted Strickland, particularly since they supported a federal bailout of Chrysler and General Motors.

“They stopped the bleeding,” he said.

More than 120 Ohioans protested outside the speech, urging the governor to hold off on allowing hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells. (This was mild compared with last year when 3,000 protested Kasich’s collective bargaining reforms outside this 2011 address.)

Ohio is on the cusp of a potential oil and gas boom as energy companies look to tap into the Utica Shale deposits in the eastern part of the state. Ohio Oil & Gas Energy Education Program, an industry supported group, estimated that Utica play could result in 200,000 new jobs from the related leasing, exploring, drilling, and construction work and landowners could see royalty payments of up to $1.6 billion by 2015.

The Warren County Career Center may be playing a role in training Ohioans to get those jobs.

Peg Allen, WCCC spokeswoman, said the school and the governor’s office have been in discussions and exploring avenues to train workers in heavy equipment operation/site construction and obtaining commercial drivers licensing.

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