Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal – 2020 might have been a year of chaos — but that hasn’t slowed local economic development efforts, setting the stage for growth in 2021.
JaxUSA Partnership — the economic development arm of Jax Chamber — has about 50 projects that it is working on, with between five to eight that could come to fruition early in the new year, Executive Director Aundra Wallace told the Business Journal.
2020 was marked by a fall-off in financial services project, Wallace said: Typically there might be a dozen projects in that sector, but as office-based businesses moved workers home, that number plummeted.
The city did see success in the fight for those left, though, including getting an 80-employee Cantor Fitzgerald office.
Will the projects that ground to a halt in March reappear in 2021? “We’ve got to see how the vaccination rolls out,” Wallace said. “That will have an impact on how the office market goes.”
What is expected to continue is the growth of distribution, especially that tied to e-commerce: Early in December, for example, Amazon announced its 10th operation on the First Coast. Advanced manufacturing — one of the key sectors local economic development focuses on — is also seeing movement, Wallace said.
“The pandemic exposed the weakness of supply chains not being here,” he said, which is leading to reshoring, as manufactures move operations back to the U.S.
JaxUSA’s marketing efforts in 2021 will be focused on the areas like Ohio and Illinois, as Jacksonville looks to lure companies and workers who might be looking to leave larger cities to avoid congestion or taxes: The area already has one of the fastest-growing populations in the country.
“I’m very excited.” Wallace said. “It’s been a challenging year. But this year proved to us that we were able to pivot.”
That led to 17 announcements, totally 2,475 jobs and $857 million in investment. “That’s what we were able to do in a pandemic year,” he said. “I’m looking forward to 2021.”
Photo courtesy of Remy Gieling.