Dayton area tops Ohio's biggest cities in job growth

New work around airport one of the key drivers, city says.

Forget Ohio’s three C’s — the big D is besting them all in job growth.

Employment in the Dayton metro area grew by 2.8 percent, or 10,700 jobs, between December 2016 and 2017, according to preliminary state labor data.

Ohio’s largest metro areas could not keep up. During that time, employment grew 1.4 percent in Columbus, 0.4 percent in Cincinnati and 0.2 percent in Cleveland, the data show.

It wasn’t just percentages, either. The raw numbers show the Dayton metro area — which consists of Montgomery, Greene and Miami counties — trailed just Columbus, which had 15,000 new jobs, or about 4,300 more than Dayton.

Dayton had “double the rate of growth of the national economy, and was the highest of all the metro areas in the state,” said Diane Shannon, Dayton’s deputy director of management and budget.

Dayton’s growth — including new jobs around the airport — outperformed all of the Buckeye State’s other major metro areas, including Toledo (-0.4 percent), Akron (-1 percent) and Canton

(-0.2 percent).

About 395,400 people were employed in the region in the final month of the year, which was the most since December 2006, state data show.

Nonfarm payrolls in the Dayton region also grew 0.3 percent between November and December, which was better than most Ohio metro areas.

“The Dayton region continues to see strong growth, with companies bringing new jobs and investment into the region every day,” said Julie Sullivan, the Dayton Development Coalition’s executive vice president of regional development. “From businesses looking to take advantage of Dayton’s logistical advantage to major employers investing in research and development operations, we see a strong pipeline for job growth into 2018.”

City officials say the Dayton International Airport has become one of the regional leaders in new jobs.

Employers at the airport have the equivalent of 2,225 full-time workers on their payrolls, and about 600 new jobs were added between the middle of 2016 and 2017, according to an airport job survey.

Hundreds of new jobs are expected to come to new facilities planned or under construction around the airport, which are being developed by NorthPoint Development LLC.

The firm already built and opened a 570,000-squarefoot facility for Spectrum Brands and is constructing another large building next to it for an unidentified user.

NorthPoint plans to build a third facility on 32 acres west of the airport. The two new facilities are projected to bring around 425 new jobs.

“This is probably the largest job growth in the region that’s happening,” Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley said in December.

PSA Airlines, which is headquartered in Dayton, has grown rapidly and is likely to add more personnel. The company has 3,500 employees at flight crew bases across the nation and operates more than 750 daily flights to more than 90 destinations.

The employment growth has helped the city of Dayton’s budget.

City budget officials recently noted that Dayton’s baseline income tax revenue grew 2.8 percent last year to $111.8 million. That does not count new revenue from Issue 9, a tax hike approved by voters in 2016, which raised Dayton’s earnings tax to 2.5 percent from 2.25 percent.

Total income tax collections last year were $122.4 million, the most in the city’s history, in part because of about $10.6 million in additional Issue 9 money.