Thai restaurant views Town & Country spot
A spokeswoman for the city of Kettering said city officials are reviewing plans for a new 1,934-square-foot restaurant to be called Singha Thai at the Town & Country Shopping Center.
The plans call for significant renovation of a space at 4123 E. Town and Country Road in the Village Shops section of Town & Country, between First Watch and Panera Bread. The proposed work includes removing existing flooring “down to the slab” and removing the existing ceiling and lighting fixtures and building out a new restaurant that could seat as many as 49.
The Dayton Daily News reached out to the owner of Singha Thai.
Besides getting approval for architectural plans, the project would have to navigate several more potential regulatory and financial steps before a restaurant could open and serve its first customers.
Pam Cochran, property manager of the Town & Country center, said she has not yet met with the owner of Singha Thai and had no information beyond the architectural plans submission. Andy Bartz, vice president for leasing for Columbus-based Skilken/Gold Real Estate Development and the leasing agent for the Singha Thai deal, declined to comment directly on the restaurant’s plans, referring questions to its owners.
School contractor to lay off 184
Parallel Education Division, a firm deploying substitute teachers, will permanently close its Dayton office and told the state that this will impact 184 employees.
Many of the substitute teachers and school aides that work for the substitute teacher supplier will likely work for the new agency that Dayton Public Schools contracts with.
Parallel is a contractor that runs substitute teacher operations for Dayton Public Schools and other school districts around the country. The people covered by this notice are substitute teachers and school aides who work in Dayton Public Schools. Many of those individuals also substitute in other school districts.
DPS announced late last month that starting next fall, it will contract with a new agency — ESS Northeast, LLC, formerly Source4Teachers — to provide substitute personnel. The company 15 W. Fourth St., Dayton.
Dayton cafe adds Ethiopian drinks
Nanya Café, 6129 N. Dixie Drive, Harrison Twp., Montgomery County, has added alcohol to its menu.
Nanya’s owner Sofi Kinde said she hopes to appeal to diners looking for adult beverages with their meals.
The offerings include liquors, Habesha, an Ethiopian beer, and a variety of Ethiopian wines.
She said she hopes to add local craft beer in the near future. The Ethiopian beer will regularly cost $4 a serving, but will be sold for $3 this month. Wine is $5 a glass.
Kinde said bottles of wine will be sold for $18 to $20 this month.
Premier Health names new chief operating officer
Premier Health named Barbara Johnson, currently chief human resource officer, as the next executive vice president and chief operating officer.
Johnson will be the second highest ranking executive at Premier Health, which is the largest private employer in the region and operates Miami Valley Hospital, Atrium Medical Center and Upper Valley Medical Center. Dayton-based Premier had $1.8 billion in revenue for 2018 and the equivalent of about 12,200 fulltime employees as of November.
Johnson takes over for Mike Maiberger, who is retiring from his post Aug. 16 after 27 years with Premier Health.
Premier said in a statement that Johnson has served Premier Health in various executive roles since joining the organization in 2003, including serving as executive vice president and chief operating officer at Miami Valley Hospital, and before that, as vice president of operations at Good Samaritan Hospital.
“Barb brings a wealth of knowledge and skill about the many facets of organizational strategy and structure,” Mary Boosalis, president and CEO of Premier Health, said in a statement. “Barb combines a strong, mission-driven foundation with her approach to work and her interactions with others. She blends solid business acumen with an abiding commitment to the organization, the people who work and volunteer at Premier Health, and to the communities we serve.”
WSU enrollment numbers down for fall
Enrollment at Wright State University for next fall is down 13.6 percent so far, a number school leaders have been trying to turn around for years now.
The undergraduate student headcount for this fall so far is 9,086, compared to 10,517 students enrolled 11 weeks out from the start of the 2018 fall semester. These numbers do not include the Boonshoft School of Medicine, which had about 480 medical students last year.
Tuition revenue is Wright State’s largest single source of income. Fewer students means less money flowing into the school, which is trying to recover from financial issues that forced it to slash around $53 million from its budget in fiscal year 2018.
The enrollment statistics were published by the university’s Office of Institutional Research, which creates a weekly report of enrollment figures that compare to the previous year. The report’s figures are likely to be discussed at a Friday meeting where WSU trustees will be briefed on the school’s fiscal year 2020 budget.
The report’s 2019 enrollment figures, said WSU spokesman Seth Bauguess, were not unexpected. But, it is a snapshot of the students currently registered and not a projection of what fall enrollment will be, Bauguess said.
Despite the anticipated improvement, there’s a good chance fall enrollment will be down because the report’s numbers are down, Bauguess said.
Beavercreek defense firm to lay off workers
A Beavercreek defense contractor will lay off 12 employees after the company failed to win a Wright-Patterson Air Force Base contract.
“BTAS was not awarded the contract through recompete,” Ezra Ross-Saunders, human resources director for BTAS, wrote the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. “Subsequently, the last day of employment for our employees on this task order is July 17 2019.”
The letter said successor contractors may contact affected employees to give them “right of first refusal” on other job openings.
Generally, a successor contractor may not hire new employees under a contract until a right of first refusal has been provided by displaced workers, Ross-Saunders wrote.
The firm has focused on providing business and technical solutions in IT, communications, security, program management and engineering.
Prosecution recommends 10-year sentence
A former Bellbrook financial advisor who pleaded “no contest” to charges of stealing nearly $1 million from clients will be sentenced June 25 in Montgomery County Common Pleas Court.
In a sentencing memorandum, county prosecutors recommended that John Gregory Schmidt, 68, be sentenced to prison for at least a decade.
“The evidence in this case shows that the defendant performed these actions with regularity over more than a decade,” prosecutors wrote.
A maximum consecutive sentence would approach 142 years, prosecutors said in a memo to Judge Gregory Singer.
The defense entered its own memo Monday, with letters from friends and family on behalf of Schmidt.
“This case is extremely unusual because the defendant never took any of this money for his own personal gain,” Schmidt’s attorney, Steven Pierson, wrote in the defense memo. “The monies that were transferred fraudulently were moved from one client of the defendant to another client.”
Added Pierson: “No one has ever claimed that the defendant ever took a single cent for himself.”
In a separate case, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Schmidt in federal court last year, and in that civil case, U.S. District Judge Walter Rice ordered Schmidt to pay more than $1.1 million.
Manpower: Growing hiring pace to continue locally, nationally
Employers will continue their torrid hiring pace in the next quarter, locally and nationally, a new Manpower staffing firm survey shows.
Among local employers surveyed, 27% plan to hire more employees July through September, Manpower said Monday.
That number is offset by the 3% of surveyed employers who plan to cut payrolls, while 68% expect to maintain current staff levels and 2% indicated they aren’t sure of hiring plans.
This yields what Manpower calls a “net employment outlook” — the percentage of surveyed employers planning to cut payrolls subtracted from the percentage of those planning to hire — of 24%.
That’s up from this time last year when the outlook for the area was 18%, said Tom Maher, owner of the Manpower Dayton franchise.
“The Dayton, Ohio MSA (metropolitan statistical area) employers have reported a stable hiring pace compared to Q2 2019 when the net employment outlook was 23%,” Maher said.
Maher said the recent tornadoes have not dampened overall demand for workers.
“Several of our customers have been affected, some much more than others,” he said. “All of them are in the process of putting things back together and hope to see things back to normal as soon as possible.”
“I don’t see this as altering demand,” he added.
The Dayton MSA consists of Montgomery, Greene and Miami counties.
Nationally, employers are reporting the strongest hiring intentions in 13 years with an outlook of 21%, according to Manpower’s national survey.
The last time the survey of more than 11,500 employers reported an outlook that high was the third quarter of 2006.
“With such strong competition for talent, skilled workers are choosing when, where and how they work,” she added.
She said employees want “flexibility, access to childcare and clear career paths.”
The number of job openings exceeded the number of unemployed Americans by the largest margin on record, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
There were a seasonally adjusted 7.449 million unfilled jobs at the end of April, the Journal said, citing federal figures. Meanwhile, the number of Americans seeking work in April dropped to 5.824 million from 6.211 million a month earlier.