Why not Cincinnati area? Lack of tech talent

Greater Cincinnati lost its bid for Amazon’s coveted second headquarters for one main reason — a lack of tech talent.

That’s according to economic development officials who Monday told The Enquirer that they were part of a conference call last week in which Amazon officials offered a longawaited post-mortem on the region’s failed bid for the so-called Amazon HQ2.

The Seattle-based online retail giant in January selected 20 finalists to house its planned new $5 billion headquarters from a list of 238 bidders from across the United States and Canada. One of those finalists is Columbus.

Amazon has pledged to create up to 50,000 highpaying jobs at the new facility, which will generate billions of dollars in annual economic impact for the community lucky enough to land it.

While the Cincinnati area has made strides in creating tech jobs, according to Amazon, the pool of computer programmers, software developers and other high-tech workers was simply too shallow to meet its demands.

“At the end of the day, their feedback was that talent was the most important factor out of everything they looked at,” said Ed Loyd, a spokesman for REDI Cincinnati, which put together a regional bid for Amazon’s HQ2 that included communities in greater Cincinnati, northern Kentucky and Dayton.

REDI, or the Regional Economic Development Initiative, is the economic development arm of the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber. Its focus is on bringing jobs and development to a 15-county region, including southwest Ohio, northern Kentucky and southeast Indiana.

According to a Brookings Institution report last year, Cincinnati ranked No. 27 out of 30 metropolitan areas with the largest increase in tech jobs from 2013-15.

Still, Amazon was encouraging and complimentary, commending the area for its quality of life and pace of development, including revitalization efforts in Over-the-Rhine and The Banks development along the Ohio River.

“It was the best letdown meeting I ever had,” Johnna Reeder, REDI president and CEO, told the Enquirer’s editorial board Monday.

In addition to tech talent, another negative in the Cincinnati area’s bid for Amazon was the region’s transportation infrastructure, which many observers had speculated could be the area’s biggest shortcoming.