Labor & the local baseline
What this economy is before the project — the denominator every jobs claim divides by.
Every jobs promise is a numerator. This chapter is the denominator. It reports what Allen County, Ohio's economy is before the project, from federal series that will still publish after it. A real impact study starts from this baseline, and so should every claim made against it.
The five largest private sectors
| Sector | Jobs | Location quotient |
|---|---|---|
| Health Care & Social Assistance | 9,452 | 1.33 · exports |
| Manufacturing | 8,779 | 2.15 · exports |
| Retail Trade | 5,261 | 1.06 |
| Accommodation & Food Services | 4,737 | 1.05 |
| Administrative & Support & Waste Management | 3,263 | 1.12 |
Government employment adds ~ 5,745 jobs across 3 ownership slices (QCEW federal/state/local) — the slice a private-only sector mix cannot show.
- Any jobs claim reads against this baseline as claim vs. denominator — the study never computes a jobs multiplier.
The full sector mix, the multi-decade employment trend, wages, and the consumer-energy series are in the labor-baseline annex.
Allen County held 49,690 jobs across 2,586 establishments in 2024, on the county employment baselineref . Ten years earlier it held 49,814. The county’s employment has been flat for a decade.
Population moved in one direction over the same period. Allen County counted 106,586 people in 2010 and 101,685 in 2023. So the county did not lose jobs. It lost people, and the jobs that stayed did not grow.
That is the shape any jobs claim about this campus has to be read against. A promise of a few hundred permanent positions divides into a base of about 50,000. It lands in a county whose job count has not moved in ten years.
What the county already does well
Manufacturing is the county’s export sector, and it is not a small one. Allen County’s manufacturing employment is 2.15 times the national concentration, and it pays $92,093 a year on average. The county-wide average across all sectors is $58,790, and the median household income is $62,001.
Those figures matter because a jobs comparison is not only about counting. A job that pays $92,000 and a job that pays less are not interchangeable in a local economy, whatever the headcount says.
This chapter computes no jobs multiplier, and it will not. A multiplier requires assumptions about hiring, wages, and local spending that no record here supplies. The baseline is what the study can contribute honestly. It is a denominator anyone can check, from federal series that will still publish long after the campus opens.
The record behind this chapter
What this chapter stands on: the records it reads, the inputs its modeled figures rest
on, and the reference data behind its baselines — the same pages the record screens
serve, not a second copy. A figure the record does not support stays [open] and links nothing.
- Economic baseline (BLS QCEW / Census)Reference dataset