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Truck-Lite Announcement Shows County Still Has Work To Do Creating A Skilled Workforce

The news that Truck-Lite is creating a global headquarters in Southfield, Mich., and moving part of its Falconer workforce to Michigan, shines a light n one glaring issue for Chautauqua County’s economy.

It’s still not known exactly how many local employees who work within the sprawling Falconer plant will be impacted, but the Falconer plant’s manufacturing operation will remain in Chautauqua County. That’s good news given that Truck-Lite is one of Chautauqua County’s largest employers. The bad news is the reasons given by Detroit officials talking about the new Michigan headquarters. According to The Detroit News, the company cited Southfield’s proximity to existing supply chains and qualified workers as reasons for Truck-Lite’s decision to build the new headquarters.

Chautauqua County can’t do anything about where it is located in relation to the supply chains of local businesses. It can, however, do something about its number of qualified workers. County Executive George Borrello has been sounding the alarm about workforce development since he began his campaign to be County Executive in 2017. His much-touted business tour in the first 100 days of his tenure as the county executive confirmed on a large scale what many business leaders have known for quite a while — that many jobs go unfilled because Chautauqua County doesn’t have employees with the necessary skills. That shortage has come back to bite southern Chautauqua County.

For all those who criticize city and county officials for not bringing in companies to provide more jobs, and better paying jobs, consider this — how can the city and county recruit new businesses if long-established businesses are moving parts of their operation because they can’t find qualified workers?

There is good work going on to reverse the trend. The Chautauqua County Chamber of Commerce has led the Dream It, Do It program to showcase the types of careers that are available in the county’s manufacturing sector while the Chautauqua County Education Coalition has taken those efforts even further. Dr. Bret Apthorpe, Jamestown Public Schools superintendent, has made one of his primary goals to better align the district’s curriculum with the needs of local businesses. BOCES offers a boatload of courses that train students for jobs.

The county still ranks poorly, however, in the percentage of its residents who have bachelor’s degrees or, even more importantly, advanced degree. Those are the types of people needed to work in corporate offices and headquarters like Truck-Lite, Cummins, Artone, Athenex and the rest of the large employers that provide the backbone of Chautauqua County’s economy. We have long known that too many of our best and brightest students leave for college and don’t come back. Truck Lite’s announcement is a timely reminder that as organizations work to increase the quality of our workforce, their government counterparts must make sure their decisions are creating the type of county that attracts college-educated people back to Chautauqua County.

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