Springfield’s chamber of commerce raising money for campaign to bring jobs, housing

A new capital campaign is expected to create job growth and bring housing to Springfield and surrounding areas.

The Greater Springfield Partnership, the region’s chamber of commerce, kicked off EXPAND 2029 earlier this month. Through this campaign, it’s pursuing $6.5 million in public and private funding for a five-year local economic growth plan. This is a 60% increase from the previous five-year campaign.

And it’s already closing in on its goal — it’s just under a million dollars away from it after just a few weeks.

The money will go toward developing local talent in Clark County school districts and increasing housing stock.

Horton Hobbs, vice president of economic development for the Greater Springfield Partnership, said this campaign is building off the success the organization has seen over the past eight years in increasing jobs in the area.

“Go back almost 20 years and we were really shedding jobs,” Hobbs said. We had lost almost 10,000 jobs in our community and we needed to put together a bold strategy and a bold vision for how we would grow those jobs in partnership with our city and county leaders as well as private sector supporters.”

Hobbs said the Greater Springfield Partnership assisted with bringing over 2,000 new jobs and $800 million to the area over the past five years.

John Brown, president of Park National Bank and campaign co-chair, said the organization wants to create these opportunities so people feel they can live and raise families in Springfield.

“We have a high percentage of folks living in Clark County that are leaving Clark County every day to work,” Brown said. “And there might have been a time where that was necessary for them to earn a living wage. I would suggest that it’s not anymore.”

About half of Clark County’s workforce exit the county for work – and the largest labor shed of any community in Ohio, according to Hobbs. 

By the end of the five years, it projects the program will create 3500 jobs with total earnings of $176 million.