Every day we’re inundated with economic forecasts related to inflation, layoffs, remote work and unemployment. But what is happening here in Missoula County? Does it reflect national trends? How does a desirable place like ours foster more jobs without sacrificing the values that make it so desirable in the first place?
This week, the commissioners spoke with Grant Kier, director of the Missoula Economic Partnership. Kier spoke to local employment rates, how to balance growth, quality of life, housing access and more.
Links mentioned in this episode:
Thank you to Missoula's Community Media Resource for podcast recording support!
Every day we’re inundated with economic forecasts related to inflation, layoffs, remote work and unemployment. But what is happening here in Missoula County? Does it reflect national trends? How does a desirable place like ours foster more jobs without sacrificing the values that make it so desirable in the first place?
This week, the commissioners spoke with Grant Kier, director of the Missoula Economic Partnership. Kier spoke to local employment rates, how to balance growth, quality of life, housing access and more.
Links mentioned in this episode:
Thank you to Missoula's Community Media Resource for podcast recording support!
Josh Slotnick: [00:00:10] Hey there and welcome back, everybody, to The Tip of the Spear with your Missoula County commissioners. I'm Josh Slotnick and I'm here with my fellow commissioners and friends, Dave Strohmaier and Juanita Vero. And speaking of friends, we also have Grant Kier with us today from the Missoula Economic Partnership. And if you don't mind, Grant, I'm going to just toss out the first question. For people who don't know what is MEP and what are some of the big things you all do? Why do you exist?
Grant Kier: [00:00:33] Well, let me first just thank you, the commissioners, for having us here today and I'm happy to explain a little bit about our background and our mission. Missoula Economic Partnership is focused on expanding prosperity while improving our quality of life in Missoula County. And the background is that we were formed in about 2010 as a response to the Great Recession, focused primarily in the early days of how we created higher paying jobs. We had this phenomenon that all of us are very familiar with in Missoula, which is that we had very highly qualified workforce and under-employed workforce. And when the Great Recession hit, we had even more people out of work. And so the focus was really partnership where the city, the county and the private sector came together and said, we got to get more organized about how we create higher paying jobs in our community.
Juanita Vero: [00:01:14] I was just thinking, expanding on prosperity... and 13 years ago, what are the economic trends you're seeing now?
Grant Kier: [00:01:23] The sort of more recent trends are certainly very different than the ones we saw when we started. I'm happy to report, you know, just in the last five years, we saw increase of high paying jobs in Missoula County. That's something they had worked toward for the entire decade going into that. And we're really pleased to see that that was great news for our underemployed workforce, for the folks who are looking for those higher paying jobs and chances to kind of improve their standard of living while hopefully retaining their quality of life. Unfortunately, it also led to some of the challenges that we started to see before the pandemic that only got worse since. And I think it's hard to speak to trends because we're in such an anomalous time, and I think in our economic history to come out of the pandemic and have so many changes going on demographically as well as economically. But I think some of the things that we're seeing that we feel like are trends, and some of them are very positive. You know, we have seen a real resurgence in manufacturing sector in Missoula County. That's been very exciting. A lot of the jobs that we lost during the Great Recession and as mills and things shut down even before that are starting to come back and even more sophisticated manufacturing sectors. But one of the challenges that we're seeing right now that's holding back a lot of our economy is around workforce availability. And what we didn't have a problem with in 2010 when we started was available workforce. Whereas today what we hear from employers across all sectors and at all pay levels is that they're struggling to find people to fill positions that they have opened.
Dave Strohmaier: [00:02:43] Maybe put this in a little bit of context for us. So how is Missoula situated in relation to other communities here in Montana or throughout the region or the country for that matter? Are there other places where in Montana where these workforce challenges are not being experienced, or is it more we're kind of all in the same boat together here?
Grant Kier: [00:03:03] Yeah, I think that's a great... That's the perfect question. And that's really the important question to ask right now is sort of how different are we from other places? At the end of the day, the economy that we have here is competing with economies everywhere else. So when we're trying to recruit people to take jobs or we want to attract students to our university, at the end of the day, all of those questions are relative for people. Is Missoula a better place or a worse place to go than somewhere else? And as much as we take a lot of pride in our local community, the truth is we're not that different from other places right now in terms of the challenges and the opportunities we see. So just to put this into some concrete numbers and context, right now, our unemployment rate is at 2.1%, at least as of the most recent numbers and data that we had.
Josh Slotnick: [00:03:47] That is functionally no employment.
Grant Kier: [00:03:48] That is no... That is functionally no unemployment. And that is true across every major community in Montana. All of the big counties with big population centers are experiencing the same thing. So Gallatin County is unemployment is as low as 1.7%. And the Flathead County, which has the highest rate, if you want to think of it as high in any sense as of November of 2022 of 2.8%. So functionally...
Josh Slotnick: [00:04:11] No unemployment, zero.
Grant Kier: [00:04:13] You know, functionally no unemployment across the entire state in terms of major communities that have large population centers. And then, you know, I think it's also important to realize that we're also facing the same housing issues across the state. And I think that's a huge opportunity for us because I think we're seeing opportunities for consensus during this legislative session that we haven't seen in a long time. And things like housing, we hope, can be sort of approached in nonpartisan ways because they certainly are not inherently partisan issues.
Josh Slotnick: [00:04:43] I remember a time way back when during Reagan's America, when at the end of Jimmy Carter, when inflation numbers were super high and unemployment numbers were pretty high. And there's been a bit of those fears of inflation recently, we've had what's felt like terrible inflation given where we were two or three years ago looking towards, say, December of this year, it could really be possible that we are at nationally at 4% inflation and 4% unemployment. Which, if you were in the early years of Ronald Reagan would have been amazing. But for us right now, don't seem as good as they could because of where we were just a little bit ago pre-pandemic. So economically, do you think we should be comparing ourselves to 2019 or looking more broadly historically, economically, when deciding whether we're doing poorly or doing well?
Grant Kier: [00:05:29] [00:05:29]I guess I'm not sure that when asking the question of how we're doing, if it's relative to the past, frankly, I think what's important is do people feel like they're doing well today? As I mentioned earlier, these are unprecedented times. So, you know, we are told every day by various economists, we're in a recession. We will be in a recession. We may never see a recession, depending on who you ask and which day it is and what data they're looking at. I am not an economist, but I try very hard to read a lot of what economists are saying and talk to a lot of them to understand kind of where we stand. And I think everyone will admit that we're in really uncharted territory right now. And so I make the case that there's never been a more important time to have something like the Missoula economic partnership. Fundamentally, what we're about is creating a bridge between the public and private sector to really understand issues that are facing our community as fast as possible so that we can create a collective response to whatever extent we're able to respond. [00:06:24] And I think right now, one of the things we're hearing is that most businesses feel like they are seeing this slowdown that we hear about nationally, but some of them feel like this slowdown is right now happening at a pace that could lead to that soft landing that we had talked about, at least at the local level, and feeling strong signs certainly of longer-term health in their companies in the demand for their products and services. And frankly, even from people who want to invest in our community in the form of building more housing or building more places for businesses to grow, I still feel and hear that we have a very bright future here and we're a place that people want to continue to invest.
Dave Strohmaier: [00:06:59] Well, speaking of a place where people want to invest. Oftentimes when we're looking at Missoula versus other communities, what we hear is the desire to retain a sense of authenticity here in Missoula. And that's oftentimes a difficult concept to put our finger on in terms of what that means somewhere. And there seems to be a balance between business recruitment and business retention, retaining those aspects of our economy that we think are distinctively Missoula versus the desire to extoll the virtues of Missoula for businesses in the greater world to come here and set up and do shop.
Josh Slotnick: [00:07:41] Can I do a paraphrase of this that's stuck in my head?
Dave Strohmaier: [00:07:43] Yeah. Since that was such a long, convoluted...
Josh Slotnick: [00:07:46] "Can we save our skin without selling our soul?"
Dave Strohmaier: [00:07:49] Oh, that is much more elegant.
Grant Kier: [00:07:51] That sounds like a bumper sticker,
Juanita Vero: [00:07:54] So pithy.
Grant Kier: [00:07:54] I think...
Juanita Vero: [00:07:55] But I mean, you know, what are some examples of...
Josh Slotnick: [00:07:57] You gotta let him answer the question!
Juanita Vero: [00:07:58] I know, but I don't understand the examples. What's, what's meaningful? What does authentic Missoula mean to you?
Dave Strohmaier: [00:08:03] Well, I'm not exactly sure of that, but I think it has something to do with this balance between investing in supporting and making sure that businesses that are here already are doing well and continue to do the things that we value. I think the starkest example would be think of those national chains or national businesses that are currently not here in Missoula that, if they were, would certainly bring jobs with them and all of that. But they don't have that unique character that your favorite spot in downtown Missoula embodies.
Josh Slotnick: [00:08:41] It seems like forever... Missoula has had a very strong self-reflective streak. It's a place where people like to talk about what Missoula was or is, and if we were to ask ten people, we'd get ten different answers. But everybody, I believe, would have an answer. People have a sense of what they think Missoula really is. So I go back, how do we maintain that and make sure that we do grow accordingly?
Grant Kier: [00:09:04] Commissioner Strohmaier, you got to the heart of, I think, the question that everybody wrestled with when we were establishing our comprehensive economic development strategy. We looked at where we're going as a community and how we want to shape our economy going forward. And everyone wrestled with this question. And I think, frankly, this question is somewhat embedded in our mission. [00:09:20] There's a reason that we are not just about expanding prosperity, but also about improving quality of life, because I think so often those two things might be in tension as well as complementary. Right? And so finding that balance is, I think, what everybody is looking for in this place that everyone loves, and that's why they're here. [00:09:37] And I think you're right, Josh, when we ask hundreds of people what it is they loved about this place, and some of them start with the arts and the creative businesses that we have in the community, some with the outdoors and the quiet places to get away, some with the rivers and with trails. When we kept pushing people to define what it is about this place that was so special to them, it was this sense of community and the relationships they have with the kinds of people who are here.
Grant Kier: [00:10:13] And I think the way we've tried to embrace that as part of our mission is one, [00:10:17] really thinking carefully about displacement as we grow is the growth that we're doing, the kind of growth that forces people who are here to leave. I think we saw during the pandemic a lot of pressure on people who had been here a long time that they felt like they couldn't stay and they weren't able to be here. And that's partly why we have shifted gears, very much so at MEP, to go from trying to recruit companies here to help the companies that were here grow more organically. One, those jobs stick and they last longer. Two, because housing is such a big challenge in our community right now to try to recruit somebody here who's going to compete for workforce that we're short of or bring people who are going to look for housing that we're short of is really adding fuel to a fire right now, a fire we're trying to suppress. And [00:10:56] so we really do need to be always attentive of what's happening in our community and what the challenges are and thinking carefully about how do we solve the housing problem first so that there's a place for workforce. I don't think that it means that recruiting companies here means that we erode who we are as a community.
Josh Slotnick: [00:11:12] Sure.
Grant Kier: [00:11:12] A good example of that is that we just lost our Denny's. And I was visiting with Town Square Media a couple of weeks ago and that was the number one most visited story on their website of all time.
Josh Slotnick: [00:11:23] Denny's going away?
Grant Kier: [00:11:24] Denny's going away. There's a national chain. But that national chain was the fabric of many people's lives and a place that they had gone to for years and years and years. It meant a lot to people, even though it was a national chain. I think so. I think it's really important that we're sensitive to the specifics of the individual business or the individual opportunity and not necessarily couching this in terms of local businesses versus chains or new businesses versus old ones. I think one thing we try really hard to do in concert with our board members and Commissioner Myers served on our board for many years is think critically about what are best fit companies, what are the ones that come in and complement the other ones that are here and fit the community and fit the talent that we have here. The last thing we want to do at Missoula Economic Partnership is recruit a company here who won't be successful.
Josh Slotnick: [00:12:09] Right, right.
Grant Kier: [00:12:09] And that success is going to depend on the community embracing and being excited to be a part of them and them being excited to be a part of the community.
Josh Slotnick: [00:12:16] I really like how you kind of wedded quality of life and prosperity and talked about relationships being part of that quality of life. I mean, there was a time in Missoula, as we mentioned many times when we had four mills that ran 364 days a year, three ships a day when everybody knew someone who worked at those industries and very sadly in those industries went away. And this place, somewhat inadvertently and somewhat intentionally, became to be defined more by its amenities and access to beautiful land than by its industry. It stopped being so much This is a mill town as a place that had an amazing bike trail system and you could go paddling at lunch and still be back to work and had a vibrant downtown. None of those things necessarily feel or sound like traditional economic development. If traditional economic development was, we give a tax break to 3M and they come here and hire 5,000 people. We didn't do that somewhat accidentally and somewhat intentionally. We put public investment towards making this place even more wonderful. And then I believe, I don't know if this is just anecdote from my small sample group of my friends, we became a place that people wanted to be, and then once here they figured out a livelihood that kind of rhymed with their values, which is what got them here in the first place. And then we have this explosive growth. And I don't mean to throw any shade on our old economy, times just changed. And I'm speaking more in cliche like we don't want to kill the golden goose in that maintaining this quality of life means not being overrun. There's a scale issue there. As Bryce Ward pointed out the other day, "we can expand and build more houses, but we can't build another Blackfoot River." Just sort of wrestling with that. That was my comment. I don't have a question there. It's just it just seems to be the moment we're in right now.
Dave Strohmaier: [00:13:59] Well, I might have a question.
Josh Slotnick: [00:14:00] Please.
Dave Strohmaier: [00:14:01] First preface by a comment, of course, but...
Grant Kier: [00:14:03] I was just loving that he didn't have a question.
Josh Slotnick: [00:14:05] Oh, I'll hit you with my question.
Dave Strohmaier: [00:14:06] We'll see if I have a question. So related to this, just sticking with the quality of life piece and this relates directly to MEP. So THE Missoula Economic Partnership and Missoula County are partners in deploying Big Sky Economic Development trust fund resources, job creation, grants in the community. And one thing that I've tried hard to do, and I think all of us as commissioners try to do, is when applicants come before us pitching what it is that they want to do, we always ask, particularly if they're coming from outside of Missoula and Montana, why Missoula? Why Missoula County? Without exception, what I hear is "quality of life". I have never, never heard anyone say, you know, "it's because you guys have a great tax system," or "the business climate is so far superior in Missoula than other communities." Never. I have never heard anyone say that it is always been and they might be thinking in the background as far as a factor, but it is the first thing they always say, "it's the quality of life in Missoula is what has attracted me." Does that resonate with you or do you hear something different, Grant? There's my question.
Josh Slotnick: [00:15:18] There you go.
Grant Kier: [00:15:19] There is a little bit of filtering going on there, I think, right? I don't think we have the world's best tax system for businesses. And so therefore, if a business is exclusively interested in locating itself for tax purposes, it's not likely to look here. So that's some of it. But there's no question that the people we do recruit here want to be here because of our quality of life. They believe that our quality of life in Missoula relative to our cost of living gives them a competitive advantage so that the people they hire will want to continue to work with them and for them and be a part of what they're building. And for some of them it's because they themselves want that as the key leader of the decision or the CEO of the company. They want a better life, they want a higher quality of life. So they move the company with them or they know that that will be a key recruiting advantage as they try to build their workforce. There's no question that if we degrade our quality of life, we are degrading that competitive advantage. I will say, however, that looking at that through the lens of somebody who is looking at Missoula from someplace else is very different than looking at it through the lens of somebody who is in Missoula and knows what Missoula used to be like.
Josh Slotnick: [00:16:26] Yeah, yeah.
Grant Kier: [00:16:26] And so when somebody is looking from Arizona who now has no water, there's a long way that we could go to reduce what many of us have appreciated for our quality of life here over many years and still have a high competitive advantage. Which is not to say I'm advocating we diminish our quality of life. I just think it's important to realize there's a relative perspective to that, that is important to realize when you're thinking about somebody's motivation.
Juanita Vero: [00:16:52] Oh, and I'm not one to comment, so I have a question. Tell us more about the Big Sky Trust Fund and let's celebrate it.
Grant Kier: [00:17:01] Yeah. The Big Trust Fund is actually an incredible... I believe it was a bipartisan effort when it was formed. A lot of foresight went into creating this program. And essentially what a group of legislators did is they said, we know that a large part of our economy is based on exporting power and that essentially what we're doing is we're mining coal, converting it into energy, and we're exporting energy and we're bringing money back to Montana. And all of them knew that coal was a finite resource and eventually we were going to run out. So the idea was how do we start to invest some of our taxes, that we recover from coal severance and turn it into more sustainable, a more diverse economy that continues to bring money in from outside of Montana. So they created this fund that allows for basically two ways to approach the fund. One is a planning grant and the other is job creation grants. And these grants that help you either build your workforce or potentially plan a facility, for example, are provided to companies who are going to create more jobs from which the income will be generated primarily out of state. And so we are trying to replicate the kinds of jobs that we have based on our power industry and exporting power to the coast and do more modern jobs that are no longer dependent on a finite resource. And it's been wildly successful just Missoula alone. I mean, we lead the state in the number of grants we've secured. And I think that is fundamentally because in part you guys have made an investment in the program. You guys have made a commitment to fund a staff person who is out knocking on doors, talking to companies to say, Do you have the potential to grow? We want to help you.
Grant Kier: [00:18:38] And because of that, we've over the last five years invested I think over $3.5 million. These numbers might be plus or minus 10%, but $3.5 million. I think we've created 522 jobs in this community over that time using those funds to support job growth. And that now creates, on an annual basis, $26 million in payroll in Missoula County, which is an incredible, incredible asset to our community. And it's really helped a lot of our local companies grow. And so beyond just those numbers, it helps ATG show a company like Cognizant that this is a place worth investing in a world-class facility. So during the pandemic, Cognizant, which acquired ATG, built one facility in the entire world and it was here in Missoula, and it was because they believed in the ability for this facility to build and attract workforce so that they could serve the company's needs all over the country by sending people who are trained and working here to their customers all over the country in the world. So it's a wonderful success story for Missoula and all of Montana, because now they're, to your credit, he other thing you guys did that no other county, to my knowledge, has done is you allowed a company to set up its headquarters here and put some of those jobs in other counties. You're absorbing that risk. But we've all agreed that it's really important to allow companies to build a headquarters in Missoula. And so ATG has done that. And so some of those employees are in eastern Montana or in the Bitterroot or other places, but they're helping this company grow here in Missoula County.
Juanita Vero: [00:20:03] Can you mention some more companies to help listeners?
Grant Kier: [00:20:06] I mean, yeah, so that's a great job creation success in other. One that we're really excited about. A recent success in manufacturing. And so I'll talk about the planning grants, right? So we helped a company called Paradise Dental get a planning grant to that planning grant, help them plant a new facility out at the Wye. That company, I think, distribute dental instruments to something like 66 countries around the world, and they're manufacturing by hand out at the Wye. They've tremendous growth potential. We help them with a planning grant through the Department of Commerce Trust Fund. That planning grant allowed them to plan a new facility which is now in the works of being built. The foundation is poured, walls are going up. As soon as that's done, I think they're going to expand their old footprint into another new facility and continue to grow. So to me, what's exciting is that that mid-wage job, those jobs that are giving people with perhaps less college education, but really incredible work experience, opportunities to grow their jobs and they have a world class employee retention program at Paradise Dental and they're coming up with some of the most innovative ways to retain staff in a manufacturing context in our whole community. It's just been really exciting to get to know the company.
Josh Slotnick: [00:21:11] So a friend of mine who's an engineer at a major engineering firm here, we were chatting and talking about the difference in wages for people who are doing remote work and the companies they work for are San Marcos, and then they're here in Missoula and they're taking the coastal wages and applying them to a Missoula housing market. And he said this thing, it really stuck with me. He's like, you know, it's that way right now. But it won't be long when for these professions that are very much portable that you can do them remotely, We're not too far away from one wage, that if you are a civil engineer, doesn't matter where you live because you could live anywhere the wage is going to be X. Do you think there's.
Grant Kier: [00:21:51] I think we're already hearing about that phenomenon happening. Not, I mean, no one's talking about it as one wage, but we're already hearing from local employers that there are some positions they have where they just have to pay the national wage no matter what because they cannot attract talent otherwise. Yeah, but what I will say is that what I didn't expect to happen with remote work is that we have employers here who are struggling mightily to find people to fill positions who are now hiring remote workers to fill their positions. And so they're able to stay open and keep serving their customers because they found somebody to do their job who lives in maybe some random town in Oklahoma and they can't move because their spouse is doing something that forces them to stay in place.
Dave Strohmaier: [00:22:31] Grant In the spirit of completely sucking the life out of our guests, we typically end these podcasts, and I'll just put the question to you Do you have any nugget of wisdom, a good book, something to share that might provide some inspiration.
Grant Kier: [00:22:46] A good book I read over the holidays that I think speaks a little bit to the role of our businesses in building our communities is called The Man Who Broke Capitalism by David Gelles. It's the story of Jack Welch's leadership of General Electric. And I think one of the things I love most about my job is that I work with a board of directors who are really, really thoughtful leaders in their businesses and in the community. And I think a lot of times when we look across the national landscape, we wonder why we're not seeing that same level of civic commitment from big companies. And this tells a little bit of the story about why that might have happened. And I found it a very interesting read and something I've been thinking a lot about as I think about how to engage leaders in our business community into the important work of building a better Missoula County.
Josh Slotnick: [00:23:33] Thanks a lot, Grant.
Dave Strohmaier: [00:23:34] Thanks, Grant.
Juanita Vero: [00:23:35] Thanks so much, Grant.
Josh Slotnick: [00:23:35] Thanks for coming over.
Grant Kier: [00:23:36] Yeah, thank you.
Josh Slotnick: [00:23:38] Thanks for listening to the Tip of the Spear podcast. If you enjoy these conversations, it would mean a lot if you would rate and review the show on whichever podcast app you like. And if you know a friend who would like to keep up with what's happening in local government, be sure to recommend this podcast to them. The Tip of the Spear podcast is made possible with support from MCAT, better known as Missoula Community Access Television and our staff in the Missoula County Communications Division. If you have a question or topic you'd like us to address on a future episode, email it to communications@missoulacounty.US and to find other ways to stay up to date with what's happening at Missoula County. Go to Missoula.co/countyupdates and thanks for listening.