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County continues to target aerospace industry Santa Rosa County is actively targeting a list of 300 businesses in the aerospace industry to recruit to the county. Stephen Nodine, president of the Mobile County Commission, said jobs from these prospective industries would pay from $80,000 to $100,000 a year. Nodine addressed a crowd at the Santa Rosa County workshop for the Gulf Coast Aerospace & Defense Coalition in Milton recently. "It took us six years of working to get the Air Force tanker project to the point of choosing Mobile as its home," Nodine said. "But we also recently landed a $4 billion steel mill that will employ 2700 workers and provide jobs that pay from $50,000 to $70,000 a year. "The coalition we have formed now between counties all the way from Jefferson in Alabama to Walton in Florida is helping us all accomplish this. And when we went to the air show in Farnborough, England, all the tier-one suppliers for the tanker project were surprised and very pleased to see the number of people there from the Gulf Coast eager to have their business." Commissioner Don Salter was the workshop monitor. "If you are not in the game, you cannot play in the big game," he said. "You can't just sit on the sidelines and be part of anything. It takes a commitment to bring this kind of new industry here, and we have formed a great partnership with Mobile and Escambia counties. We have to pull together now for the future of our children and grandchildren to bring better paying jobs here. "This is not about just creating jobs. It is about changing lives for the better," he said. Commissioner Gordon Goodin attended the Farnborough Air Show in London last month with the Mobile and Escambia County contingencies, as well as meeting representatives from other parts of Florida there. "We were able to talk to the guy in Farnborough who actually builds these planes for Northrup Grumman," Goodin said. "He is from France. He looked at our list of potential tier-one suppliers for the tanker project and told us right away which companies do not have a presence in the U. S. Those are the ones we needed to target right away, to recruit them to locate here. "That was information that could have taken us years and years to get to if we had not gone to Farnborough, for example. And that was just one piece of invaluable information we picked up by being there," Goodin said. |
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