TOLEDO – When Italian Bowl XLIV was held at the University of Toledo’s Glass Bowl on June 28, Guelfi Firenze was not the only winner.
While the football team from Florence defeated the Ancona Dolphins 49-14 on the field, the Northwest Ohio Regional Growth Partnership was also scoring a big win.
Bringing the Italian Football League Championship to Toledo for the second time (the first was in 2023) shows the global growth and outreach of the RGP.
“RGP and JobsOhio were the main sponsors for the entire (Italian Football) league for the last two years, and for very little money,” said Dean Monske, president and CEO of the Regional Growth Partnership.
“We had big banners that ran like 40 yards along the field. Every single game was televised throughout the entire country and every commercial, every break, everything had the RGP Northwest Ohio logo up on the screen,” he said.
The goal was to promote Northwest Ohio and encourage Italian businesses to consider doing business in this area.
“The more connections you have, and the higher levels you have them, the more credibility you get and the more companies – which is our ultimate goal – are going to say, ‘You know what? I want to talk to those guys.’”
International firms building or expanding in Northwest Ohio make up about a third of the RGP’s success stories, while the other two-thirds come from investments by businesses in Ohio and across the United States.
“We average $3.2 billion each and every year in capital investment on 115 projects,” Monske said. “And capital investment on those 115 projects creates 4,200 new direct jobs – not spinoffs, not fuzzy math, those are direct jobs for those 115 projects.”
According to RGP’s 2024 Annual Report, 2,468 new jobs were created, 14,539 jobs were retained, $5 billion in capital investments and 125 new projects were built in Northwest Ohio last year.
Those numbers include $93 million in capital investments and 124 new jobs for National Electrical Carbon Products in Fostoria, and 50 new jobs and $9 million in capital investments for Creative Liquid Coatings in Montpelier, Ohio.
IBC Properties, a Toledo-area real estate developer, recently announced a $10 million renovation of the former Spicer-Dana manufacturing plant on Bennett Road. The historic 400,000-square-foot building had been vacant for decades and condemned by the City of Toledo before being saved by the RGP’s collaboration with IBC.
Another recent high-profile success story for RGP, working with JobsOhio, was landing an $800 million project with Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms – to build an AI-optimized data center in Wood County.
“The guys from JE Dunn, the general contractors on that project, were invited to the ground-breaking announcement,” Monske said. “They said they had never been invited to one of those types of events. They were so excited. And it’s great because everyone is helping to make it all happen.”
The Regional Growth Partnership of Northwest Ohio has been around more than 30 years, starting as a government branch of the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority. But the statewide and national economic development scene started to change in the early 1990s, Monske said, when RGPs started popping up all around the country.
In order to be competitive, the local RGP decided it needed to go private because businesses that were looking to build or relocate were could not afford to have their plans made public before the deals were completed.
Monske said $9.3 million in private funding was arranged for a five-year commitment to launch the new RGP in 2005-06.
Monske had been running the Oregon Economic Development Foundation for five years and was hired by the RGP as vice president in 2006. He has been the organization’s president and CEO since 2011.
The local organization, which has 17 employees, receives a third of its annual funding from more than 100 private-sector companies in Northwest Ohio, and the other two thirds from JobsOhio, the statewide private economic development agency founded by then-Gov. John Kasich in 2011.
There are six other RGPs across Ohio, divided by regions.
Monske said the NW Ohio RGP reaches out to companies to promote local investment, but as its reputation grows, an increasing number of companies are approaching RGP officials each year.
“We’ve done a really good job of communicating the strengths and assets of the region to a national audience and an international audience,” he said.
Some of the larger corporations are conducting up to 70 deals a year, he said, “so we want to make sure we’re really good friends with them and that they know the assets we have in Northwest Ohio.”
The RGP keeps a list of sites that would be well-suited for various types and sizes of companies. All of the state RGPs get referrals from JobsOhio for companies that are considering a local investment.
“It’s a two-way street of people reaching out to us, and us being proactive in communicating what we have here,” Monske said.
“I think we always have to work harder than Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati because they’re better known… We have to work a little smarter and a little harder just to get the same attention.”
The RGP’s sponsorship of the Italian Football League has opened doors for Italian companies to bring jobs to Northwest Ohio.
“We’re working on three specific projects with three Italian companies that have happened because of this the last two years,” Monske said.
He credited the efforts of Paul Zito, vice president of international development at the RGP, for building relationships with Italian business and government officials. Zito makes about six international trips a year to promote Northwest Ohio.
More than 6,000 people are now employed by Italian companies operating in Northwest Ohio, and five more Italian firms are discussing local investments.
In the last two years, RGP officials have given presentations to more than 100 Italian business representatives at forums held in Rome, Florence, Bologna and Varese, according to the RGP website.
“International work is hard,” Monske said. “It takes time to find something, to get someone interested, to make it happen. It’s a lot more work, time and effort.”
He said the RGP is apolitical, but the organization is keeping up with the recent tariff changes because they will impact economic development in Ohio and elsewhere. Tariffs affect the prices of imports and exports as well as the costs of equipment and tools.
“I don’t care what side of the aisle you’re on; we’re going to talk about things from an economic development standpoint…When things like this happen it really makes for some good dialogue to help those companies, to understand how they’re being affected and then look for tools to help them.”
Monske said tariffs are just the latest issue the RGP has had to deal with.
“This whole process is bigger than just the tariffs. That’s just one factor. Companies will always make the decisions, as we do, based on the rules they have to work with. And we’re going to make the best decisions we can.”
