Dorsey Hager, Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Columbus/Central Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council, joined the America's Work Force Union Podcast for his monthly Trades Day segment as part of the Labor 132 series.
Hager reported on Intel's continued construction ramp-up at its Central Ohio campus, a new $100 million early childhood learning center coming to downtown Columbus under a Project Labor Agreement with Franklin County, upcoming public hearings for two major gas-powered energy centers that will supply power to data center campuses in Fairfield County and Asheville and an $850 million Electra aircraft manufacturing facility landing in Springfield. In July, Electra announced plans for a 96-acre plant at AirPark Ohio, adjacent to the Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport, to produce the EL9 Ultra Short hybrid-electric airplane and create nearly 2,000 jobs.
Hager also discussed the state of Ohio's data center conversation at the local government level, the AFL's founding in Columbus in 1886. Finally, he discussed the C/COBCTC's outreach efforts at the Ohio State Fair, where building trades members connected with teenagers, college-age adults and underemployed workers, including a CDL-licensed trucker who was connected to the Teamsters on the spot.
Dorsey Hager arrived at this month's Trades Day with a full plate. Construction at Intel's Central Ohio campus continues to ramp up, with new agreements with Nvidia and Apple providing positive signals alongside the federal funding the company has received. The C/COBCTC continues to help affiliated unions in Central Ohio add workers to the pipeline and move them to jobsites. The work, Hager said, is all good stuff.
Behind the Intel news is a data center and energy infrastructure build that is reshaping the region's construction landscape. Public hearings are upcoming for two major energy projects: the Fairfield Energy Center, a gas-powered plant that will supply power to proposed data center campuses in Fairfield County and Millersport, and the Asheville Energy Center, just south of Columbus, where data center construction is already underway, and the energy center will supply the power to sustain it.
On the manufacturing side, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine traveled to Heathrow Airport in London for a press conference with JobsOhio head JP Nassif to announce that Springfield, Ohio, had beaten out 242 other cities worldwide to land an Electra aircraft manufacturing facility. Electra announced an $850 million investment to build a 96-acre plant at AirPark Ohio, adjacent to the Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport in Clark County. The plant will produce the EL9 Ultra Short hybrid-electric airplane and create nearly 2,000 jobs. Two counties west of Franklin County, the facility will be built in a region with strong aerospace infrastructure. When a project of that scale breaks ground, suppliers follow, and the economic ripple effect will be felt well beyond Clark County, Hager said.
The project Hager was most eager to discuss was the early childhood learning center coming to downtown Columbus. Franklin County Commissioner Erica Crowley has championed the project since before she left the Ohio Statehouse to run for county commissioner, and the C/COBCTC finalized the memorandum of understanding for a Project Labor Agreement this week. The MOU will ensure the work is done on time, under budget and safely, with union labor throughout.
The project will replace the old downtown jail — the county built a new correctional facility west of downtown for approximately $300 million under a separate project labor agreement — with a learning center serving children ages 3 to 5. The county will fund, construct and operate the facility. The projected cost is $100 million.
Hager cited research showing that every dollar invested in early childhood education returns approximately $9 in avoided incarceration costs. He connected that directly to the history of educational attainment in the prison population and said getting children ready for elementary school, providing them with foundational skills and reducing the childcare burden on working parents has documented benefits that cut across urban, suburban and rural communities. Hager also noted that the C/COBCTC will use the project as a pipeline for people from underserved communities to enter the trades directly on the job or through apprenticeship programs. The county is separately considering an expansion of its new jail facility, a project Hager estimated at upward of $300 million, with early conversations already underway and a target of breaking ground in 2027.
Hager addressed the ongoing political debates about data center development from the perspective of someone who both advocates for the work and lives in a community where data centers are being built. The C/COBCTC pro data center. Google's three Central Ohio facilities alone generated 6.5 million work hours for building trades members last year. That equals about 3,700 union jobs at industry-standard wages, with full health, pension and annuity benefits. Google, EdgeConnect, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are just some of the clients active in the region.
His concern is at the local government level, where township trustees, village council members and county commissioners who are farmers, accountants and lawyers in their day jobs are being asked to negotiate complex economic development agreements with sophisticated developers and are often not equipped with the tools to extract maximum community benefit. He pointed to Asheville Village Council as a counterexample: the council negotiated a $110 million development agreement that will deliver a new fire station, complete water and sewage infrastructure upgrades at a cost not to exceed $34 million and approximately $50 million for the local school system, which has been teaching students in trailers after failing to pass levies in an inflationary environment.
He acknowledged that data centers have contributed to rising utility prices, though he said they are not the only cause. He discussed Google's work in Scioto County to upgrade the electrical grid around its Portsmouth facility, addressing a brownout problem that has plagued the community in hot summer months. Google is solving the problem because it cannot operate a data center in an area subject to multi-day power outages, he added. Conversations at the state and federal level about requiring data center developers to fund the infrastructure their operations require are appropriate and necessary, he said.
Switching to Labor 132 territory, Hager shared a piece of labor history he said he discovered while walking through downtown Columbus with his wife. After stopping to read a historical marker, he discovered that Columbus is the birthplace of the American Federation of Labor. The AFL was founded on Dec. 8, 1886, at the corner of Fourth and Town Streets downtown. Samuel Gompers was elected as its first president. Hager said he uses that history nugget during community education efforts and in conversations with elected officials and community partners about what organized labor has meant to Columbus and Central Ohio for nearly 140 years.
That history has a current chapter. Franklin County Commissioner Erica Crowley worked with Central Labor Council leader Jamie Shoemaker and the Franklin County Convention Authority Board to ensure the new downtown Columbus Hilton was organized, covering 1,100 rooms with union workers. A result: Columbus will host the 2028 Tradeswomen Build Nations Conference at the Columbus Convention Center, bringing approximately 7,000 building tradeswomen from across North America to a union hotel in the city where the AFL was born.
Hager closed with the C/COBCTC's outreach efforts during the Ohio State Fair, which he described as one of the highlights of the building trades calendar despite the heat. The Cement Masons run a statewide apprentice and journeyperson competition and allow the building trades to set up alongside with booths, tables, handouts and hands-on demonstrations. Bricklayers built walls. Cement masons finished the concrete. Children who came to the fair for the rides and the food ended up watching the work and asking questions.
Hager described conversations with teenagers who had never considered the trades, with adults who were underemployed in open-shop work, and with others who asked about data center and Intel opportunities and compared their current wages to what union members earn. One moment that illustrated exactly what the outreach is designed to produce involved a young man with a CDL license working for a trucking company. He was being paid about $25 an hour with no benefits. He left the fair connected to the Teamsters on the spot. Hager said Kitty French from the Ohio State Building Trades and Eli Wenzel from the C/COBCTC did the heavy lifting to make the event happen. The two days at the state fair reach more people with more varied backgrounds than almost any other outreach effort the council does.
More information on the Columbus/Central Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council is available at columbusconstruction.org.
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