Help wanted: Region lands 2,650 jobs

A 650-worker locomotive factory, a 500-job service center for Ascension Health and another 650 new jobs at student loan firm Sallie Mae and call-center operator Affiliated Computer Services.

And that was just on Friday.

Earlier in the week, two other companies announced expansions with 850 new jobs.

The last time such a large number of jobs was announced in the state was in 2007, when Honda and Toyota rolled out plans to hire more than 3,000 employees in Greensburg and Lafayette.

This week’s announcements came at a time when the economically reeling state badly needs such a fresh helping of jobs.

“It’s been a great week for Indiana in terms of all these announcements. They just came to fruition at the right time,” said Terry Murphy, vice president of the Muncie-Delaware County Economic Development Alliance, which helped lure the locomotive factory to Muncie.

Gov. Mitch Daniels happily emceed most of the week’s job announcements, traveling with his entourage from Columbus to Muncie and even hosting the Ascension announcement in his Statehouse office.

“Weeks like this remind us that Indiana is a leader in private-sector jobs creation because we’ve built the best sandbox for business,” the governor said.

The week’s worth of business expansions will create 2,650 jobs over the next five years, assuming they play out as outlined.

Through September, Indiana has created 43,100 private-sector jobs, the sixth-highest number in the country, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics. the five states ahead of Indiana all have much larger populations.

Friday’s announcements supply reason for cheer in a state with an unemployment rate of 10.1 percent in September, well above the national jobless rate of 9.6 percent:

St. Louis-based Ascension Health, the nation’s largest Roman Catholic hospital system, said it picked Indianapolis for a 500-worker service center that will open in the summer. It will be one of the first such consolidated back-office operations of its kind among hospital groups in the nation.

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Progress Rail Services, a subsidiary of Caterpillar, announced it will build a $50 million locomotive assembly plant in a long-vacant or underused Muncie factory, creating 650 jobs with a $29 million annual payroll by 2012.

Sallie Mae ended any speculation about the future of its Indiana operations, saying it’s closing locations in 2011 in Florida and Texas instead, and moving work from there to the Fishers and Muncie offices, creating 350 jobs. Sallie Mae has lobbied against congressional attempts to have the federal government take over its function of servicing federal student loans.

Affiliated Computer Services, a division of Xerox, will hire 300 more call-center agents in Anderson, where it already employs 700 people. the new hires are needed to handle customer calls for a new Affiliated client, a wireless phone provider.

The diversity of the new jobs — from call center workers and mechanics to software engineers and accountants — bodes well for Indiana, said Jerry Conover, director of the Indiana Business Research Center at Indiana University.

“We are not putting all our eggs in one basket,” Conover said. Indiana traditionally has been over-reliant on manufacturing, he said.

The flurry of corporate job-creating announcements shows that Indiana’s reputation as a relatively low-tax state with a favorable business climate is attractive to companies now looking to expand as the recession is at an end and the economy shows signs of improving, said Michael Hicks, director of Ball State University’s Bureau of Business Research.

State and local governments are pumping millions of dollars in tax subsidies and abatements — most in the form of tax breaks — to companies involved in the expansions.

The largest of the subsidies will go to Alabama-based Progress Rail, which was offered $22.5 million in property tax abatements locally and up to $4.5 million from the state in tax credits and training grants if it creates the promised jobs at what will be the first locomotive plant built in the nation in many years.

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To lure Ascension’s service center, the state’s business promotion arm, the Indiana Economic Development Corp., negotiated up to $5 million in state tax credits.

Ascension officials said they’re looking to lease office space for the center on the Northwestside off Michigan Road. That’s near the Ascension-owned St. Vincent Hospital campus on West 86th Street.

Indianapolis beat out Nashville, Tenn., and Birmingham, Ala., as finalists for the center, said Mayor Greg Ballard.

The center represents “a pretty massive transformation” in the way Ascension’s hospitals operate because it will combine much of their human resources, accounting and finance and supply chain functions in the one spot, said Lee Coulter, an Ascension vice president who’ll head the new center.

The $11 million center should save the 70-hospital Ascension system millions of dollars in operating costs by the time it’s fully staffed in 2013, he said. those savings will be critical to the hospital system as the federal government reduces Medicaid and Medicare payments to hospitals, and private health plans also continue to look for ways to shave costs, he said.

Indiana Democratic Party Chairman Dan Parker called the job announcements “all good” but questioned whether they were timed to burnish the image of Republicans as job creators, days before the general election Tuesday. Republicans will try to wrest control of the House from Democrats in the election.

“Anything close to an election has political overtones,” Parker said.

But he discounted any advantage the job-creating announcements might give Republicans at the polls.

“In terms of trying to affect Indiana’s election, it’s too little, too late. Voters know what Indiana’s situation is. the governor’s jobs record . . . is not very great.”

Daniels’ spokeswoman, Jane Jankowski, said there was no attempt to pool the job announcements for the week before the election.

“We only wish we were that good,” she said. “These are blue-ribbon companies, and they determine when they are going to make announcements about their future.”

Murphy, the Muncie economic development official, said the Progress Rail deal had been in negotiations since July, and “the reason they wanted to announce (this week) is Progress Rail wants to get in the building” and start renovating it.

Help wanted: Region lands 2,650 jobs

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