Well...
Time to focus on attracting other companies, I guess.
The number of professional and managerial jobs leaving is something that is going to be hard to deal with. Other posters on this forum have identified before that many of the jobs in Fort Worth are manufacturing or service based, and that we need more professional "white collar "jobs to round out the mix. I seem to remember that the city recently began an initiative (well, at least a study) to try to attract other businesses to town, but are the successful catches going to bring in managerial and higher-paid professionals to fill the gap that is going to develop when XTO departs? Are the companies lured here going to want to locate in the downtown area? I wonder how much of a heads-up the city leadership had about this move... Departing employees will most likely put their houses on the market which will probably depress upper-middle and higher range residential property prices. Even a staged withdrawal from the large and medium office buildings downtown is going to lower lease rates there since the knowledge of many vacancies in the very near future is now widely known. Focusing attention on attracting service jobs to downtown is not going to counter these effects; Fort Worth needs company offices and the related services that support them. Two possible strategies for addressing this need come to mind:
There are other, smaller companies that are in the same industry as XTO/Exxon-Mobil; perhaps the city could help support an effort to match those professionals who don't want to leave town to hire on with local Exxon competitors or even better, start-up their own competing firms here. I don't have a lot of experience in this area but I am sure there are people in the city or the Chamber or DTFW Inc, etc. who do, and if not perhaps a consultant could be brought in to help set up something along the lines of a "job fair" or a referral service to help those employees/contractors match up with growing local companies looking for experienced personnel. Maybe Bob Simpson could be asked by the mayor to have a "sit-down" to discuss how best to retain key industry people in the city...
The other idea is to begin a concerted effort to attract the "other" energy industry to the city; The companies that provide clean and sustainable power in contrast to burning fossil fuels. If there is going to be ANY sort of financial incentive offered as part of the city initiative to attract companies to move here, the same breaks offered to old-school energy companies should be offered to new-wave firms. One way to compete with other cities that are already onboard with this trend would be for the school districts to offer more STEM opportunities and even STEM with an energy focus as a graduation track. As part of this effort UTA, Tarleton, TCU, UNT etc. should be brought onboard with guaranteed scholarships in their engineering and business programs and even collaborate support for company start-up incubators.
- renamerusk, youngalum, Austin55 and 1 other like this