ROBERTSDALE – Developing a trained workforce is one key to continuing the area’s growth, Lee Lawson, director of the Baldwin County Economic Development Alliance, told local officials.
Addressing the November stakeholder’s meeting of the Baldwin County Emergency Management Agency, Lawson said Baldwin County is the state’s fastest-growing county and is now the fourth largest county in the state.
He said officials with companies considering moving to Baldwin are asking if they can find trained employees.
“The number one thing we talk to companies about, and I just left one this morning and was with a different one yesterday, is workforce,” Lawson said. “Where are the people that can staff the facility that I’m looking at putting in, whether it’s a new hospital facility, a new advanced manufacturing plant, a new distribution logistics facility or a new office? Where are those people going to come from? Not only today, where are they going to come from 10 years from now? That’s the question we answer day in and day out.”
The Baldwin County School System plans to build a career-tech high school to train students to fill jobs in the area workforce. That school is scheduled to open in 2024, school officials said.
Lawson said company owners in areas as far away as Arizona have expressed an interest in how the school training program could provide workers.
“We’re graduating 2,200 kids a year per 2019 and 35 % of those kids are going straight into the workforce,” Lawson said. “We’re putting 800 seniors a year straight into the workforce. We asked the question three or four years ago ‘where are they going?’ and the answer was a little fuzzy. We know where some of them are going, but we don’t know where all of them are going and that was a little bit of a problem for us.”
Baldwin County’s population increased from 182,265 in 2010 to 231,767 in 2020, according to U.S Census reports.
Lawson said the increase is sometimes attributed to commuters moving from Mobile or people coming to Baldwin County to retire. Jobs, however, are also growing in Baldwin County, Lawson said.
The number of jobs in Baldwin County grew 19 % from 2014 to 2020, the highest rate in the state. Madison County was second with a 15 % job growth.
Lawson said Madison County also received much more federal funding for jobs than Baldwin. Madison’s federal funding rate was $25,000 per person, while Baldwin County received $2,500.
“If you look at that and you look at what stimulates your economy, a lot of what happens in the other county that we’re one and two, neck and neck against, when you stack up the entire state is a ton of federal spending an absolute ton of federal spending propping up that economy,” Lawson said.
Lawson said only about seven or eight of Alabama’s 67 counties had significant growth in the last decade. Many of the other growing counties were college communities, such as Lee and Tuscaloosa.
“That should worry us as a state, but you see us leading the charge,” Lawson said. “People are having the choice of where they want to live and work and that’s showing up in real numbers.”
Lawson some changes could be coming to Baldwin County’s growth patterns. Five of Alabama’s six fastest growing cities are in Baldwin and include cities on the Eastern Shore and Gulf Coast. He said that as available land in those areas is developed, other areas of the county could also see more growth.
He said the area along Interstate 10 and Alabama 59 could also grow more in the future.
