“As they’ve stated to us in the past, the Dayton region and Ohio are critical components to their company and will continue to be a strong focus in the future,” Hoagland said.
But he admitted that he is unsure of the impact on local jobs.
“We don’t know how many jobs we are losing,” he said. “It could be 10. It could be 100.”
Lexis Nexis has several employees in Clark County at its data center in the PrimeOhio Industrial Park in Springfield, Clark County Commissioner John Detrick said. Those employees mostly serve to store the company’s records to prevent any disruptions in case of a fire or other emergency at the firm’s corporate offices, Detrick said.
Company officials declined to provide further details, but Detrick said he has heard no indications that the Springfield employees will be affected by the move.
State Rep. Niraj Antani, R-Miamisburg, said he is in regular contact with the company and was given a “heads up” about the job losses. He said this move is not like when NCR left for suburban Atlanta in 2009. That move still stings locally and cost the region 1,300 jobs when Georgia offered generous tax incentives.
“This is different from NCR in that this is them shifting a unit from one of their offices to another one of their offices, not picking up an entire campus and moving,” Antani said.
“What I understand is that the majority here will be the sales and customer service, and so that I think what they told me was that they see that the Dayton campus is being a center of excellence for sales and customer service,” Antani said.
He believes LexisNexis is committed to staying in the region but said the company’s decision to base its technology “center of excellence” in North Carolina rather than Ohio shows “we have a job to do to recruit and retain our workforce to be technology leaders.”
“Obviously it’s a loss if we are going to lose some of these high-paying tech jobs,” Antani said. “I think it’s incumbent on us as local officials to work to ensure that there is a highly skilled pool of workers that can fill these high tech jobs.”
Miamisburg mayor Dick Church said he heard about the job cuts Wednesday, from a person claiming to be a LexisNexis employee who had attended a Tuesday teleconference where the plans were laid out. He said the person indicated a large number of employees would be impacted.
The company did not respond to requests for comment Thursday. On Wednesday night, spokeswoman Pamela Rath confirmed that local jobs will be lost but declined to say how many.
“As we continue to build a software and technology center of excellence in Raleigh, North Carolina, some technology roles will move from Miamisburg to Raleigh over time,” she wrote in a statement. “On balance, the total number of employees across the LexisNexis Legal and Professional business remains consistent with prior years.”
LexisNexis Legal and Professional is the company’s full name. Rath did not clarify whether the number of employees locally or worldwide would remain consistent.
Launched in 1966
An online research pioneer that grew out of Dayton-based Mead Corp. in 1966, LexisNexis is a global provider of content and technology solutions that employs 10,000 people worldwide. It is owned by RELX Group, formerly Reed Elsevier, and is headquartered in New York City. Company officials and others routinely refer to the loal campus as being the “Dayton” or “Miamisburg” campus.
In 2013, a company official said the local campus had about 3,400 jobs and spokesman Marc Osborn said it was the company’s “flagship facility” and “the largest Reed Elsevier and LexisNexis site globally.”
Rath declined to say how many are employed there now, but Hoagland said he believes there are 3,000 workers, making it one of the region’s largest employers.
“LexisNexis has ebbed and flowed over the years. When some jobs move then we are able to backfill certain jobs,” said Hoagland. “Everything we’ve been told is this has nothing to do with the overall presence of 3,000 local employees at LexisNexis.”
Hoagland said he was told by LexisNexis that the loss of jobs is related to the company’s decision in 2013 to open the technology and software center of excellence at North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus in Raleigh.
In its September 2013 announcement, LexisNexis said the new space had enough room for 650 employees.
“LexisNexis will have more than double the space it currently occupies in Cary’s Regency Park, enough to house up to 650 workers — giving the company plenty of room for future expansion,” the News & Observer wrote that month.
Layoff rumors
LexisNexis reacted last month to rumors of layoffs by releasing a statement saying it “routinely reviews resources worldwide,” and as a result of that “we build teams in certain areas of the business and reduce in others.” Hoagland said the new information about job losses also is related to what the company said in December.
“If we are going to lose a few jobs to North Carolina” the goal would be to “gain other jobs if it is in the customer service side of things or in other areas,” he said.
Hoagland said the region does not lack a capable, talented high-tech workforce.
“We hold our own from a research and development standpoint when competing with other states,” he said.
Hoagland said he doesn’t know if there will be fewer high-paid technology jobs locally because he isn’t familiar with LexisNexis’ pay scale.
In 2013, the News & Observer reported that the jobs at the new LexisNexis facility in North Carolina would pay an average annual salary of $91,644.
Gene Pinder, a spokesman for the Centennial Campus at North Carolina State, said he had no information on jobs being moved from Dayton to North Carolina.
But Pinder said LexisNexis already has 450 employees in a stand-alone building in the “heart” of the campus.
“LexisNexis is just the kind of company we like to attract to Centennial because it’s innovative and likes to engage with our students and faculty,” Pinder said. “They benefit being here by having close proximity to our College of Engineering, which is literally across the street from the company’s offices.”
State incentives
Mary Wilson, of the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, declined to discuss whether the state is actively trying to recruit more LexisNexis jobs. She said there was an incentive package offered to the company about four years ago.
A 2012 announcement from Research Triangle Regional Partnership said LexisNexis intended to create 350 jobs over five years and invest $1.75 million into the region. At the time, LexisNexis had more than 300 people in Cary and Charlotte in North Carolina, the development organization said.
“The project was made possible in part by state grants from the Job Development Investment Grant,” the organization said.
In October 2014, Raleigh television station WRAL said former North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue pointed to success in “significant incentive deals at high-tech firms” for Research Triangle corporations such as Red Hat and LexisNexis.
LexisNexis does not have any state tax or development incentives in Ohio and Hoagland said it has not asked for any.
Matt Englehart, spokesman for the state’s private-public development arm JobsOhio, declined comment on whether it is in discussions with LexisNexis. He directed questions to Hoagland, whose DDC is the regional JobsOhio representative.
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