Why aren’t Tallahassee-Leon leaders demanding better performance from a $5-million-a-year organization that hasn’t landed a new business in 2025?
Special Report By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida
In economic development, the scoreboard is brutally simple: Did companies choose you? Did they build here? Did they hire here? Did new paychecks land in your community? Everything else is costuming.
By that standard, the Office of Economic Vitality in Tallahassee-Leon County has posted a goose egg for 2025. Zero relocations. Zero transformative expansions. Zero net new job announcements. But you’d never know it from the steady hum of OEV newsletters — filled with conferences, expos, dashboards, “talent initiatives,” awards, rankings, and community events. All perfectly pleasant. None remotely related to landing employers.
This is exactly the kind of civic misdirection Red Tape Florida was built to expose. When process replaces product, when slogans replace substance, and when leaders congratulate the machinery rather than the outcomes — someone has to say it.
And, by the way, this red tape is expensive.
OEV carries a $5 million annual operating budget, part of the $31.6 million Blueprint budget. We are sure that money pays for hard-working folks who want to succeed. But if you track OEV’s public storytelling over the last several years, you recognize the cycle: the breathless tease, the unnamed “secret project,” the giant job number floating just over the horizon, the “exclusive” well-placed local media story hinting at transformation … and then silence. No deal. No construction. No payroll. Just a new round of teasers.
“Project Whatchamacallit”
You might be saying: Wait! Didn’t I just read about big things coming?
Indeed, in October, the breathless news: Project Vertigo “may bring 2,000 jobs to the Tallahassee airport.” A headline so aspirational it practically floated off the page. But the story was unmistakably conditional — “may,” “could,” “under consideration.” No commitments. No dates. No contracts. No site plan. Yet the public was left with the impression that a monumental win was already being loaded onto a cargo plane and taxiing toward Tallahassee.
We hope THIS is the one that gets OEV off the 2025 schneid.
But we’ve seen this show before.
In 2022, the Tallahassee Democrat ran a piece featuring a “hitlist of known, confidential projects in the pipeline.” It featured a list of 13 code-name “Projects.” So far as Red Tape Florida has found, none of them materialized
And those aren’t the only ones. Tallahassee has a long trail of “Project X” promises that never turned into payroll:
- Project Alpha – North American Aerospace Industries
• Hype: Airport cargo/teardown project at TLH, framed in Tallahassee Chamber release as a “game changer,” with estimates of roughly 700–1,000 permanent jobs, hundreds of construction jobs and ~$147–$450 million in economic impact.
• Reality: By 2024, the Tallahassee Democrat was reporting that the deal with North American Aerospace Industries had “failed to take off,” after years of cheerleading and silence from the city on its status.
- Project Bravo – TLH Cargo & Logistics Campus
• Hype: In 2022, the City of Tallahassee finalized terms with Burrell Aviation for a major cargo, logistics and aircraft-services campus at TLH — pitched as a multi-facility development that would “transform” the airport, expand the region’s air-cargo capabilities, and position Tallahassee as a southeastern aviation hub. Tallahassee Mayor John Dailey called it “the beginning of the game change.”
• Reality: By March 2024, the Tallahassee Democrat reported that the entire deal with Burrell Aviation had fallen apart — no facilities, no campus, no jobs. After nearly two years of boosterish framing, the project evaporated quietly, joining the growing list of Tallahassee airport “game changers” that never made it off the runway.
- Project Glove Story – logistics prospect at TLH
• Hype: In 2021, OEV submitted an official community response for “Project Glove Story” through the GSLI site — a logistics/warehouse prospect tied to TLH-adjacent parcels, dangling nearly $5 million in estimated incentives and flagging Tallahassee as “open for business” for a sizable operation.
• Reality: There’s been no subsequent public announcement that a Glove Story project actually chose Tallahassee, broke ground, or hired anyone. It looks like another one that lived in the pitch deck and died in the real world.
- Project E-Boat – electric-boat manufacturing concept
• Hype: Another OEV response through GSLI under the code name “Project E-Boat,” pitching Tallahassee as a site for an electric-boat related operation with the capacity to support 500+ employees within three years, again built around TLH-adjacent logistics advantages.
• Reality: Same pattern — detailed RFI response, big job potential, then radio silence. No public record of an E-Boat project choosing Tallahassee or announcing jobs here.
- Airport FTZ / IPF jobs bonanza
• Hype: Chamber/airport communications around the International Processing Facility and associated Foreign Trade Zone status tout an anticipated 1,600+ jobs and $300 million in annual economic impact once everything is up and running and the FTZ is fully utilized.
• Reality: The IPF itself is years behind its original opening timeline and the jobs/impact numbers remain projections on paper — not actual payroll in Leon County. It’s not branded as “Project [Noun],” but it fits the same pattern of huge numbers in presentations with no corresponding private-sector job creation.
It is always “big things are coming.” Somehow, the big things never quite land.
Meanwhile, the OEV weekly newsletter archive from this year, analyzed one by one by Red Tape Florida, shows an unbroken streak of zero real wins. Not a single new employer choosing Tallahassee. Not one. And yet city and county leadership remains remarkably quiet — as if failing to land a single project in 11 months is simply an unfortunate scheduling issue, not an indictment of the model.
When a win becomes a loss
Consider the high-profile “wins” Tallahassee does have on record. JetBlue lasted all of five minutes before departing. And OEV is actually touting Wawa as economic development? Delicious sandwiches, but still a gas station. These are not the kinds of economic developments you build a regional strategy around.
Yes, Amazon was a big addition … when it was announced four years ago. But insiders say that landowner Devoe Moore was as much or more responsible for the deal as anybody in government. Plus, Amazon basically picked a point on the map where it needed distribution — it wasn’t a matter of “if” but “where.” Meanwhile, OEV’s list of wins is so thin it has to claim things like a pharmacy relocation in Woodville as a victory.
While these are perfectly respectable community happenings, they are not seven-figure-ED victories. These are everyday business decisions occurring with or without government help. When your scorecard lists items that routinely happen on their own, it’s a sign the system isn’t producing anything above ordinary background business activity.
Now, to be fair, there is value associated with activities that increase the prospect pool. Securing the MDSM Magnetics Conference for the second year is a major accomplishment, as was the TakeOff Aviation Conference that was held at TLH earlier this month.
But if they don’t translate to wins, their value is diminished.
A deeply flawed system
When you examine the structure, the lack of outcomes starts making painful sense.
OEV sits inside the Blueprint Intergovernmental Agency. Under the Department of PLACE. Managed by the Intergovernmental Management Committee. With oversight and advisory input from the Economic Vitality Leadership Council, the MWSBE Citizen Advisory Committee and the Competitive Projects Cabinet. Any incentive package above roughly half-a-million dollars must go to the full IA board — all city and county commissioners — in a public meeting, unless it gets stuck earlier in the chain.
That’s five veto points before a project even touches dirt. It’s a process designed for careful deliberation, not speed — for compliance, not competitiveness. Companies choosing between Tallahassee and Alabama or Georgia can’t wait months for three committees and a workshop on a Tuesday afternoon.
Red Tape Florida has heard from multiple CEOs considering Tallahassee that there simply wasn’t enough urgency displayed by local officials. In one case, a leader actually preferred the Tallahassee market, but eventually gave up for a lack of engagement from local officials.
Meanwhile, the rest of the I-10 corridor continues racking up wins like it’s Black Friday.
• In Bay County, Oxford Technologies committed $7.5 million and 40 new aviation manufacturing jobs.
• Also in Bay County, Global Impact Products opened a 100,000-square-foot facility bringing 150 advanced manufacturing jobs — actual bodies, actually hired.
• Bay County again: Project Kilowatt, a Canadian marine manufacturer, locked in $37 million in capital investment and 285 new jobs.
• Over in Jackson County, PackEx USA is constructing a 400,000-square-foot aluminum packaging plant — $50+ million, 75 jobs.
• Santa Rosa County landed Mondelez International (Nabisco’s parent company) with a new distribution center anchoring the I-10 industrial park.
• Okaloosa County secured one of the biggest aviation projects in Florida history: Williams International’s $1-billion turbine-engine manufacturing complex, bringing more than 330 high-wage jobs.
These aren’t speculative headlines. These aren’t “projects under discussion.” These aren’t “we might, they might, someone might.” These are executed deals. Buildings. Worksites. Construction. Payroll.
And make no mistake – this isn’t just missed opportunity – it translates to jobs … or, better put, a lack of them. Compared to similar-sized counties, or even small counties in close proximity to Leon, the county’s job growth since the start of 2019 has been anemic – just 7.5 percent growth in the past 6 years.
While others are counting new tax revenue from a growing industrial base, Leon County residents are left to chuckle at yet another Hail Mary attempt at improving the Tallahassee Airport, through an airline incentive program with projections so large and so distant you practically need binoculars to see the end date.
Spoiler alert: Until we get some economic development wins, the airport situation won’t improve.
Where is the leadership?
This piece didn’t require particularly difficult digging or an amazing sense of awareness. Everybody knows OEV isn’t working. Why the silence?
Where are local leaders, who are supposed to ask hard questions when the scoreboard reads zero? Not one commissioner, IA board member or civic stakeholder has stepped forward to publicly demand accountability for a year with no wins. We hear praise for process. We hear confidence in strategy. We do not hear the one question Tallahassee desperately needs its leaders to ask:
Where are the jobs?
Pay-for-play(ish) awards like All-America City don’t mean much when the on-the-ground results don’t include economic development and robust job growth. Tallahassee is a community laden with cheerleaders when it needs just leaders. Our local government officials would be well-advised to put down the pom poms for a few minutes and pick up a pen and start working on a new economic development structure. Perhaps the local Chamber could pitch in.
If Tallahassee wants to compete with the rest of the corridor — or anywhere — the model has to change. Economic development must be measured by outcomes, not panels. Deals need to be approved in weeks, not semesters. The mission must return to its core: recruit employers, expand employers, retain employers, produce jobs, invest capital, and report results transparently.
If it doesn’t show up on the scoreboard, it doesn’t count.
This is precisely why Red Tape Florida exists. When systems stop producing results, when leaders stop asking questions, and when the public is expected to simply believe the press releases rather than the outcomes, someone has to point to the scoreboard and tell the truth.
If we aren’t getting deals, why isn’t anyone in charge demanding them?