Spotlight On: Cynthia Johnson, Director, Pinellas County Economic Development (PCED)
February 2025 — Invest: spoke with Cynthia Johnson, director of Pinellas County Economic Development (PCED), regarding workforce development, and small business support. She emphasized partnerships with educational institutions and the Employment Sites Program to modernize industrial space.
What has the organization done to put a spotlight on Pinellas in recent years and how does the county stand out from an economic standpoint?
Pinellas County’s focus these recent years is on supporting workforce and talent development, providing investment tools for redevelopment through the Employment Sites Program and the Ad Valorem Tax Exemption, and engaging with businesses to address and stabilize workforce needs with a rapid response capability recovery needs. We have made those areas priorities in how we conduct business and as we go forward. This county has always been a center point for innovation, and businesses are attracted to Pinellas because of the talent, and the beautiful beaches, arts, and culture is the icing on the cake. This year we have worked on strategies to support workforce and talent needs and we look forward to being a partner with CareerSource Hillsborough Pinellas. We’ve also made an investment and brought on new personnel dedicated to assisting businesses with workforce development needs.
How would you assess the workforce in the county and what collaborations do you have with educational institutions to meet the needs of businesses.
Workforce development is a regional issue. Pinellas has access to over 1.4 million workers in our collective communities, and because our educational system has a great reputation for producing high-quality talented individuals, we’re able to leverage that. It’s essential to have the buy-in and the insights from the business community on workforce development issues so we can work to help build critical skills sets to match industry needs. One of the key stakeholder groups for us is the One Pinellas Business Alliance, which serves as the voice of business and education. This group serves as a focus group, and we meet quarterly and collaborate with industry and training providers to work together to strategically meet talent gaps and match them with critical skill shortage areas. In addition, the college and university systems, especially the University of South Florida (USF), St. Petersburg College, and Pinellas County Schools, have adopted a direct approach to examining workforce and talent needs. Speaking with industry provides insight into the future, and in response, we hold industry roundtables before creating specialized short-term training. USF has launched a new AI college, which is a quick response to industry needs in the technology field, providing short-term training. St. Pete College offers customized training by sitting down with companies and creating curriculum based on their needs. The lineman training program with Duke Energy at St. Petersburg College is one example of a highly successful collaborative program. Additionally, St. Petersburg College received a $7 million allocation from the Florida Department of Education to create a mechatronics training facility. This facility will provide talent for many of our manufacturers, with input from them to ensure the curriculum meets their needs.
How important is the small-business community and entrepreneurial ecosystem in the county, and what resources does your agency provide in support?
The small-business community in Pinellas County is the epicenter of all business activity. Just here in Pinellas County, as a government agency, we provided $56 million last year in small business enterprise contracts for small firms in our region. Not only did we do that through our small-business enterprise program, but we also coupled up with the APEX program, a program with support from the Department of Defense, to expose small businesses to bigger local, state, and federal contracting opportunities. Last year, we also provided support and helped Pinellas companies win about $52 million in federal contracting awards. We see small businesses as the innovative, creative, thought leaders that are producing products and services that are changing lives and supporting critical missions for our nation. They are critical to the economy not just because of their new ideas and fresh perspectives for their customers but also for incorporating new technologies for the government and homeland security.
What is the Employment Sites Program, and how are companies using this site?
The Pinellas County Employment Sites Program is an award-winning program. Last year, this program, which is designed to create more modern industrial and office space in Pinellas, resulted in a tremendous opportunity for business expansions and new construction. The International Economic Development Council awarded us the Gold Award for this program. The Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners have approved $36.8 million in funding for 26 Employment Sites Projects to date. This investment has resulted in a total square footage of 1.6 million square feet of new or modern space, with an investment of over $251 million from the private sector. Nine of the ESP-supported facilities are now operational, employing over 1,300 individuals in new jobs. One of the other features of the program is that we engaged developers and businesses to create the program from the beginning so we could have a practical process and that has led to the program’s success.
We are also introducing a second funding phase of the program, which focuses on public infrastructure. We’ll be working with our city partners on projects that are going to have economic impacts, attracting investment into their community, and we’re excited about that partnership. We have that round of public infrastructure open and at least four of our communities are actively applying to participate in that grant program. We’re excited about the opportunities right now to support infrastructure projects that improve areas of high-employment and projects that will benefit multiple tenants and business owners.
What are PCED’s top priorities and goals for 2025 and how do you plan to achieve them?
Our strategy for 2025 is to drive growth and to create a more resilient community. We’re going to deploy a marketing campaign that really supports the attraction of investment and the growth of redevelopment in our community. The strategy is going to help us elevate our relationships regionally and here locally, to be able to work with site selectors, to target our networks, and to really expose and leverage our shared assets, such as our airport, our port system, our talent pool – we need to share all those assets. That will assist us in how we support industry clusters, to make sure that we’re creating diversified employment centers where people have access to high-paying jobs so that they can continue to live in a community that they love.
We are really data-driven here, so we’re going to leverage the data that we receive to make decisions about redevelopment, to make decisions about how and who we attract here, to make decisions about how we can take our data and share it with our educational partners.
As we do that, our priorities will remain with assisting talent recruitment and attraction, proactively engaging in our business community in efforts to really stabilize the workforce and provide rapid responses for resiliency. One thing I’m really looking forward to is conducting more industry roundtables on how we do that because alignment of all the opportunities is going to be part of how successful we are with getting and attracting investment to our region.
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