06/01/2026

Lucas County’s proactive site development program aims to speed process of attracting new business investments

by Kent Cahlander, Guest Writer

Lucas County can boast as the Ohio home of the Jeep assembly plant, but county leaders aren’t being idle when it comes to attracting more industrial development to the area.

Hence the county’s creation of LCReady, a three-phase site readiness certification program administered by the Lucas County Economic Development Corporation (LCEDC).

Lucas County Commissioner Pete Gerken described the program as a proactive approach officials have embarked upon to better compete for industry partners looking for sites with a minimum 20 acres or buildings of at least 50,000 square feet.

“Like every other county, we’re in competition and we want growth here,” he said. “We want business development here and we’re always looking to find the appropriate role government plays in business development and expansion.”

“Within that framework, we said: ‘What makes people select sites somewhere?’”

The answers: people want sites that are ready to go and don’t face a lot of barriers when they decide to make investments to build or expand, Gerken said. As such, the goal of the program is to improve the process of preparing and offering “shovel-ready sites” that reduce risks for developers and increase the speed of getting projects off the ground.

The county’s announcement of the initiative said it is “designed to proactively position sites for industrial and manufacturing investment by certifying the locations through a rigorous process that aligns properties with the expectations of modern site selectors and corporate decision-makers.”

That’s accomplished through LCReady’s three-phase structure:

• LCNavigate to establish a baseline understanding of site conditions and infrastructure availability.
  
  
• LCEvaluate for confirming development readiness through due diligence and technical validation.
  
  
• LCCertified to position fully vetted sites for active marketing and competitive project attraction.

The program’s phases aim to address barriers to development at all levels, from zoning challenges and infrastructure needs at the start of the process, to site readiness determinations, and finally LCReady Certification that leads to direct marketing to site selectors and potential certification by JobsOhio.

Projects can take advantage of various entry points in the process depending on their status.

“We’re looking for advanced manufacturing, logistics, larger-scale investments,” Gerken said, adding: “This is not a data center program.”

To help move the process along, the county is putting up $100,000 annually on a first-come, first-served basis to help developers cover due diligence costs. LCEDC likely would start with a low-cost desktop review to obtain a clear understanding of development feasibility, validate readiness, reduce risk and accelerate development.

Gerken said the audits cover environmental, utility and engineering evaluations as an extra incentive for program participants.

“If you’re willing to sign up with LCReady, we’re willing to take on some of those pre-development costs,” he said.

Sarah Elms, communications director for the Lucas County Commissioners, said LCReady will be augmented with a web-based navigation tool to streamline the process for property owners, developers and others involved in the projects. The county has allocated $126,000 to develop the permitting software.

The tool will help program participants coordinate their efforts across government entities and regulatory bodies versus having to deal with them individually, she said.

“Anyone from a major developer to a homeowner, when it’s all said and done, will be able to use this technology to bring it all together and help navigate easily through the regulatory process.”

The initiative reflects the county’s renewed focus on retaining and expanding businesses in the county, which the Department of Economic Development created in late 2024.

Karen Poore, Lucas County’s interim economic development director, said the project will help all parties involved in projects navigate the maze of regulatory hurdles that can arise.

“In a lot of communities, the permitting and regulatory process is oftentimes not always as expedient and efficient as it can be in order to help a development project go from an idea to inception,” she said. “A lot of people don’t understand the complex and different permissions and different agencies that you have to go through to get your project ready to put shovels in the ground – especially in a county.”

Poore, who previously worked with Toledo, said a city’s development landscape can be easier to deal with because the agencies involved are contained in a single government entity.

“When you’re in a county, an end user many times has to interact at the township level, and then with a county engineer who is a different elected official, and then the building regulations department and in some cases the health department,” she said.

Poore is currently overseeing inquiries sent through the LCReady website, with a focus on commercial and industrial projects.

“We try to get people on the front end before they start a project, and our team convenes all the government entities and brings them together with the business,” she said. “We have pre-meetings to talk about the project, discuss preliminary site plans and get everyone at the table from the Ohio Department of Transportation to the health department if needed, to building regs, the engineer’s office, the zoning office, the township to talk about things early on.”

The web-based navigation tool under development, with a target rollout date of the first quarter in 2027, will have a broader application for projects of all sizes to deal with regulatory permitting.

“Navigating through that can sometimes be hard to figure out,” she said. “We hear that frustration and – especially with technology the way that it is today – we can build something that can help, whether it’s the homeowner living in a township who wants to do an addition on their home, to building a new manufacturing or warehouse facility.”

“It’s one place that can help them do that, so they don’t get tied up in one area or another,” Poore added. “It’s only going to get better with time.”

Commissioner Gerken said part of the impetus in developing the program is to use the county’s resources to help some of its smaller government entities lure more business development.

“The smaller communities, the municipalities and townships, they don’t have the staff to do this for developers. We do and we want to have a partnership with them.”