Tom Manskey may be a new arrival to the Permian Basin, but the Odessa Chamber of Commerce Economic Development Director is no stranger to the field.
Manskey took over from Wesley Burnett Feb. 1. Burnett now works for Nacero, a natural gas-to-gasoline plant at Penwell.
Manskey has been involved in economic development since 1988. He started in economic development with the Daingerfield Main Street program, a downtown redevelopment program.
Soon after earning a degree in geography with an emphasis in urban planning from what is now Texas State University. Texas State was previously Southwest Texas State.
Manskey, who grew up in Irving, has also gone through the Institute for Organizational Management at Southern Methodist University and the Economic Development Institute at the University of Oklahoma.
After serving in Daingerfield for a couple of years, Manskey became economic development director for the City of Port Arthur.
From there, he went to Rockwall where he started working in economic development in a chamber environment, as in Odessa.
“… I really like the organizational structure and the setup,” Manskey said.
Over the years, economic development has changed considerably. There are sales taxes communities can vote in. A 4A sales tax, which Odessa has, is designated for direct employment, bricks and mortar.
A 4B sales tax is for direct employment, bricks, mortar and some community development. Some communities have both, Manskey said.
“Communities didn’t have that and then all of a sudden you realized you needed to have it to compete,” Manskey said. “When I went up to [Fort Smith] Arkansas for six years and ran their chamber, it was tough to compete with Texas. We did and we were successful. But when you look at everything that’s been happening the last 20 years a lot of it has to do with state law that’s been passed in Texas that made it so competitive and it put it at the local level.”
He added that 90 percent of his efforts in Fort Smith went toward economic development and someone else ran the chamber side.
Through their economic development boards, communities will often set expectations for certain dollar amounts or a certain number of jobs “so you’re not just giving away money; you’ve got policy in place,” he said.
From the end of 2018 to the present, Manskey was in insurance in Forney, but kept his eye on economic development. However, he had stopped looking because he and his wife, Stephanie, were building a house.
The couple has two daughters in Midland.
“Someone in the organization reached out to me and when they described the situation here and everything and … I didn’t see that it was going into a volatile [situation],” he said.
Manskey said he missed economic development and wanted to get back into it in the right environment.
“In my insurance office, we had taken things virtual and so you weren’t out and about dealing with people every day, and I kind of missed that part of it,” Manskey said.
Having a diversified economy is important and it does alleviate some ups and downs.
“But you also have to dance with what brung you,” Manskey said. “… You’ve got the workforce here. Now, are there new technologies coming out in in energy that we want to tap into, clean energy and other things like that? Certainly. If you look at our target industries — energy’s there; logistics; medical; Tyler is a good example of that. They’ve wrapped a lot of their economic development efforts around health care. And it’s helped them grow. You have to visit your targeted industries every so often to see if you need to make adjustments,” he said.
At the same time, you have to be realistic and not expect to snag the headquarters of Merrill Lynch, for example.
Manskey said he is scheduling meetings to meet as many people in local leadership as possible during his first 90 days.
“I want get educated about everything here and what the leadership’s thinking and then share my thoughts …,” he said.
Manskey noted that the reason Austin is booming is because companies want to tap into “all that UT talent.”
“When you’re graduating 20,000 kids a year, they feel like they can get their hands on it,” Manskey said.
While Odessa may not be Austin, this is a center of the energy industry and the people are “great.”
“Somebody told me early on that people come to Odessa kicking and screaming. But then if they have to leave later, they leave kicking and screaming. And I’ve actually seen that,” Manskey said.
The $7 billion Nacero project was recently landed and he said there are a lot of good things going on here.
Manskey added that he believes he can bring in his outside expertise, add it to what’s going on and maybe “elevate the program and make things better.”
He said he’s big on collaboration and is here to be a team player. Manskey added that Odessa has the city, the university, Odessa College and the chamber of commerce.
He said everyone needs to work as a team, otherwise businesses might not move to your town.
“… I can tell you from my experience when I was in East Texas, we had a neighboring community that was about same size. We’d have prospects walk in our door all the time and they’d say, hey, look, we were trying to locate up the road but those people don’t get along. If you’re a new business coming into town and you’re kicking the tires, the last thing you need is all the entities in that community not working together. I’m not saying you have to agree 100% of the time, but you have to be neighbors and people coming in from the outside can see it. They can recognize it quickly. …,” Manskey said.
Manskey said one thing he is interested in is other businesses that could benefit from Nacero being nearby.
“We met this morning. We’re talking about our business retention expansion program and doing our business retention visits with companies and we’ll going … formalize that effort. If nothing else, that way we can communicate it better to leadership, this is what we’re doing,” Manskey said.
He said you have to have constant communication with local businesses to see what they need to help them be more comfortable and stay and grow.
“… You don’t want to wake up one day and your fifth largest employer decided to pick up and leave. And usually that’s not a decision that’s made overnight and so in other words, we didn’t have our hands around it. … My goal in the first year (is) at least 200 visits. And, you know, we’re going to have some some questions we ask all of them but then the conversation will lead to different questions with each one —- and listening. Because … you have to listen and hear what they’re saying, and think okay do we need to do something? I can tell you on numerous projects — and some of your best growth is what’s already here — can we help them? Is there something they want to do that can grow their business that they’re kind of struggling with? You don’t want that to be a wall that’s being constructed locally. If it is, we need to tear the wall down and help them do whatever they need to do to grow,” Manskey said.
we started searching and then we put out our request for resumes for several months.
Burnett’s last full day as economic development director was Sept. 24, but he did some work for the chamber until Manskey arrived, President/CEO Renee Earls said.
Earls said they got about 50 resumes for the position from all over the country and even parts of Mexico. Of those, they got six to eight local applications, she said.
“Once we took those 50 resumes, then we narrowed that down and we did Zoom interviews,” Earls said. “We did eight Zoom interviews and those were all people from out of town. We knew that we wanted to save our local candidates for in-person, so we narrowed that 50 down to eight Zoom interviews. …”
Once they met Manskey, Earls said they felt a great connection with him.
“… His 30 years of experience certainly was something that we were looking for. He’s very familiar with the process. He’s familiar with various communities. He’s familiar with chamber operations, as well, and that was real plus because he understands being part of a chamber …,” she added.
Earls said Manskey’s personality, attitude and perspective were factors, too.
“… He seems very easy to get along with; very friendly. We felt like he would be a good fit for Odessa because you can know the business, but you need to be able to fit in a community as well. So we felt like he would be a good fit because of his friendliness [and] his background; his knowledge, again, having 30 years of boots on the ground economic development experience, we felt like there were some programs and some knowledge that he could also bring to our department to … elevate the department from where it is today,” Earls said.
She added that Manskey can offer a different perspective from what other communities are doing and where they’ve been successful.
“I will say that he and Wes have known each other in the business for many years now, so Wes also was a part of that discussion knowing who would best fit in and Wes has been there and there’s no one better to know who might be able to fit in the organization best and fit in the community and help sell Odessa,” Earls said.
She added that it also helps that he has two grown daughters in Midland.
