One Call Medical Inc. wants to bring +650 jobs to Southbank

[thelakelander]

One Call wants to relocate their Baymeadows office to the Southbank. If everything works out, they'd bring +650 jobs downtown and take up half the space being vacated by Aetna.

The DIA board deferred action on a request for a Business Attraction Incentive agreement from IP Capital Partners, the landlord, and One Call Medical Inc. for One Call to lease about 83,000 square feet in the Aetna Building.

The lease would represent about half the space Aetna will vacate this year as the insurance company moves its operations to a suburban office park.

One Call currently leases space in the Aetna Building, but would move about 550 employees to Downtown from Baymeadows and create 107 new jobs in customer service and information technology.

The incentive would be capped at $1 million and paid in annual $100,000 installments over 10 years.

The company would be required each year to document it has at least 600 employees at the site and maintain a lease of at least 80,000 square feet.

Full article: http://www.jaxdailyrecord.com/showstory.php?Story_id=549169

[Westside Guy]

Excited that the jobs are coming downtown but I remember when Aetna announced they were leaving and a lot of folks in and around downtown tryed to spin it as an opportunity to replace the low pay call center jobs there with higher wage jobs even though it really boiled down to over 100,000 sq ft of vacant office space.  It appears now that they were just trying to keep the sky from falling after downtown lost a major tenet, which is fine by me because downtown finally has some momentum. But apparently not quite enough momentum to bring in those better paying jobs. Maybe someday. On a side note, it still stuns me that Baptist didn't end up with all of Aetna's space.

[Steve]

Excited that the jobs are coming downtown but I remember when Aetna announced they were leaving and a lot of folks in and around downtown tryed to spin it as an opportunity to replace the low pay call center jobs there with higher wage jobs even though it really boiled down to over 100,000 sq ft of vacant office space.  It appears now that they were just trying to keep the sky from falling after downtown lost a major tenet, which is fine by me because downtown finally has some momentum. But apparently not quite enough momentum to bring in those better paying jobs. Maybe someday. On a side note, it still stuns me that Baptist didn't end up with all of Aetna's space.

To be very clear, One Call Medical isn't a call center company. It's a technology company. Yes, they have people that take calls but so do many companies. This would be a good land.

For example, if someone said an ecommerce company were moving their headquarters to town, people would be thrilled. However (assuming they don't outsource these), the largest employment groups at an ecommerce company are in their Fulfillment Center and Contact Center. Some of it is about perception.

[Westside Guy]

Excited that the jobs are coming downtown but I remember when Aetna announced they were leaving and a lot of folks in and around downtown tryed to spin it as an opportunity to replace the low pay call center jobs there with higher wage jobs even though it really boiled down to over 100,000 sq ft of vacant office space.  It appears now that they were just trying to keep the sky from falling after downtown lost a major tenet, which is fine by me because downtown finally has some momentum. But apparently not quite enough momentum to bring in those better paying jobs. Maybe someday. On a side note, it still stuns me that Baptist didn't end up with all of Aetna's space.

To be very clear, One Call Medical isn't a call center company. It's a technology company. Yes, they have people that take calls but so do many companies. This would be a good land.

For example, if someone said an ecommerce company were moving their headquarters to town, people would be thrilled. However (assuming they don't outsource these), the largest employment groups at an ecommerce company are in their Fulfillment Center and Contact Center. Some of it is about perception.

Thanks for the clarification! I obviously missed that.

[thelakelander]

Excited that the jobs are coming downtown but I remember when Aetna announced they were leaving and a lot of folks in and around downtown tryed to spin it as an opportunity to replace the low pay call center jobs there with higher wage jobs even though it really boiled down to over 100,000 sq ft of vacant office space.  It appears now that they were just trying to keep the sky from falling after downtown lost a major tenet, which is fine by me because downtown finally has some momentum. But apparently not quite enough momentum to bring in those better paying jobs. Maybe someday. On a side note, it still stuns me that Baptist didn't end up with all of Aetna's space.

To be very clear, One Call Medical isn't a call center company. It's a technology company. Yes, they have people that take calls but so do many companies. This would be a good land.

For example, if someone said an ecommerce company were moving their headquarters to town, people would be thrilled. However (assuming they don't outsource these), the largest employment groups at an ecommerce company are in their Fulfillment Center and Contact Center. Some of it is about perception.

Yeah, the Amazon stuff being said locally is pretty insane. They're opening fulfillment centers, not moving their headquarters. While the new warehouse jobs will be an economic benefit, Amazon opening warehouses in Jax isn't going to the "game changer" many locally have been promoting it to be. Polk County already has two of these things and a Walmart ecommerce fulfillment center. However, it's still the same old Polk County that's been sitting between Tampa and Orlando since the 1800s.