Today's guest is Steve Scheetz, research manager for the Nevada Governor's Office of Economic Development. He joins "Diversify Nevada" to offer expert analysis into the current economic trends and headwinds that the Silver State is facing in 2025.
Speaker 2 (00:00)
Welcome. You're listening to Diversify Nevada, a podcast produced by the Governor's Office of Economic Development. Diversify Nevada provides insightful discussions and expert analysis on the driving forces behind our state economic workforce and community development. I'm Tom Burns, the executive director of the Governor's of Economic Development.
Speaker 2 (00:20)
Our guest today is GOED's research manager, Steve Scheetz. Steve's career in public service began in 2011 with the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation. Since then, he's worked at multiple state agencies and has gained deep expertise in data, finance, and economic research. At GOED, Steve supports Nevada's economic strategy with research that helps drive policy and business decisions. When he's not busy with labor stats or regional GDP trends, Steve is working in his garden, hanging out with his two kids, or getting deep into real estate and AI. Steve Scheetz, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (00:54)
Hey, how are you doing?
Speaker 2 (00:55)
Great, it's great to have you. So tell us a little bit about your background and how you got here to GOED.
Speaker 1 (01:01)
Yeah, so as you mentioned in the intro, you know, I started with the state back in 2011. ⁓ Well, I can go back a little bit further. I grew up here in Northern Nevada. I grew up down in Garnerville, moved up to Reno for college, spent a couple of years in Iowa while my wife, my fiancé at the time, wife now, finished up her masters. But she and I grew up in the same town, all of our family and everybody's here. So we always knew we were coming back. And when we did come back, I started with Dieter.
Department of Employment Training and Rehabilitation. And I was just, you know, entry level position doing labor statistics. A lot of my job had to do with ⁓ these surveys that the Bureau of Labor Statistics send out to companies asking for staffing patterns and wages and things like that. And for really the most part, I was doing mostly quality control. ⁓ So, you know, when you would get a company that would send in, like typically what happens is they get the
the survey, they'll probably give it to an administrative assistant or something like that. And they're going off of job title alone, right? And so they're, you know, filling out the survey and then they send it in to us and then I'm looking at it and I'm like, okay, well, here's a company with 20 employees, 15 of them are general operations managers making $15 an hour. And you know, two of them are making $75 an hour. Well, those two people are...
Those two positions are definitely not doing the same thing. So then I would have to call them and be like, okay well, what are their actual duties and put them in the right category and stuff and all that kind of plays into the larger picture of labor statistics because a lot of what we do here in our office is based on those SOC codes that I was exposed to so long ago, so it's kind of a full circle thing ⁓ You know, I again, you know, worked there. I worked at you know agriculture for a little bit. I worked at ⁓
the state treasurer's office and their investment division for a little bit. ⁓ And all of those kind of gave me a good grasp of ⁓ how the state works. I had a few years in the private sector and then now that I'm back, I'm kind of putting all that long learned ⁓ stuff to work here.
Speaker 2 (03:11)
So tell us what does a research manager actually do at GOED? Like what are your duties involve here?
Speaker 1 (03:19)
Well, you know, there's a lot of different aspects to it. ⁓ One piece, if I can break it up into kind of different sections, is one piece is, you know, keeping track of what we as an agency have done in terms of our ⁓ economic development efforts and kind of tracking over time what those results are ⁓ so that we can report those to our stakeholders and making sure that, you know, we're highlighting the efforts that we're putting forward. But then also a good portion of ⁓ my job is kind of
support for our business development efforts when a company is looking to relocate and they're kind of shortening that list of potential candidates where they might want to land. They're going to be looking for data statistics and demographics and regional economics ⁓ reporting and things like that so that they can kind of compare apples to apples. Okay, am I if I'm looking at Nevada versus California versus Arizona versus Utah, you know what?
what's gonna suit my needs the best. So that's, yeah, that's kinda what we do.
Speaker 2 (04:23)
So you're kind of the numbers guy here at GOED. So you have a great view of economic trends. That's something I know that you work a lot with. You're on various calls. You're always talking about numbers and looking at numbers. Tell us about what's going on here in Nevada at the present moment, kind of just broad strokes. If you could paint us a picture of where we're at and kind of how we got here, I think that would be pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (04:46)
Yeah, and as you mentioned, you know, I do have a monthly ⁓ econ call where we kind of pull together some of the state economists, ⁓ both in the private sector and in the public sector to kind of get their, what they're seeing in their specific, you know, realms, what they're seeing in their corner of business throughout the state. So we can kind of piece together an idea of
What are we seeing? Where are we going? Are there things on the horizon that we need to look out for? ⁓ That's honestly one of the highlights of my month is to do that call and be in the presence of minds that are much better than mine. Honestly, if I was going to recall the...
The call that we just had this this econ call that we just had the word of the day would be uncertainty. You know, think that, know, any economist these days are probably sick and tired of hearing it. Like nothing bad has happened yet. Everybody is just kind of a wait and see pattern. Yeah. And ⁓ like that's very evident in the calls. I mean, the forecasters right now really have their work cut out for them. They are having a hell of a time just trying to get some sort of orientation around what the heck they're seeing.
because, you know, a tweet or a headline can send things just haywire.
Speaker 2 (06:03)
So what are some of the challenges that are associated with that uncertainty? Like what are the real-world implications that you're seeing? If you could just dial into that a little bit more in specifics.
Speaker 1 (06:13)
Absolutely.
So when it comes to uncertainty, that kind of not knowing what's around the corner is when people are trying to forecast what's going on in the market, they're looking at these typical kind of traditional economic indicators. And a lot of these indicators are kind of sending mixed signals.
Speaker 2 (06:28)
In here in Nevada, I know like a word that gets thrown around a lot is just how Nevada suffers and benefits from extreme cycles in the economy. when the goods are good, we're riding high, and when things are tough, we're really suffering. And ⁓ where are we at right now between those two extremes? Or are we already at one of them?
Speaker 1 (06:50)
You know, as my predecessor Bob Potts used to say, I'm probably going to butcher the quote, but Nevada is the tail to the California dog, right? So like, I think that that expands kind of nationally when you start looking at consumer habits over not just California, but like the nation ⁓ and public perception and things like that. Again, if people are sitting on their hands and they're not sure what's around the corner, ⁓ they might not necessarily decide to make that trip to Vegas and, you know, drop some coin in the slot machines and stuff like that, right? They might opt for the more value 9.99 prime rib dinners.
Speaker 2 (07:30)
Favorite on the strip. So you're saying those are going away, those cheap prime rib dinners?
Speaker 1 (07:35)
Well, I mean, there's there's still there. But what I'm saying is instead of going to, you know, the the chop house and spending one hundred and twenty dollars, you know, on just a hunk of meat. I mean, it's a really good hunk of meat, but you might adjust your spending habits in order to kind of go more ⁓ for the value or the discounted things. So that's definitely going to have an impact on Nevada, which is largely driven by tourism and hospitality and food service.
Speaker 2 (08:04)
So where do we stand with job growth? ⁓ Because I know obviously the hospitality sector employs tons of people and that's just a huge part of our economy down south. ⁓ So where do we stand with that and kind of where do you see us heading? Where does the numbers tell us we're going?
Speaker 1 (08:24)
So we're talking about job growth, know, there there's two sides to the coin There's job growth then there's entertainment will or unemployment so we'll talk about the job growth and you know again similar to what I was talking about earlier the The econ call that we were just on one of our more prominent economists is the lead economist at at Dieter His name is Dave Schmidt He's somebody who I value his perspective a lot and we have a lot of chats over the unemployment rate in employment in general
And, ⁓ you know, when he brings up his charts and things like that, we're seeing a lot of kind of leveling off. In fact, his opening statement was like, things are kind of boring. Things are kind of flat right now. So going into the summer here, ⁓ you know, after we've, we're coming off the back of, you know, a couple of years of just extreme growth, it's tapered quite a bit. now, you know, trying to look into the, peer into the future, we're not seeing a...
tremendous amount of growth going forward in the near term. And if I can just kind of caveat that, when you're coming off of extreme growth like that, especially amidst uncertainty like we're experiencing now, that flattening is probably ⁓ more indicative not of a slowing economy per se, but more of a normalization.
You know, obviously the pendulum's swinging the other way and right now we're just not seeing a ton of it.
Speaker 2 (09:56)
And how about, so we talked about ⁓ down south, you know, Vegas is obviously a huge economic hub for our state. Do you have any insight into stuff happening in the rural communities? How does this impact them, like what we're seeing at the state and national level? How does that impact our rural communities? Because that's obviously huge part of Nevada, right?
Speaker 1 (10:16)
Right, yeah. You know, it's funny, the rules don't get as much attention, so I'm glad that you bring that up. I don't have, you know, the breakdowns and stuff like that, but just anecdotally, I suppose, if we're kind of ⁓ workshopping this idea, some of the things that...
Are more prominent in the rural communities. know, we're looking up in Elko and Lander County and things like that. Mining is going to be huge. And right now, again, economically investments and things like that, the price of gold has like doubled over years, right? I don't think there's any shortage in the mining employment there. I will say that as some of the discussions that are coming up, ⁓ you know, as the more urban areas become more ⁓
Speaker 2 (10:48)
You're right.
Speaker 1 (11:04)
Fully developed and and things are starting to move out toward the the rules Well, we are seeing a lot of economic activity out there in terms of development bumping up against ⁓ the simple things like lack of broadband
Speaker 2 (11:20)
Housing and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (11:22)
Housing infrastructure, those are the types of things that I'm hearing a lot of the time. you know, again, we're talking about the workforce needs as we're looking at, you know, our advanced manufacturing sector, right? They're, you know, working, they're exploding in the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, the TRIC out in Story County.
Speaker 2 (11:45)
So in December, I know, of last year, it was the end of the first of our five-year state plan for realizing Nevada's electric, innovative, and connected future. What are some takeaways you can give us now that we've capped the end of that first year and some change, you know, now that we're recording in around June or so?
Speaker 1 (12:04)
Right. If I can ⁓ put in a selfless or selfish plug, guess. You know, we recently released the annual report out of GOED and in our state of the economy, I do kind of reference a lot of the activities with regards to our five target sectors. For those of you who don't know, ⁓ our state plan, our five-year strategic state plan has identified, you know, five primary target sectors, including the advanced manufacturing, ⁓ information technologies, logistics and operations. We've got natural resources and technologies.
And then also we've kind of, we can talk about this maybe a little bit later, but our hospitality, tourism, sports and creative industries and it's kind of like this amalgamation that we're not necessarily kind of foregoing what's got us where we are with which is gaming and things like that that that's really kind of woven into the fabric of what Nevada is ⁓ but it's kind of diversified within kind of expand for for branding purposes and things like that so to answer your question more directly we we had a lot of tailwinds kind of coming out of COVID ⁓
Some of which being low cost of capital, interest rates were low. We had mass in-migration from other states, most notably California.
Speaker 2 (13:33)
I came from Massachusetts by way of New York, so I'm one of those ⁓ East Coasters.
Speaker 1 (13:37)
Right. you're an implant as well. There's that. had, with the cost of things, our industrial parks were very affordable. And what that did was it really kind of accelerated what we had already kind of been building over time. And then with the state plan, we kind of put this hard concrete, like almost kind of a North Star, like, okay, this is what we're going to focus on and here's why.
So in those first three that I mentioned, the information technology, logistics and operations and advanced manufacturing, we I'll have go back to my notes. We were at least in the top three growth in all those three sectors, if not the top. ⁓ As you can imagine, being, you know, post covid environment, a lot of the. ⁓
Consumer spending shifted from brick and mortar retail to online. So naturally, everything having to do with that really kind of exploded our logistics sector.
Now we're starting to see that kind of taper off a little bit. And again, I think it's more normalization than anything. It's like, OK, well, we saw this extreme double digit growth for year after year. And then now all of sudden, we're kind of seeing that flattened out or maybe even slightly decline.
Speaker 2 (15:00)
We talked a lot about some of the challenges that Nevada is facing and kind of the business climate we're at now. What are some positives that we can glean from these trends and numbers that you see?
Speaker 1 (16:44)
Perfect. I mean, obviously, I've mentioned some of the some of the difficulties that come with uncertainty. We also, you know, as a state, because of our growth, because of the prosperity that we've seen, ⁓ you know, with that comes challenges. Right. And so, you know, we we have.
A lot of things that we're working on, like some of the challenges, I'll just kind of list them real quick. ⁓ know, housing affordability continues to be a major concern for people. We really kind of saw prices run away from us when then interest rates went up.
And so the price of housing has increased faster than the wages have increased. So it's been really hard to keep on top of that. And so as a result, that's something that we're working on. Educational attainment, health care continues to be an issue. We talked about infrastructure, child care.
⁓ Land we have a ton of land but what a lot of people don't realize is that like over 85 percent of it and in some regional areas like over 95 percent of those regions are BLM land right like we don't have access to that so hopefully you know through lands bill and things like that we can kind of unlock some of that for us ⁓ You know and then obviously the cost of industrial space has increased pretty substantially over the years
So we have no shortages ⁓ of challenges here in Nevada, but we continue to push forward. ⁓ And the thing is, like, we continue to hit, you know, best place for living lists all over the place. You know, like, we are constantly fielding ⁓ those requests for information where the companies are looking at Nevada because they see a lot of benefit. Things are still looking promising, and I want people to kind of look up from, you know, the everything is falling apart headlines and recognize that we're actually poised to be tremendous ⁓ growth story, really. You know, I kind of wrote it down here, you know.
Reno or I'm sorry, Reno. I live in Reno. So like, that's the first thing that comes out of my mind. But but Nevada's rad and people are realizing it, right? Again, we're hitting those top 10 best places to live ⁓ lists all the time. And this kind of stuff doesn't happen by accident happens over a long period of time. So whatever short term pain or whatever short term discomfort we feel in our pocketbooks in the short term, ⁓ you know, just understand that there's there's both the public
and the private sector are actively working in Nevada to grow. I'll take it one, just one more step. People talk about recession fears and things like that. And it's tough when we discuss recessions because a lot of the most recent... ⁓
Most recent recessions were, you know, the pandemic, obviously that was short lived, but I mean, that was pretty detrimental. And obviously the Great Recession starting in 2008. Those are some really extreme examples. And I would say that, you know, a majority of recessions historically, yes, it's bad. Nevada doesn't fare particularly well during those times. However, those times also provide a lot of opportunity for us. And, you know, I think that if
And when an inevitable economic downturn comes, Nevada has the right people in place. We have a good vision. We have a North Star, right? And ⁓ we could be the poster child for ⁓ tremendous growth.
Speaker 2 (20:17)
Last question that we ask everybody, why do you care about economic development?
Speaker 1 (20:22)
I personally think that Nevada's rad. I personally love where I live. mean, our proximity to Tahoe is amazing here in the north. And then I have family down in Vegas that I can visit all the time. And, ⁓ you know, one of the things that I've kind of done... ⁓
In recent years is really kind of explored some of the more rural areas. I mean, there's some really rich, fruitful ⁓ experiences to be seen out in, you know, our national parks and things like that. ⁓ Nevada is a cool place that I'm going to go. I'm going to tout the benefits day and night from mount tops. But like I mentioned before, economic development doesn't really happen by accident. Right. And so
I guess one of the things that is super appealing is since I've been here, my time here has been limited. I'm really just over a year. But the people that I've met, the people that I've worked with, I can see their drive to really make Nevadans life better. For a while there, a lot of people were...
of like antagonistic towards state workers because they just saw so much waste and they saw you know these these folks that ⁓ just you know click the same button for 30 years waiting for a pension and anything change or growth oriented is not welcomed and that's been farthest from my experience since I started. I mean the people that I work with are super dedicated and you know we're
Speaker 2 (21:57)
Yeah, mine too, for sure.
Speaker 1 (22:04)
For the most part, all on the same page in what does economic development look like for Nevada and how do we get there? you know, are the people, are the right people in place in order to achieve that? I think that's a really cool story. And if we can look back, you know, let's say in 10, 20 years and look at all of the progress that we've made and, you know, again, there's always going to be progress to make. But if we can look back and be like, man, we've really come a long way. I mean, even just
Just from my personal perspective to see what we've accomplished here in Northern Nevada ⁓ in terms of our diversification and kind of the public perception, right? Like for the longest time, we were the poor man's Vegas, right? Like people...
There were jokes in like the Muppet movie and stuff like that. About at Reno's expense and Reno, you know, has really kind of proven that through focused effort, we can kind of change that perception. We can embrace the things that make us ⁓ unique and culturally viable. And we've largely shed that. now Reno's hit in top 10 best places to live lists like every week. You know, it's kind of and that's just a small
Speaker 2 (22:53)
I didn't know.
Speaker 1 (23:19)
example of what economic development looks like now expanded across the state. I mean, I can say things all day long about how cool Nevada is.
Speaker 2 (23:28)
Well Steve Scheetz, thanks so much man, this has been a great interview.
Speaker 1 (23:31)
Thanks, I appreciate it. ⁓
That's all for this episode of Diversify Nevada. This podcast was created by the Governor's Office of Economic Development with the help of our sound editor, Michelle Rebeleati. If you'd like to learn more about our agency, can visit our website at goed.nv.gov. And if you'd like to share feedback about the show or suggest a topic you'd us to cover, send us an email to GOED@goed.nv.gov. Thanks for joining us and we'll be back soon.