The main goal of the City of Riverside’s Economic Development Action Plan is to help business create jobs and an August 17, 2012 article from the Press Enterprise shows that there has been significant improvement in employment numbers and the region’s economy is showing signs of significant growth.
The following is an excerpt from the Press Enterprise article by Jack Katzanek:
A report from the State Employment Development Department released Friday, August 17 found that almost five years to the month after Inland Southern California’s job market began what resulted in a huge contraction, the region’s economy is now showing further evidence of recovery. An estimated 25,000 jobs have been created in San Bernardino and Riverside counties in the last year, the State Employment Development Department reported. The year-over-year increase of 2.2 percent is the largest for any month since the recession started in 2007.
All the growth is coming from the private sector. State and local governments and schools have reduced their payrolls by a little more than 1,000 jobs in the last year, according to the state data.
“The really crucial thing is that we added 26,000 private-sector jobs,” Redlands-based economist John Husing said. “The private sector is almost acting like it’s a normal year, and not just a normal recovery year.”
The Great Recession officially started on the national level in the fourth quarter of 2007, based on a decline in the country’s gross domestic product. But Inland Southern California was already going through an economic decline before that, because home values were declining and developers were backing away from expansion plans.
In July of that year, employment was coming off more than a decade of eye-opening growth and peaked at about 1,278,000 payroll jobs in the Inland area. That was the last gain for more than four years, and in the 12 months after that about 55,000 jobs had hemorrhaged away.
The state reported there were about 1,146,900 people drawing paychecks from Inland companies last month, meaning the region is still more than 130,000 jobs off its peak.
Growth was reported in the logistics, health care, leisure and hospitality sectors. Also, the office-based professional and business service sector is 13 percent ahead of last year.
There was also a 4.4 percent jump in construction jobs in the Inland area, a figure that appears to be in line with data released earlier this week by the National Home Builders Association that indicated that more single-family homes in California are being completed and that the number of permits sought by developers is up sharply.
The growth in the region’s employment numbers shows that Riverside is on track in its main goal of helping businesses create jobs. The City’s Economic Development Action Plan aligns with the goals of Seizing Our Destiny to make Riverside a location of choice in which highly skilled workers and quality businesses want to move to, stay, and grow. The strong economy and well-developed workforce in Riverside improves the community’s overall quality of life and contributes to our vision of a unified city that encourages innovation and fuels intelligent growth.
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