I heard the Mayor last week touting the fact that we have gained 1,400 new jobs in Hickory this year and the same number was touted by Scott Millar, the head of the Catawba County Economic Development Corporation, yesterday in the Hickory Daily Record. The Mayor stated on Hal Rowe's show that he believes that the uptick in Unemployment is a result of National and State Economic Issues. He hopes that these job losses will be temporary and these 1,400 jobs will make quite a favorable impact. He says that from an Economic Development standpoint that we have had an excellent year.
Mr. Mayor I just don't see it that way. It is nice that Mr. Rowe gives you a platform to speak from, but please leave the political spin at home. Let's talk about results. You mentioned that these 1,400 jobs were created at Williams-Sonoma, MDI, Convergis, and FedEx. How many of these jobs have actually been realized, versus proposed?
These jobs have little impact on our area's current unemployment numbers. Most of these jobs do not exist at the moment. Local officials have never stated how many of these proposed 1,400 currently exist (people actually doing the work). They act as though they are all currently online and they are not!!!
It is time to stop the obfuscation! Unemployment is up 2.2% in Catawba County to 8.3%. Statistics show that we have lost approximately 1,401 jobs in this county this year (January through October) and 3,513 in the Unifour (January to September). To get back to 5% in Catawba County unemployment, we have to find a net-plus of 2,489 jobs.
It is ridiculous to blame the state and federal government for our situation. This area has been in a malaise since 2001. Since the employment peak of June 2000, we have lost 9,290 jobs in Catawba County and 24,493 jobs in the Unifour.
In Catawba County, since May 2001, we have only had unemployment lower than 5% during one month. Disastrously, we have not had a single month where we had a better unemployment rate than the state or federal government. 56 of the succeeding 89 months have seen Catawba County at least 1% worse than the state’s unemployment rate. Comparing to the Federal rate, we also have been at least 1% worse in 63 out of those 89 months.
I know that these a lot of numbers and many of you may not be interested in the numbers, but there is a pattern here. We were a successful community, because of our robust industrial based economy. The community was doing well as a whole and now only certain pockets of our community are doing well, while most of us are worried to death about our future.
City officials seem to think that we can magically transform this area into a more service oriented economy, while watching our industrial manufacturing base wither and die. Our successes in the past were brought about by an industrial based economy. While the days of the hosiery industry have long since passed, there are still new, innovative, technical manufacturing industries waiting to be brought here or discovered. We should not seek to return to a bygone era, but we should learn the salient points of our history.
Do we not expect Accountability? Local government leaders have stood by and watched our manufacturing base shrivel, while constantly telling us our economy is turning around. The numbers don’t lie. The time has long since passed for results. If this were a corporation, we would have changed management teams a long time ago. These results are inexcusable under any criteria. The Wright path has led us in the wrong direction!!!
The Unifour's Unemployment Numbers:
http://hickoryhound.googlegroups.com/web/Unifour%20Area%20Unemployment%20figures.xls?gsc=wiJC5BYAAAD6B-_n9Gqh7BP95elZ_rEh57an5Fe8QJeePd7zpGv9tg
Catawba County Unemployment Spreadsheet:
http://hickoryhound.googlegroups.com/web/Hickory+Unemployment+4+-+2k81205+(3).xls?gda=s4SZuF4AAADNJTwgxLHl9sR8sNs28UTRi4vdkNwo0RBTBC1DMH_pYIFlaxaQ3AwJ_PQYCE0hwCt1ev9eErEjiTzqK7Iu2WwPmww4DpCobtkUhHoXAeUyAeOwpdWz5ftt1dlzlu5J-bE
|
| Join To Get Blog Update Notices |
| Visit the Hickory Hound Group |
Monday, December 8, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
MDI is great and all, but those jobs don't address one of Hickory's glaring weaknesses, which is the low proportion of college-educated citizens. We need to bring jobs that will attract more highly-skilled, white-collar workers, who have the disposable income to make the service sector work well.
And on the whole downtown development thing, I found this quote from an article that was actually discussing the Kannapolis project, which seemed pertinent:
Creating a Substantial Foundation
According to Legg, to succeed in a downtown redevelopment requires “something substantial that moves downtown and creates well-paying jobs. And you have to create higher density residential sections that draw people downtown after hours and on weekends.” Bologna agrees and adds to the mix good corporate citizenship and developers with deep enough pockets to roll with the lean years. “You’ve got to have developers and clients who are not looking for a quick buck, who are looking to stay the course, and who can keep the vision they started out with,” he says.
Ultimately, says Legg, successfully revamping a downtown area requires a combination of vision and action. “You’ve got to get aggressive, take risks, and make it happen,” he says. “Most things usually fail because of a lack of vision. Once you get past that, then you can start working on the details.”
http://www.areadevelopment.com/siteSelection/aug07/downtownUpswing.shtml
I thought the part that says, "creates well-paying jobs" especially telling.
Out of the 1,400 jobs, only the Williams-Sonoma jobs are truly manufacturing. The rest are service industry jobs.
And according to what I have been told, they basically consolidated their supply chain under their umbrella.
What that means is that instead of buying these products wholesale from someone else, they are instead producing the products themselves.
These we local area companies that lost that business. So there was (or will be) basically a local citizen laid off for every new Williams-Sonoma employee that was (or will be) hired.
So we saved the jobs for this area, but nothing new is being created.
Ant, that is very good information on the Kannapolis downtown story and that is very relevant to the Hickory story. The difference is that they have real businessmen running the show down there and we have a bunch of shortsighted trust fund babies running Hickory into the ground and forcing their fru-fru lifestyles upon us.
This is an excellent comment that I received from another in-state website_________________________________________________
Regardless of the spin, if McCrory would have won would have been a big help.
Shell, I've worked a tiny bit with econ development folk in some of the counties. One thing I noticed is that they get paid to chase employers to relo, not close deals to get employers to relo. Therein lies a fundamental problem. As long as the bureaucrats can put together an impressive powerpoint or report that makes it sound like they're working their butts off chasing every company between here and tim-buck-too, the typical elders are happy. I have seen this first-hand. I feel the econ development agencies should get a small base salary, with a huge incentive if they close deals. Sales 101. They're selling the area, right? Further, I notice that these same folk don't actively engage the local biz leaders as much as I feel they should. They do, to some degree, but it's way short, imo. When one of my customers was interested in relo'ing here, I found that the econ development people were ill-prepared regarding a comprehensive list of available properties. The only properties they had lined up were ones that owners had called into the Econ Devel. agency. There was no active partnerships I could see regarding local Real Estate / MLS agencies, banks, etc.
Get paid to chase, not close....very good point. I agree with the idea of a base salary/bonus for closing. Not that I ever see it happening.
Post a Comment