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Thursday, May 17, 2012
Regional Focus: June 2006
Ahead of the Pack
A stellar job market and industry base are spurring growth — and plaudits
Story by Wes Sander
Ed Graves likes to point out that the traffic flow along Interstate 80 appears more balanced these days. It’s a handy visual barometer, and a rewarding one: Graves sees almost as many commuters entering Placer County each morning as he sees commuters exiting.
It didn’t look that way a dozen years ago. Graves took the job of economic development director for Placer County in 1994, during an economic slump that was slowing Placer’s employment growth. The region was different then, and the outbound commute certainly showed a greater edge.
Since then, Placer has gained jobs at rates sufficient to rank it among the state’s — even the nation’s — top counties for employment numbers. Sure, the county gets help from its given attributes: an agreeable (and often spectacular) natural setting, outdoor recreation opportunities and Interstate 80, an economic aorta that threads the county for most of its length.
But observers say there’s more to it. They laud local jurisdictions at the county’s western end for their cooperative and proactive approach to promoting a well-rounded industry base that is less dependent on Sacramento than it used to be.
“You’ve got five members of the Board of Supervisors who are very proactive in attracting primary-wage-earner jobs to Placer County,” Graves says. “It’s all in how you allocate your resources, and we have statistics to prove that it’s worked.”
Graves now works as an independent consultant. He retired in February from a 36-year career, then spent the rest of the ski season on the slopes of Lake Tahoe, enjoying one of his county’s key recreation industries.
When Graves arrived in 1994, the county had gained only 100 jobs the previous year and had lost 700 jobs two years before that. But Placer rebounded by mid-decade, and in the 10 years following Graves’s arrival, its job market grew by 87 percent, far beyond the Sacramento region’s 32 percent and California’s 19 percent.
In 2005, Placer’s annual average unemployment rate of 4 percent was topped only by Marin County’s 3.9 percent and Orange County’s 3.8 percent, according to California’s Employment Development Department.
Now millions of dollars are being spent on new developments at eastern Placer ski resorts like Squaw Valley and Northstar-at-Tahoe, and Tahoe golf seems to be outpacing skiing in its ability to pull visitors up the highway each month — visitors who visit many local businesses along the way.
Placer’s transportation infrastructure is a boon — it provides its industries with quick access to goods and its residents easy access to the Bay Area, Napa and Sonoma — as is its quality of life, which has attracted two large retirement communities — Del Webb’s Sun City Roseville and Sun City Lincoln Hills — that have brought “thousands and thousands of people to the county who want to shop and who have money to spend,” as Graves puts it.
Residential growth has made construction one of the county’s top four growth sectors. (The others are government; leisure and hospitality; and trade, transportation and utilities.) Employment in construction grew 244 percent between 1994 and 2004, and business development is not expected to slow in the next few years as the space separating Roseville, Rocklin and Lincoln — which form western Placer’s driving engine — will soon begin to fill following the completion of a growth plan that’s still being smoothed out.
Placer is also venturing into extended education. “The No. 1 thing that we felt was missing in south Placer 10 years ago was education,” Graves says. “To send our kids to school, we had to send them away. To get somebody with a bachelor’s degree, we had to import them.” Now the county is expecting a satellite campus of California State University, Sacramento, in addition to a private university expected to arrive in the near future.
Western Placer has thrived on a balance of new and old industries, from the area’s original railroad industry to the latest in the medical and high-tech industries. Roseville originated as a railroad town, and its switching yard, now owned by Union Pacific, is once again going strong: after a two-year renovation in the late ‘90s, the reopened rail yard, responsible for 1,100 jobs, has become one of the city’s top employers.
Steve Perez, who chairs the economics department at Sac State, spoke to a gathering of Placer’s business leaders and local officials in March after helping to complete a study of the county’s economy with the Sacramento Regional Research Institute.
The study includes the opinions of employers, who said the most highly valued county asset was Placer’s natural setting. They also pointed out transportation, education — in local school districts as well as the area’s colleges — and proactive business-boosting policies by local jurisdictions.
Despite projections of continued growth, there are concerns to be addressed, among them the area’s heavy traffic, which could deter development in the future. But all regions have challenges.
“It’s a county that has actively tried to take advantage of its advantages,” Perez says. “I don’t think you can diminish their effort in accomplishing those goals.”
