Little good to be found in job-creation survey

The best that can be said about the recent job-creation figures in the Milken Institute's Best Performing Cities Index is that the Mahoning Valley has almost nowhere to go but up. The metropolitan area comprising Mahoning and Trumbull counties in Ohio and Mercer County in Pennsylvania was listed 199 among 200 areas in the statistical breakdown of job creation in 2005.
The really bad new is that being at or near the bottom in job creation is nothing new for the Mahoning Valley. We've been there before. In fact, when we jumped from the basement in 2003 to "all the way up" to 174 in 2004, it obviously wasn't an indication of any great strides in job creation. It was more of a statistical blip on the screen.
Those kinds of things happen in surveys such as these. Indeed, the Ocala, Fla. area went from 98 in 2004 to 13 in 2005; Bremerton-Silverdale, Wash., went from 122 in 2004 to 18 in 2005. Huge gains such as those don't reflect an area's true economic well-being as much as they belie statistical aberrations.
But people in the Mahoning Valley -- indeed, people from throughout Ohio and the Midwest -- cannot write off their low scores as aberrations. No statistical accident consistently places Sun Belt states in the top tiers of these job-creation surveys and Rust Belt states in the bottom.
Five years of losses
Local economic development specialists do not need a California think tank's national survey to tell them that the Mahoning Valley has consistently lost jobs since the third quarter of 2000. That is more than five years of net job losses. More troublesome, it is largely manufacturing jobs that are being lost. To the extent that jobs are being created, they are too often in the lower-paying service sector.
According to Milken, these days jobs are being created in areas that have good weather, low costs, a growing population, a strong tourism industry and little heavy manufacturing. The top-rated area, Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, Fla., has all those things, plus a diversified economy, with heavy aerospace and defense-related industries.
While Florida is at the top of the list, with five of the six top spots, Ohio and Michigan are battling for the hindquarters. Five of the bottom 10 are from Michigan; four are from Ohio. No Ohio, Pennsylvania or Michigan area is in the top 100. Lancaster, Pa., comes closest at 102; Columbus is Ohio's best at 135.
Reversing this trend is not going to be easy.
As Reid Dulberger, executive vice president of the Regional Chamber, says, we can't move sunshine, seashores or mountains to the Mahoning Valley.
What the state needs is a favorable tax climate, a more highly educated population and a plan to get the biggest bang for the buck -- either in encouraging start-up companies, helping existing companies grow or attracting companies to the area.
That, obviously, is easier said than done. But it's marginally easier than moving mountains.