PWC - Part II

(Click on the picture to see a larger version, which is easier to read.)

All of them pretty much show the same trend. Although some are a little better and others a little worse, every piece of the data falls below the state unemployment average for the time period. This means the entire five county/three city region was experiencing a growth spurt in employment and a related reduction in unemployment. Manassas Park exhibited a tremendous drop in unemployment rates—from 3.7 to 1.9% in only one year. With all of this going on around PWC, there may have been new jobs locating there without anyone doing anything to attract them. I wondered about that. Bern claims he attracted 3,000 high tech jobs. While I didn’t check into the different industries’ numbers, I did check the civilian labor force figures.

	Prince William County
	Civilian
Year	Labor Force	Change
1997	131,789	0
1998	136,668	4,879
1999	142,169	5,501
2000	152,081	9,912
	Total Jobs Created	20292

The total job growth for Prince William County during the time when Bern was there was excellent, with almost 20,300 new employees entering the labor force. Of course by implementing a controversial growth barrier proposed by Bern, the county’s Board of Supervisors put a halt to some of the housing construction in their attempt to slow down county expenditures for schools, roads, libraries and parks as well as other county services and make the area more attractive to high-tech companies. The unemployment rate pretty much bottomed out and flat lined at 1.8 percent for the last two calendar years he was there (1999 and part of 2000). The economic development continued after he left. But the unemployment rate began to rise again and continued to go up—just like in every other county and city around PWC.

Go figure. One person can't do it all and one person can't stop it all. Sometimes stuff happens regardless of what we do.
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