Report: 22,000 Jobs Lost Countywide Since 2007

Nearly 22,000 jobs have been lost in San Mateo County since 2007 – grim news delivered by an independent report released yesterday.

“Indicators for a Sustainable San Mateo County” is an annual report published by San Mateo-based nonprofit , which monitors economic indicators and trends to provide fact-based information to local governments, business leaders and other stakeholders in the region’s economy. The group’s 2011 report focuses on the region’s job market and revealed that county firms have shed nearly 22,000 jobs in the past four years, especially in manufacturing and professional services.

Education and health services jobs were the only two sectors reporting moderate job gains during the same period, according to the report.

“The Indicator Report is put together by over 20 volunteers in an effort to report on sustainability issues as they relate to the , and the economy,” said Kari Binley, executive director of Sustainable San Mateo County. “The original idea behind the report is that what gets measured gets managed.”

She continued, “This year’s key indicator is ‘Economy & Jobs’ because of the obvious state of the economy, but also because of the tie-in with workforce development and the state of education and its inherent importance to economic development.”

The full report was released Wednesday at a reception at the Millbrae Library. Officials at the event sounded an optimistic note, pointing to several signs of a recovery since the 2009 data.

“What we’re seeing now is that large employers are more relaxed, and they’re looking to hire again,” said Redwood City council member Rosanne Foust.

She said the Sustainable San Mateo County report showed that many businesses – about a third – are planning to increase their workforce in the next few months.

The unemployment rate dropped from 9.4 to 8.4 percent between March 2010 and March 2011, according to the California Employment Development Department. Additionally, the average weekly wage for a worker in San Mateo County increased to $1,471 in 2009, after stagnating at $1,300 for the previous two years.

“We’re also seeing a drop in commercial vacancy rates,” Foust said.

However, although every job sector is expected to grow, the total number of jobs in the county in 2016 will still be below the 2001 peak, according to the report.

Rafael Reyes, a board member of Sustainable San Mateo County, stressed the need for collaboration between cities in the county to accelerate green job growth. For example, he said, local governments saved about 12 percent on their transaction costs recently when several cities in the Peninsula collaborated to buy solar panels for their municipal facilities.

Although solar panel projects proliferated in the last decade, the number of installations in the county last year was about half of the 2007 peak of 3,000.

Reyes thinks cities should step up their efforts to decrease dependency on oil. Combined, drivers in the county consume about 329 million gallons of gasoline per year, according to the California Department of Transportation.

“That’s about $1.3 billion a year. That’s money directly coming out of people’s pockets, and almost all of it is going abroad,” Reyes said.

Still, the poor economy seems to have helped lower greenhouse gas emissions. According to the report, total greenhouse gas emissions in San Mateo County decreased again last year, falling nearly 12 percent since 2003.

This summer, Sustainable San Mateo County plans to conduct a study on the growth and decline of companies in the county between 1992 and 2009 to determine the need for job training programs in specific segments.

To see the Indicator Report in pdf form, or to order a hard copy of the report, find the links on this page of the group’s website.

Bay City News contributed to this report.