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County political, business leaders deal with curtailing economy
Unemployment figures released last Friday by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics put the national rate at 7.6 percent for January, a 0.4 percent increase from the previous month.While Virginia was still better than the national average (5.4 percent in December), unemployment has risen here, too, in terms of percentage and raw numbers.
Virginia had its largest labor force base ever at 4,159,473 and largest number of unemployed at 222,656, according to December 2008 numbers released by the BLS. However, the number of employed — 3,936,817 — is the lowest it has been since July 2007.
Locally, the impact can be seen in places like the Richmond-based national company Circuit City collapsing. Its long-standing Manassas location closed in December and now is an empty storefront. The Woodbridge store is due to close by the end of March.
But there have been some improvements locally.
The housing market has rebounded significantly, and the New York-based grocery chain Wegmans opened both of its two new stores in the county last year in Gainesville and Woodbridge.
“Everybody tends to look at the negatives and not pay as much attention” to the positives, said Steve Nelson, chairman of the Chamber of Commerce for the greater Prince William County area. He later added, “Prince William County will surprise people over the next 10 to 15 years with what we have here.”
Board of County Supervisors chairman Corey Stewart is setting up an all-volunteer commission consisting of local business leaders with the intent of figuring out strategies for making it easier for small-business entrepreneurs to do business here.
“We currently do not have an organization that does that,” Stewart said Monday. “The board hopes to create something like this in the next couple of months.”
Stewart, who is responsible for setting the meeting agendas for the BOCS, said he would like to have a board-approved commission operating within six months. He essentially wants it to serve as the small-business-focused version of the department of economic development, which is charged with bringing in big businesses.
In the meantime, he said the county can expect to slash real estate tax rates for homeowners by 15 percent, which is about $600 for the average home. One of the keys for getting out of the recession rut is simply for consumers to have confidence in spending, according to Nelson.
“A lot of the small businesses have been seeing a slowdown for better than a year now,” he said.
The local Chamber chairman and owner of the Manassas-based company Junction Travel said that most of what he has read points to an economic recovery coming within six to 18 months.
It’s figuring out when the turnaround will begin that has troubled lawmakers and economists alike.
When more big businesses begin to recover and expand, according to Stewart, the county will not have to fight with its neighbors so much for those new jobs, unlike with teachers.
“Our biggest competitors are not Fairfax or Loudoun County. We’re competing as a region,” said Stewart.
He said big businesses are more inclined to set up headquarters in Fairfax, as did the Hilton hotel chain. Prince William, however, is more suited for life sciences and government facilities that need a lot of real estate “that you couldn’t afford to do in Fairfax,” said Stewart.
Examples of that from the last two years include the FBI, Northern Virginia Resident Agency, and Covance, Inc., which replaced a defunct deal with pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly in 2007.
“We’ve got some good sections of land that have been left untapped to allow this growth,” said Nelson.
County Finance Director Chris Martino said the individual impact of Circuit City closing in Prince William will result in obvious unemployment, but will not drastically affect the county’s revenues, as there will still be real estate levies collected from the property owners.
“We will lose some jobs," Martino said. "They are not our target jobs.”
The targeted white-collar, high-paying jobs targeted by the county’s department of economic development are still focused on Innovation Park.
“That, to me, is the fruit that’s hanging out there on the western side. It’s not ‘Innovation or bust’; it’s the fruit that’s out there,” said Nelson.
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