Prince William County created or imported jobs faster than any other big county in the nation last year. Yet some say many of those jobs are not the kinds the county needs most.
The strong growth in Virginia's second-most populous county camouflages problems that many residents experience: Half the county's 170,000 workers must still cross the county line every day for employment.
"A lot of our growth has been in retail, and those jobs only pay $8 or $9 an hour," said John Hampton, owner of Express Personnel Services Inc. in Manassas. "We've had a lot of small professional companies come in -- five employees here, 10 there -- but together it's significant. Still, a single Target store employs 300 people at a stroke."
So Prince William has to figure out how to keep more residents working within the county and at better-paying jobs.
"The key word is balance," said E.M. Risse of consultants Synergy/Planning Inc. in Warrenton. "You have to balance jobs with housing with amenities like open space."
While the county is trying to lure more high-tech jobs, including offering more than $4 million in incentives to giant drug company Eli Lilly and Co. to build an insulin plant, the latest figures show Prince William's largest employer in the first quarter of 2004 was county government, which includes schools.
By contrast, Fairfax County, the local model of success in high technology, counts professional and technical services companies as its largest employers. Government was second.
On the positive side, professional and technical service jobs in Prince William grew faster than retailing jobs in the latest period available, up almost 12 percent to nearly 6,000 jobs through the first quarter of 2004. Retail, on the other hand, grew only 8 percent (although it totaled almost 17,000 workers, or three times as many as professional and technical services).
And unemployment is dropping again, to levels that would be the envy in other parts of the country but still don't approach the rates seen in Prince William in the late 1990s through 2001, when it was often below 2 percent. Unemployment slid to 2.2 percent in October and November, with 3,700 people out of work, down from 2.4 percent in September and 2.7 percent a year ago.
Two percent unemployment qualifies as a labor shortage, said William F. Mezger, chief economist at the Virginia Employment Commission.
Mezger said unemployment here rose several years ago partly because of the technology crash in 2001 and the problems after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when many airlines had financial troubles. Many county residents used to work at Dulles International Airport, Mezger said.
As Prince William grows, unemployment will drop still further, "barring a major airline failure," Mezger said.
Low unemployment will help increase wages, which aren't growing nearly as fast as the number of jobs. Prince William led every large county in the country, with 8 percent growth in jobs for the 12-month period ending in March, the latest available, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported recently. That was 10 times the national average, the bureau said. Some economists caution that it is easier to post such large gains on a relatively small labor force compared to, say, Fairfax County.
In wages, it was another story. Pay grew only 2.2 percent in Prince William through the first quarter of 2004 from the same period in 2003, to $637 a week. The county ranked 215 out of the nation's 317 largest counties surveyed by the bureau. The national average pay rose almost 4 percent, to $758 a week. Pay in nearby Fairfax County rose almost 5 percent, to $1,156 a week.
The disparity between growth in pay and jobs is on the minds of Prince William officials.
"Jobs are high on our list of concerns," said Liz Via, Manassas's director of community development. "And we recognize that there needs to be a mix of office and retail because you want jobs for all your residents, professionals as well as service people.
"But we also need to expand the tax base, and you get more tax dollars from a retailer than you do an office" because of the sales tax retailers charge, Via said. "On the other hand, the offices have the better-paying jobs."
Prince William County is now about where Fairfax was in the early 1980s, said Stephen S. Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. That's when Fairfax started to shift from jobs based on population growth to more sophisticated tech and telecom jobs at companies whose markets were largely beyond the county line.
In about 15 years, the western half of Prince William, where much of the county's available land is, will look like the Fairfax municipalities of Herndon and Reston do today, Fuller said.
In 1999, Prince William hired Fuller to forecast what its budget would look like if it reaches Fairfax proportions in 20 years or so.
"So clearly, that's what they're thinking, too," he said.
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