By Jessica Borders
FAIRMONT — According to a West Virginia University study, Harrison County is surpassing the state and nation in job growth.
The WVU College of Business and Economics’ Bureau of Business and Economic Research recently released the January 2010 issue of the Harrison County Economic Monitor.
The report, sponsored by the Harrison County Development Authority, is in its second year and is published three times annually.
“The idea behind the publication is to several times a year track the local labor market in terms of employment growth, the unemployment rate, and also local construction activity,” said George Hammond, associate director of the BBER. “And in addition, a major part of the publication is to gather data and publish the results on the local cost of living.”
In 2007, the Harrison County Development Authority and the Harrison County Commission organized a large meeting to discuss the significant issues in the community, said David Cutlip, president of the authority. The county realized that it didn’t fully understand what was happening economically within its borders.
He said the authority hired the BBER to help with some strategic planning sessions and to start developing demographic material that the county could use to guide itself in the future. The result was the Economic Monitor, which gives a snapshot of how the Harrison County economy is doing and where improvements could be made, Cutlip said.
Hammond and student Peter Shirley worked on one section of the
most recent Harrison County Economic Monitor. This portion of the report was titled “Harrison County Manages Small Employment Gain, Beats State and National Averages.”
The research, which was for the third quarter of 2009, showed that Harrison County employment grew during the previous four quarters and was up 0.6 percent, which represented modest growth, Hammond said. This employment gain was much better than the job losses of 3.3 percent for West Virginia and 4.3 percent for the nation.
However, unemployment in Harrison County doubled — from 3.5 percent to 7 percent — during that time. But this was still below the state average of 8.3 percent and national rate of 9.6 percent, he said.
“The county is feeling the effects of the global slowdown,” Hammond said.
He said Harrison County has seen job growth in construction, health care and government, which has helped to offset job losses in other sectors.
“The county has done a bit better than expected,” Hammond said. “I would have guessed that it would have followed more closely overall state results.”
Cutlip said he was pleased that the county experienced job growth, but he still wants to see the unemployment figures go down. Harrison County imports more than 10,000 workers into the county per day and exports more than 4,000, which means that other counties impact the unemployment figures, he said.
“We’re pleasantly surprised that we’re holding our own, but we’re not where we want to be because we’ve got some struggles to get our own unemployment back down to that 3 percent range,” Cutlip said.
Amy Higginbotham, economist for the BBER, focused on the Harrison County cost of living for the third quarter of 2009 in her Economic Monitor section, titled “What do Lettuce, Coca Cola, and Advil have in Common?” She is the manager of the Harrison County ACCRA survey.
Higginbotham used the ACCRA Cost of Living Index, which the Council for Community and Economic Research compiles, to price about 60 items throughout the county.
“The ACCRA Cost of Living index is an index of cost of living by using a market basket of goods and services,” she said.
Over a three-day period in July 2009, Higginbotham physically went to grocery stores, gas stations, doctors offices, real estate agencies, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, bowling alleys, and movie theaters to do the pricing.
After collecting this data each quarter, she compares Harrison County’s numbers to the national average and to the more than 300 areas in the United States that participate in the pricing.
“I went and looked at all 61 items to find out what’s going on,” Higginbotham said. “It was interesting that Harrison County is remaining below average.”
Harrison County was the cheapest out of the state’s four participating areas — which also include Morgantown, Charleston and the Martinsburg area — for several basic items at the grocery store, she said. Lettuce, a two-liter bottle of Coca Cola, and a bottle of Advil were found to be priced the lowest in Harrison County. In addition, the costs of these products in the county were cheaper than the national average.
In terms of the total cost of living, the county was below the national average as well as Morgantown’s rate. However, Harrison County’s cost of living is actually above that of Charleston and Martinsburg, Higginbotham said.
Each Economic Monitor issue as well as other studies of the Harrison County Development Authority are available at www.hcdawv.com.
People can visit www.bber.wvu.edu to access the Harrison County Economic Monitor and various BBER reports. The BBER also does the Morgantown MSA Economic Monitor.
E-mail Jessica Borders at jborders@timeswv.com.
