Dallas facing employment gap Report suggests ways to get area back on economic track

[lewislynn]

Dallas facing employment gap Report suggests ways to get area back on economic track

11:32 PM CDT on Thursday, April 22, 2004

By ANGELA SHAH / The Dallas Morning News

Dallas, long an employment powerhouse, has seen that advantage erode, according to a new report on North Texas economic and workforce development.

The product of a six-month study by a task force of local business and civic leaders, the report paints a bleak picture for job creation unless business, civic and education leaders pull together to reverse the trend.

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Letter from the editor "There was a general sense that the economy isn't growing as quickly as before," said J. McDonald Williams, co-chairman of the group, called the Jobs Task Force.

"There are always a lot of anecdotes that surface about what's going on, about job training, economic development," he said. "We wanted to see if we can come up with short- and long-term plans to strengthen our economic base."

The report, "Closing the Employment Gap in the Dallas Area," suggests improvements in workforce and economic development, according to a copy obtained by The Dallas Morning News.

The task force, assembled last fall by Dallas Mayor Laura Miller and Dallas County Judge Margaret Keliher, offers a number of recommendations to bolster economic growth.

"This is definitely a wake-up call," said Ms. Keliher. "We need to do a better job of matching people to jobs."

The findings dovetail with a special project published Sunday by The News that revealed, among other things, a sputtering economic engine in Dallas.

Ms. Keliher, the mayor and consultants from the Boston Consulting Group are scheduled to meet this morning to discuss the report and decide on priorities, including unveiling the findings to the Dallas City Council and the Dallas County Commissioners Court.

"Dallas needs to get back to work," Ms. Miller said. "We need to have more companies relocating here, to go back to the days when Dallas had a lower unemployment rate than Texas and the U.S."

Reputation lost

Essentially, labor market weakness and a diffuse economic development strategy have meant that "Dallas has lost its reputation as a business friendly community," the report states.

Among the actions the task force recommends are devising an economic development strategy and bolstering the city's economic development department. At the onset of the economic downturn, the city slashed that budget by two-thirds and staff by half.

"We're making economic development at City Hall bigger and more effective," Ms. Miller said, referring to a $2.2 million city staff proposal to increase both staff and budget of the economic development department. "We'll take care of things at City Hall."

The report also calls for improved economic coordination. "We need a lot more good work out of the [Greater Dallas] chamber," Mr. Williams said. "Look at their results. They're not very good right now."

Among the task force's suggestions are developing programs to better match area workers to unfilled jobs and a school-to-career internship program for high school students.

Certainly, a fledgling economic recovery will help efforts. As the nation recovers from the tech bust, so does Dallas. Recent government jobs data show an uptick in payrolls. In the Dallas area, 9,100 jobs were created in March, dropping the unemployment rate to 6.2 percent, according to the Texas Workforce Commission.

It was the most new jobs created in the Dallas area since March 2002, when 9,300 were added. Trade, transportation and utilities accounted for 2,400 new jobs locally, followed by leisure and hospitality, with 1,900.

Positive outlook

Bernard Weinstein, director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of North Texas, cautioned against dismissing Dallas' historical labor market advantage. "There is no conceivable scenario in which the region's unemployment rate could reach double digits," he wrote in a December letter to Jan Hart Black, Greater Dallas Chamber president.

J. Puckett, vice president and director at the Boston Consulting Group, pointed out that there are weaknesses in the regional economy, which become greater "as you get to narrower and narrower geographic areas, especially on the Dallas side of the metroplex."

Nearly a year ago, Ms. Miller and Ms. Keliher asked Mr. Williams, chairman emeritus of Trammell Crow Co., and local businessman Tim Sambrano to head the task force and assess ways to improve the labor environment in the Dallas area.

The task force is composed of about three dozen businesses, community and civic institutions. The Boston Consulting Group did the study at no charge. They met for the first time last October.

E-mail ashah@dallasnews.com