Bouncing Back … Slowly
You would be forgiven for thinking that Clark County, which has one of Washington state’s highest unemployment rates, has been written off by businesses as an exurb of Portland with a sales tax. But there are signs that this region on the north bank of the Columbia River is starting to rebound, if at its own pace.
Looking beyond the immediate downturn in the economy, Farwest Steel found room to grow and the ingredients for consolidating its regional operations in Clark County, where the company is planning a $30 million fabrication and distribution plant.
“We’re seeing signs that things are getting better,” says John Worstell, vice president of manufacturing and operations for Eugene, Ore.-based Farwest. “We’ve got a lot of confidence in the Northwest.”
Farwest’s expansion is among several indicators that the county may be starting a gradual rebound.
Along with the Farwest complex, which will be built on land purchased from the Port of Vancouver and eventually employ up to 228 people, mining company BHP Billiton in August selected the port as its preferred location for a potash export facility that could create at least 60 full-time jobs and handle more than 8 million metric tons of cargo annually. Port officials and BHP Billiton are negotiating a lease agreement for the project, slated to begin in 2012 and be completed by April 2015 on roughly 60 acres of the port’s Terminal 5.
Other recent economic development activity in Clark County includes:
• A $44.6 million waterfront access project in downtown Vancouver that will lay the groundwork for more than $1 billion worth of retail, office and residential space on a 32-acre former Boise Cascade site;
• An 18-acre, $40 million shopping center in east Vancouver, set to open in early 2011, that is projected to create roughly 500 new jobs;
• Construction of a two-building campus in Camas for Fisher Investments, which currently has 325 employees in Vancouver and may relocate its headquarters from California to the new site.
Despite these signs of growth, local experts say the near-term economic outlook in Clark County remains grim. Its unemployment rate in September stood at 12.2 percent, compared with 8.6 percent statewide and 9.2 percent nationally. “We’ve lost 7 percent of our employment base—that’s about 9,000 jobs” in the current recession, says Scott Bailey, southwest Washington regional economist at the state Employment Security Department. “I just don’t see much, locally or nationally, generating
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