RICHLAND, Wash. – Here
are some job numbers hot off the calculator: The Tri-Cities in
southcentral Washington had 34-hundred more non-farm jobs last December
than it had in 2008. That adds up to 3-point-6 percent GROWTH -- during
one of the greatest recessions our country has ever seen. Some of the
Tri-Cities' prosperity is linked to the nearly 2-billion-dollars of
federal stimulus money pouring into Hanford Nuclear Reservation. But
experts say there is more to it than that.
Richland Correspondent Anna King explains.
Listen here:
Across the Northwest the construction industry has been devastated. But not in the Tri-Cities.
This job site in north Richland is littered with trucks, power cords, piles of drywall. There I met Alex Popov. He's a dark-eyed framer with an accent from his native Moldova [Mal-do-va]. He says his cousins are struggling in western Washington, but in the Tri-Cities …
Alex Popov: “It's really good. I mean compared to all the big cities over on the Westside, and some other states, we're doing pretty good.”
Popov says it's not like the boom times. Now he and his team frame 7 houses a month instead of 10. But he's still working overtime and he hasn't had to cut back on his family's spending.
Alex Popov: “It's still going. It's a little bit slowed down but prices on the houses have overall stayed the same. They've dropped a little bit but not much.”
The world's first large nuclear reactor,
the Hanford plant produced the plutonium used in the atomic bomb
dropped on Nagasaki in World War II. (Pictured: the plant's north
reactor.) by Jack Lyon
So who's buying these new houses in a down economy?
Part of the answer is just a bit north on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Here workers are ripping things down instead of building things up. This ginormous basin once provided cooling water to the K West Reactor that made plutonium during the Cold War. Now it's history.
Out here in a hard hat, Mike Swartz looks like a guy who tears things apart for a living. Stocky, with a thick silver loop through his ear. Swartz says this project was ready to go. The federal stimulus money made it happen years earlier than planned.
Mike Swartz: “Yeah, we put a
lot of guys to work. We picked up here probably another 70 workers. Due
to recovery act funds. They are all new hires.”
Gary Petersen: “I mean, you don't often see 1.96 billion dollars come to a community.”
That's Gary Petersen. He helps run the Tri-City Development Council.
Gary Petersen: “I mean that's pretty good. Damn good.”
He reminds me that the nation's largest federal construction project is also on Hanford. That's called the vitrification plant or the “vit” plant by locals. It's a facility designed to treat radioactive sludge. Total pricetag? So far, $12 billion dollars.
But since the bust of the 1980s the Tri-Cities has been diversifying into industries that are still OK. It's no longer all nuclear [new-klee-ur] and farm fields. That's according to Dean Schau, the state of Washington's economist for the Tri-Cities region.
Dean Schau: “If you go into a bleak economic environment, people have to eat, people tend to buy wine, people tend to have to go to heath care services…” But Schau doesn't believe the stimulus money has created thousands of new jobs at Hanford. It's more likely that a lot of jobs just got saved.Dean Schau: “And if I'm wrong, I'll eat my calculator or something I suppose.”
Schau
says there are still many skilled and highly educated people who can't
find jobs in the Tri-Cities. Schau's got plenty of work, but he says
economic uncertainty still persists even here. He points to his own
zip-up sweatshirt. He says that was his major purchase of 2009.
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