Interesting Paul Beebe story in yesterday's Salt Lake Tribune, dovetailing somewhat with Dan Schroeder's seminal 7/29/12 writeup, and putting the focus on Ogden City's still-troubling unemployment statistics. Despite the ample Boss Godfrey quotes, this "ain't no puff piece," folks. Here's the lede:
The first year of the Great Recession was pretty easy on Ogden. For most of 2008, unemployment wavered around 5 percent of the labor force, pretty good for Utah’s seventh-largest city, which had seen far higher rates of joblessness earlier in the decade.Read the full Trib story here:
That changed in December, when the jobless rate exploded. In just 30 days, it jumped to 11 percent from 5.3 percent in November.
Thus began an extraordinarily difficult time for Ogden. Over the next two years, the jobless rate averaged above 10 percent. For a year it was 11 percent or higher. And in July and August 2009, after the recession officially ended, the unemployment reached 12.5 percent — highest of any city in Utah with a population of 25,000 or more.
So what about it, O Gentle Ones? Has the Ogden City jobs economy made any significant net progress during the past four years? Are we even treading water? If you were the philosopher-king/emperor of Ogden City, with unlimited dictatorial power, what changes would you make to improve Ogden City's still-dismal unemployment picture?
