Ashtabula County residents who are employed need to be particularly thankful this holiday.

The national recession has nurtured unemployment rates the likes of which Ashtabula County has not been seen since the mid-1980s. The highest rate thus far this year came in July, when 7,100 county residents, or 14.3 percent of the workforce, were unemployed.

In October, the county’s unemployment rate settled down somewhat, to 12.8 percent, more than 2 points above the state rate of 10.5 percent and the national rate of 10.2 (seasonally adjusted rates).

Looking back 30 years ago, to November 1979, the county’s unemployment rate was 6.5 percent. Just one year later, it had jumped to 12.3 percent, and it continued to rise until November 1982, when it hit a staggering 21.3 percent.

Unemployment continued high in the county until early 1987, when the rate finally dropped below 10 percent. The county struggled for another 13 years to achieve a semblance of full recovery, as measured against the national rate. The closest it came was in 2000, when the rate fell to 4.4 percent in November. A year later, it had risen to 7 percent and remained near that level until last year, when it started creeping up.

So, with many economists declaring that the Great Recession has ended, will Ashtabula County rebound with the rest of the nation, or will it follow a historical pattern and stay mired in double-digit inflation for another six or seven years, followed by a “recovery” period that spans a generation?

Joseph Mayernick, executive director of Growth Partnership for Ashtabula County, feels the economy will rebound much faster.

“I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to take seven years to get out of this,” he said.

Mayernick said the scenarios are different: In the early 1980s, the county’s economy was heavily focused on jobs connected to the domestic auto industry.

“About 10,000 jobs in the county were in transportation at one time,” Mayernick said. Today, that number is around 1,000, if that, he said.

“There’s been some diversification (of the local economy),” Mayernick said, which gives him hope that the county will be able to recover more quickly.

Indeed, he said that in the past two months, there have been “a lot more inquiries, people are visiting the county and showing interest in investing in equipment and adding jobs over and above what we have here now.” Mayernick said the recovery of the automotive and housing industries bodes well for county employers who supply those industries, and he is seeing that already happen.

Jim Timonere, executive director of the Ashtabula Area Chamber of Commerce, also feels we are heading in the right direction but, as the national pundits predict, it’s going to be a slow recovery.

“The good news is that we have employers here who have tried to diversify their product lines,” Timonere said. He said some companies are starting to restore people who were on reduced hours to full-time employment. Because unemployment data make no distinction between part-time and full-time workers, employees who work more hours won’t change the statistics.

“I think it’s going to rebound a little, but I don’t think it’s going to rebound a whole ton,” Timonere says.

Learning from the past

Common Pleas Court Judge Al Mackey, who was a county commissioner from 1974 to 1989, says if a pattern has emerged from the county’s economic history, it is that unemployment rates here have usually been at or near the top tier of those in the nation or state. To put it another way, Ashtabula County has been the caboose of the economic recovery train.

“Too often in the history of Ashtabula County, it’s been too little too late,” Mackey said. “We miss some of the prime opportunities; that’s been our history. We need the kind of leadership that seeks opportunities.”

Mackey said the county’s leadership needs to come to grips with the fact you always will be losing jobs and the supply of jobs needs to replenished and grown; otherwise, the best you can hope for is a stagnant economy. He said economic development must be forward-thinking and aggressive.

“You got to be out there, promoting and marketing this county all the time as a place to do business,” he said.

Eber Wright, who headed up economic development efforts in the county during the 1970s, said the county lacks the innovation, investment and leadership it had during the postwar years, when banks, utility firms and industries had their headquarters in the county and their leaders were directly invested in the communities.

“There is no Bob Morrison (founder of MFG) here (today). He created the whole plastics industry in the county. We’re still living off what he did,” Wright said.

Wright feels the county’s economic leadership needs to focus on the raw products produced in the county — hardwood, milk and other farm products — and develop processing opportunities that generate jobs. He also feels that more needs to be done with the latent talent of the county’s young people, especially those who attend the Ashtabula County Joint Vocational School and have an interest in starting a business or producing a product here.

If there’s another lesson to be learned from the 1980s recession, it could be that the county made it too easy for unemployed people to hang on and perhaps adapt to a life of public support. Timonere said he’s concerned that the county’s unemployment rate is skewed by people who are able to work but are unwilling, who have come to Ashtabula County to live as wards of our excellent human-services programs. Timonere says this is not a local urban myth: Every week, the chamber gets several calls from people who say “we hear you have good government services up there, and we want to move there,” Timonere said.

“We do a good job providing these services,” he said. “But there are some people here who take advantage of that system. That’s the one area that’s never reflected (in unemployment figures). But if you look at the household incomes, it’s reflected in that.”