Unemployment on a downswing in Fayette region
John F. Brothers | Herald-Standard
Construction of the new Cobblestone Hotel & Suites is nearing completion on North First Street in Connellsville.
Mike Tony | Herald-Standard
Washington County’s average wages across all industries for 2015 exceeded the state average while those in Fayette and Westmoreland counties did not, according to the state Department of Labor and Industry.
Unemployment has been on a downswing this summer in much of Southwestern Pennsylvania.
That includes the county that had the highest seasonally adjusted rate in June in the commonwealth, Fayette at 8 percent, down from 8.6 percent in May and 8.8 percent in April but up from 7.3 percent in June 2015.
While a new hotel in Connellsville will provide some new jobs, the overall reason for a declining jobless rate in Fayette County may be a turnaround in the gas industry, a reason for optimism also in Greene County where at least two new wells are to be tapped this fall.
“We’re starting to see a bit of a rebound in the shale gas industry,” Fay-Penn Economic Development Council Executive Director Bob Shark said. “It’s not significant but it has bottomed out.”
The rate for Pennsylvania as a whole stayed at 5.6 percent through July, with the combined seasonally adjusted rate for the seven-county Pittsburgh metropolitan area remaining at 5.5 percent through June.
Greene, which isn’t part of the seven-county Pittsburgh region, saw its seasonally adjusted jobless rate drop from 8.1 percent in April to 7.8 in May and 7.3 in June.
Coal is a factor throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania, but Shark said it is less so in Fayette than in neighboring counties, including Somerset which has lost hundreds of coal jobs in recent years.
“They really got whacked,” the Fay-Penn director said. “You have a lot of unemployed coal miners, expecting the business to return.”
Elsewhere, Shark said, “health care is always big. There are manufacturing jobs available (but) some education and training is required to have those jobs.”
The problem of job openings with a lack of qualified people to fill them has been a focus since May 4 for the ongoing “Inflection Point: Supply, Demand and the Future of Work in the Pittsburgh Region” project of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development.
The project seeks to tackle the prospect that, with “baby boomers” retiring, few skilled workers being available to take their places and a slow inward migration into the Pittsburgh region, that the 10 counties around Pittsburgh may be 80,000 short of what’s needed to fill the jobs that will exist 10 years from now.
Conference spokesman Philip Cynar said that there have been meetings with more than 2,500 individuals over the past four months, including economic development officials, educators, civic leaders, elected officials and others.
“We’ve gotten a lot of excellent feedback and have been logging all of it to further inform our efforts to reverse the region’s particular workforce supply-demand issue,” Cynar said. “The dialogue will be ongoing, and we’ll be having more updates to share in coming weeks and months.”
Adding emphasis to conference concerns is the planned Shell Cracker Plant in Monaca, Beaver County, a project likely to have far reaching effects, state Community and Economic Development Secretary Dennis Davin told roundtables in three area counties late last month.
Other businesses continue to do well in and around Fayette County, including agriculture and tourism.
“Summer is always hopping in the Laurel Highlands, but once fall begins to settle in, we can expect to welcome plenty of overnight and day visitors,” Laurel Highlands Tourist Bureau Director of Public Relations Anna Weltz said.
“Our region (also including Westmoreland and Somerset counties) offers a tremendous variety of fall festivals and events and Halloween haunting events for all ages like the Connellsville Mum Festival, Brews and Brats at Nemacolin, Springs Folk Festival, FestiFall at Friendship Hill, Idlewild’s HallowBoo and more,” Weltz said.
It also offers numerous places for lodging with at least one more that may be ready early this fall, but no later than year’s end. Weltz pointed to the three-story, 54-room Cobblestone Hotel and Suites being built in the former Connellsville Bottling plant site at 325 N. First St., near the Great Allegheny Passage and Youghiogheny River in Connellsville.
Fairchance Construction is the contractor while Hotel d2 Services of Pittsburgh is the developer of the $4.5 million project.
“Once it opens we are anticipating roughly 12-15 (job) positions,” Hotel d2’s vice president of development Chris Rosselot said. While the city has some lodging choices including bed-and-breakfasts, the Cobblestone is Connellsville’s first hotel in recent memory.
Fay-Penn also is involved in development, including road paving scheduled after Labor Day in the University Business Park near Penn State-Fayette, The Eberly Campus, in North Union Township.
“We’re working with Penn State to establish a business accelerator in this facility,” Shark said, referring to plans for renovating 6,000 square feet of Fay-Penn’s headquarters in that park. “We’re pursuing some funding sources. Two businesses are interested in our accelerator as well.”
However, the Fay-Penn director sees a downside to future development in the University Business Park, from a proposed methadone clinic in the former ProLogic building that is near the park as well as the state police barracks.
“That will have detrimental to our ability to attract businesses,” Shark said of a park now home to the state police, Speedway, Slater Engineering and Advanced Acoustic Concepts, as well as other businesses that rent space in the Fay-Penn headquarters building.
Buckeye Realty LLC would own the facility in the former ProLogic location and Fayette Treatment Center would operate it, pending a decision by the Fayette County Zoning Hearing Board expected by early October.
Fay-Penn also is trying to fill its other industrial parks.
“We have at least two different organizations interested in sites at the Dunbar park,” Shark said, referring to the 80-acre, 11-lot first phase of the Dunbar Township Business Park just a short distance up and across Route 119 from the University Business Park.
He declined to give further details about the prospective first tenants in the park located adjacent to the Fayette County fairgrounds.
“The most developed park we have is the Fayette Business Park (in Fairchance),” the Fay-Penn director said. “We have 22 companies there now and roughly 1,700 employees work there.”
Fifty acres remain in Fairchance and Shark said there is “one interested party” for some of those acres. Fay-Penn also has an undeveloped property in Springhill Township, near the West Virginia border.