Down but not out, Imperial County looks to a better future
Economic news has gone from worse to bad lately, and last week was no exception: New national figures showed a surprisingly high number of jobs created in March, the fourth straight month in which jobs were added across the country.
Another report, however, brought a sober reckoning closer to home.
Each month, the Associated Press creates something of a misery index, a measurement of “economic stress.” The calculations take together joblessness, foreclosures and bankruptcies, the last gasps registered as people fall off the edge of the precipice.
In 38 states, the AP said, economic stress levels stabilized or improved in March. In California, they worsened.
Counties were considered to be under stress when their scores hit 11 on a higher-is-worse range of 1 to 100. Of the 20 most stressed counties in the nation, 12 were in California. All of them recorded more than double the stress threshold.
Geographically, the results showed anew the schism in California, whether the state is slipping into a recession or trying to claw its way out of one.
On a map, the stressed California counties started with Imperial, the southern border county where the stress index was a stunning 31 points. The list leaped over the more populated urban areas until it hit Kern, and then careened across a wide swath of the Central Valley: Tulare, Fresno, Madera, San Benito, Merced, Stanislaus, San Joaquin. Then it jumped the government-fortified Sacramento region before landing in Lake, Sutter and Yuba counties.
None of them is the California of lore. Not one touches the Pacific; there are no movie studios or corporate headquarters and almost no urban sprawl. These are still mostly agricultural areas, and what they do is feed the rest of us.
Normally, those on such a list would cry with outrage at being stigmatized. Not so this time; if anything, the standings reflected what those in the Central Valley and its cousins in the agricultural north and south have been saying all along.
“We are still in the worst of the downturn,” said David Hosley, president of the Great Valley Center, a Modesto-based think tank on valley issues. “We are probably feeling our way into bottoming out. It could be this month, could be next month. We have not yet started to move up.”
The Great Valley Center and the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley have bundled bad news into comprehensive reports for a while now. Taken together, their portrait of inland California illustrates daunting difficulties, so hard to overcome because they are woven together so tightly.
Unemployment in the Central Valley always — in good times or bad — runs far above state and national averages, even as the area grows faster than anywhere else in California. The per-capita income in 2007 was less than $30,000 annually; if the valley were a state, it would have ranked 48th that year.
In the northern Valley, where good times lured Bay Area commuters into newly constructed neighborhoods, 7% of the homes were in foreclosure in 2008, almost twice the state average.
It is education — or lack of it — that makes the problems so difficult to untangle. According to the partnership, an eight-county consortium, college attendance by valley residents was 50% below the state average. Even getting within range was a problem, because high school dropout rates are also excessive.
In other words, those who have studied the valley say, natives often don’t have the education or resources to build businesses and create jobs. And businesses that might be convinced to move in from the outside balk at the wanting workforce.
“When you’re trying to do economic development and trying to attract industry, they ask what kind of workforce you have,” said Mike Dozier, a partnership executive.
So joblessness remains daunting: 22% in Merced County, 19% in Tulare and Stanislaus and Lake and Fresno counties.
Organizations like the partnership and the Great Valley Center are trying things large and small, like convincing students to take more advanced classes so that they might be drawn to college; persuading the educated to come home to help rebuild; and getting banks to loan money more easily. They are also trying to convince businesses to weigh in.
“Business people are going to have to make this a top priority,” said Hosley, “or they are not going to have the workforce. Then you’ll wish that you were willing to pay higher taxes to have the school system improve.”
By most counts, the most dire area in California is Imperial County, the border straddler east of San Diego that goes unnoticed by most of California until an earthquake hits or something goes awry with the lettuce crop. There, unemployment in March hit 27%.
Louis Fuentes, the chairman of the Board of Supervisors, exudes optimism nonetheless. Proposals he describes illustrate both the moxie that will be required to boost the forgotten counties and how little of the future is wholly in their control.
If the croplands are going fallow, victims of a shrinking water supply, why not turn them into green energy farms, collecting solar, wind and geothermal energy?
“There’s a lot of potential here, but we didn’t have the technology before,” Fuentes said, and now they do. The problem: All the energy they want to produce would be sent to the coast through a single transmission line, which is now the subject of a nasty environmental squabble in San Diego. Imperial’s projects bank on approval for the line.
Another proposal is expanding an existing airport into a cargo port, relieving the stress on overburdened San Diego facilities. County officials last week approved a contract for a consultant to study the site.
“We’re out here, saying how many thousands of acres do you want?” Fuentes said.
In a place that has always relied on the boom-and-bust seasons of the farms, expanding the economy into non-agricultural areas “eventually … will create stability,” he said.
But the air cargo plan, too, relies on decisions made outside Imperial’s border, at the federal and regional levels.
Still, Fuentes is an example of what the valley activists north of him are trying to pull off. Raised in Calexico, he studied development and economics at UC Berkeley, and after graduation he found his way home.
He said he remembered thinking, “If I manage to survive Berkeley and I’m still in one piece, I should come back.”
“This area formed us, the people here,” he said.
Each Sunday, The Week examines implications of major stories. It is archived at latimes.com/theweek
