County Unemployment Rate Declines to 7.4% During October : Economy: Pace of job creation, experts say, indicates that recovery is gaining momentum, despite layoffs.

Jobs are being created in Ventura County at a pace not seen in years, and non-farm employment is at its highest level in almost half a decade, economic analysts said Friday.

The analysis came after the state’s Employment Development Department reported that the county’s jobless rate dropped to 7.4% in October, compared with 7.6% the previous month and 7.5% the same month last year.

The news means that the county’s economic recovery is gaining momentum, despite reports Friday that more than 250 manufacturing workers in Oxnard and Newbury Park are losing their jobs, experts said.

About 6,400 jobs have been created in the county since last October--about 3,400 of them materializing last month alone, state figures show.

“If this job growth continues, it will exceed our predictions for the year,” said Mark Schniepp, who heads the Economic Forecast Project at UC Santa Barbara. “This is one of the better reports going all the way back to 1991.”

Agriculture turned in the best performance of all economic sectors, with total farm employment at an all-time high for the month, Schniepp said. Farm employment in October was almost 13% higher than a year earlier.

Non-farm employment hit 235,000 in October.

“It is the first time it’s been at that level since December, 1990, when it was 236,900,” said Margaret Platt, a state labor market analyst.

“The recession is leveling off and perhaps we’re seeing a turnaround,” she said.

The county saw 800 manufacturing jobs disappear in the last year, a mirror of a trend seen statewide for most of the decade.

Friday’s news of imminent manufacturing job losses at Nabisco in Oxnard and Wilson Sporting Goods in Newbury Park partly offsets the announcement earlier this week that Haas Automation will bring 435 jobs when it moves to Oxnard from Chatsworth.

But the Nabisco and Wilson announcements exemplify the differences between small companies and the downsizing large corporations are undergoing, Schniepp said.

“Most of the job creation is occurring at smaller companies, and the job gains are unannounced,” he said.

Steve Kinney, president of the Greater Oxnard Economic Development Corp., said the state figures are confirmation of recent economic patterns he has seen.

“We’ve really had a feeling here in the past year and a half that there are a number of small incremental increases in employment that individually aren’t newsworthy but are building a job trend here in Oxnard and countywide,” he said.