Editorial: Corvallis needs to start sustaining jobs (June 4)

CORVALLIS GAZETTE-TIMES, 6/4/2009 (Hat tip: Jeff Kubler) - This week’s news that Nypro is closing its plant in Corvallis, with a loss of some 60 jobs, underlines some increasingly urgent facts about Benton County’s economy. ∴ First, the size of the county’s private work force actually has shrunk over the last decade: According to numbers from the state, Benton County has shed about 3 percent of the private-sector jobs it had in 2001. (The state says the county had 24,840 private-sector nonfarm jobs in April, down from 25,560 in 2001.) ∴ Although some segments of our economy have boomed (health care in particular employs 24 percent more people than it did in 2001), we’ve been unable to completely replace the manufacturing jobs that have been lost in the county, most notably at the Hewlett-Packard plant. (The loss of the Nypro jobs will make that particular hole a little deeper.) Read more at the G-T...