Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 8, 1993 TAG: 9308060037
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Consider the April-through-June quarter - and the first few weeks of July:
There was a valley builder who sidled up to a reporter last weekend wanting to know if there was any news of new businesses coming to town. He wants a shot at the work.
There's been news from First Union Corp. of new jobs being brought to the valley from elsewhere in its banking empire that covers the Southeast. But there's also been news of continued cutbacks by the Charlotte, N.C.-based company that now owns Roanoke's Dominion Bankshares Corp.
In late May, a New York company, Transkrit Corp., broke ground for its corporate headquarters and new manufacturing facility. But then six weeks later, ITT Corp. announced it would be cutting 120 jobs at its Electro-Optical Products Division in Roanoke County.
"We seem to have - at the very best - been exchanging jobs," Hollins College economist Mary Houska observed last week.
"If [consumers] are not concerned about job loss personally, then they may be concerned . . . that their community college grad isn't getting a job," she said. "They have a sense that things aren't going well."
They may be closer to correct than they think.
Despite a predictable spike in valley home sales during the second quarter - driven largely by historically low mortgage rates - other indicators suggest the valley economy is skipping up and down like a stone on a mill pond.
The valley work force grew by 800 jobs in the April-through-June quarter, even as the unemployment rate jumped from 4.2 percent to 4.7 percent of the workforce.
Business bankruptcies in the second quarter - 30 - accelerated from the first three months of the year and outpaced those recorded in last year's second quarter.
New car sales - an average of 657 units over three months - continued an upward trend in the second quarter, as measured against the first three months of '93 and last year's second quarter.
All told, a muddled picture.
A Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond survey released last week reported "moderate and uneven" growth within its Fifth District - the Virginias, the Carolinas and Maryland. Nationally, second quarter gross domestic product rose a slight 1.6 percent, compared to only 0.7 percent in the first quarter.
Christine Chmura, chief economist for Crestar Bank in Richmond and author of the bank's weekly "Economic Monitor," called the second quarter performance "anemic when compared to historical standards." A closer look "indicates some promise for a pick-up in growth . . . but certainly no assurances."
Meanwhile, key valley employers continued to send mixed signals as spring bloomed into summer:
Despite record earnings for its parent company, First Union National Bank of Virginia continued job cutting and reorganization, renewing fears that more jobless people will be dumped onto a comparatively flat economy that may not be able to accommodate them.
Norfolk Southern Corp. posted record earnings per share for the second quarter, but conceded that flooding in the Midwest and striking miners in coal country could cut into revenues later in the year.
Health-care job growth in the Roanoke Valley and surrounding localities appears to have leveled-off, in part because of the Clinton-inspired drive for health-care reform and technological advances that demand less labor.
That's not good news to the home of Virginia's largest hospital company, Roanoke-based Carilion Health System, which with 9,000 workers is also the valley's largest employer.
by CNB