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ROCK COUNTY SLOWLY ADDING MORE JOBS
WPR News - Rock County slowly adding more jobs
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Thursday April 19, 2012
by Kristen Durst
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Rock County's unemployment rate of nine-point-seven percent is one of the highest in the state, but officials say the local job and business climate is improving. Bob Borremans is CEO of Southwest Wisconsin's Workforce Development Board. He says 50 employers have signed up at the Rock County Job Center in Janesville .
"That's the largest number of employers that we've had in the last five years, and so we're real excited about being able to offer to the job seeker public that we serve access to all of these employers which I think is also a good sign that things are beginning to turn around maybe in Rock County," he says. "We've had to turn employers away which is the first time that we've ever had to do that."
But Borremans says Rock County still has about 8,000 fewer jobs today than in 2008. James Otterstein is Rock County's Economic Development Manager. He says the county was hit hard in the downturn due to its high concentration of manufacturing jobs, but he says there is progress lately.
"If you look quarter by quarter, year by year, you know things are starting to come back but the sad reality is that it isn't going to be able to replace the volume of activity that was lost at the pace that it was lost," he says. "It's going to take a lot longer to rebuild and to regrow and to replace that lost activity."
Otterstein says that some areas where companies are expanding there include food processing, technology, plastics, and advanced manufacturing. He says some of the new manufacturing positions are actually jobs have moved back from abroad.
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