DuPage County Board Chair Robert Schillerstrom has recently been touting a new county development corporation, DuPageBiz, that will be a public-private effort to reinvigorate the DuPage economy. The focus will be on expanding business and employment in DuPage. While I’d want to know more details, the basic idea is a great one that I support. It’s also an idea that is long overdue.
For many years now we’ve read about DuPage not attracting jobs with wages sufficient to live here. From a late December 2004 post I wrote:
“The 2002 (most recent online) Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Report (CAPER) by the DuPage Community Development Commission (CDC), which included April 2002 - March 2003 data, found that about 20,000 new jobs become available in DuPage County annually, but 2/3 of them are jobs below $12.71 per hour - meaning that for full-time work (40 hours a week) at least 2/3 of DuPage’s annual job creation, and likely more, is insufficient to provide a studio apartment.”
Things haven’t gotten better wage-wise - and housing and energy prices have gone through the roof.
As former Naperville City Council candidate Matt Freeman observed, we have too much vacant office space - much of it vacant since 2000-2001 when the bottom went out of the economy and formerly expanding companies like Lucent shed domestic jobs dramatically. That’s a loss of jobs and business taxes. It’s never too late for the county to be fighting for more business and better jobs in DuPage - but we should have done more a lot earlier.
We also need to be smart about our economic development. While beyond the scope of DuPageBiz, infrastructure improvements that reduce traffic congestion (like improved mass transit) can make a bottom line difference for companies and their employees, while saving taxpayers road construction money. A better transportation infrastructure can help DuPageBiz expand and attract “biz” - it can be a major competitive advantage for us if we will only do the right thing. It helps if we do it now - before everyone else does it. It is time to get DuPage moving ahead of the curve. Our residents are smart enough to meet the challenge if our leaders will only lead.
Post a Comment