Iowa Workforce Development releases laborshed analysis

By Kelly Terpstra, kterpstra@charlescitypress.com

A lot of people who work in Charles City don’t live here, and many people who live in Charles City work somewhere else.

Iowa Workforce Development made a stop in Charles City Monday morning at the NIACC Center to release a laborshed analysis of the surrounding area that had been conducted recently. There was plenty of statistical material to process.

“It’s a lot of information to digest,” said Tim Fox, executive director of the Charles City Area Development Corp.

In 1998, the laborshed study was developed by the Institute for Decision Making at the University of Northern Iowa. Legislation was passed in 2000 that mandated IWD to conduct the laborshed studies.

Craig Trotter and Katie Lippold, labor market research economists for IWD, presented a slideshow to explain and discuss their findings.

Some results of the study were obtained through surveys handed out to 187 employers in Floyd County that employ five or more employees. There was a 55 percent response rate to the survey and the commuting patterns were established out of 4,338 employees in Floyd County — 3,716 of them working in Charles City.

A breakdown of the commuter concentration of the study found that 63 percent of Charles City business employees live in Charles City and 37 percent live outside of the city limits.

Also, 615 Charles City residents, just over 15 percent of the work force, work in jobs outside the community. Most of the residents in western Floyd County drive to Mason City to work.

Those figures got the attention of Fox.

“The western people in the county outside the Charles City laborshed are all working in Cerro Gordo County. We need to find a way to try to rectify that,” he said.

Fox said he wants to raise awareness of the job opportunities in Charles City.

“The thing I’m particularly interested in is getting the zip code information by community to see exactly what our strong draws are and our weak draws are,” Fox said.

A large portion of the IWD’s study was derived from 405 telephone surveys from people age 18-64 that were conducted from April to May of this year within the laborshed boundaries.

That boundary includes a 50-mile radius of the Rochester, Minnesota, and Waterloo-Cedar Falls area, a 40-mile radius of the the Minnesota towns of Albert Lea and Austin, as well as a 30-mile radius of the Clear Lake and Hampton labor markets. The adjusted labor force in the designated laborshed area is 130,400 people.

One finding stated that 20,826 people were likely to travel into Charles City for an employment opportunity. The estimation is derived by a model developed by the Institution for Decision Making.

Almost 74 percent of all respondents said they were employed at the time they were contacted. That breaks down to 116,940 out of the laborshed area. Those contacted who were unemployed was 14,459 or just over 9 percent.

That employment status is self-identified and the unemployment percentage does not reflect the unemployment rate published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which applies a stricter definition.

The validity of survey results is estimated at a confidence interval of plus or minus 5 percent.