Great Recession hit Peninsula harder than spotted owl restrictions [With “25th anniversary of spotted owl listing” story]

Second of two parts

EDITOR’S NOTE: The listing of the northern spotted owl as a threatened species, bringing curbs to the forest-products industry like none before, is 25 years old this week. Today’s installment continues a statistical examination of the listing’s impact on the Olympic Peninsula economy.

Part 1 of this two-part series, which appeared in the PDN on Sunday, can be accessed here: http://tinyurl.com/pdn-owl25.

Twenty-five years of economic data for the Olympic Peninsula show that its residents do, in fact, have something to fear:

Wall Street bankers.

The Great Recession of 2007-09 walloped the four-county region like no other shock in a quarter-century, state jobs and retail sales data show.

The housing bubble and mortgage meltdown of the mid-2000s set the stage for the full-blown financial panic of 2008.

In the fall of that year, the stock market crashed, and the nation’s financial system nearly ground to a halt.

Until then, the Olympic Peninsula’s four counties — Clallam, Jefferson, Grays Harbor and Mason — had gained jobs during 16 of the 18 years between 1991 and 2008.

The only exceptions were the national recession years of 1991 and 2001.

The Great Recession was an experience of an entirely different order of magnitude for the Olympic Peninsula.

Beginning in 2009, the region lost jobs for six straight years, jobs data show. Nearly 13,000 jobs in the four counties evaporated.

By comparison, the Olympic Peninsula lost 2,450 jobs in 1991, the year after the northern spotted owl was declared a threatened species.

Not all of those job losses were caused by the listing.

The national recession of 1990 and 1991 was also a drag on the Peninsula’s economy.

At the same time, the Japanese log-export market began drying up, eliminating a major source of private timber sales.

As for the Great Recession, the four-county region is only now beginning to recover.

State nonfarm job estimates show that the four counties gained 880 jobs in the year between April 2014 and this past April.

Wage stagnation during the past quarter-century is another issue on the North Olympic Peninsula.

Average monthly wages in Clallam and Jefferson counties have fallen further behind the estimated living wage since the early 1990s, according to research by Dan Underwood, a professor of economics and environmental science at Peninsula College.

The Olympic Peninsula did have an unlikely Cinderella story during the Great Recession, at least as measured by taxable municipal retail sales.

Taxable retail sales fell across the Peninsula in 2008 and 2009, but not in Forks.

At the time, the West End city’s retail economy was buoyed by visitors and sales inspired by the Twilight series of books and movies.

At a time when retailers nationwide were suffering, taxable retail sales in Forks increased 56 percent between 2007 and 2011.

For Forks, the timing of a tale about forbidden teenage love and rain-forest vampires could not have been better.

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George Erb is a former Peninsula Daily News reporter who covered the spotted owl controversy in the 1990s. He now teaches journalism at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Email him at geoerb@seanet.com.