The Washington region added 64,700 new jobs in 2005, putting it near the top of the nation’s 15-largest job markets. The good news is that almost a third of the new hires were in professional and business services, with an average salary of $75,000. The bad news is that there’s no place for these people to live; about 300,000 people commute daily from homes outside the metropolitan statistical area.
But when Montgomery County Council member Steve Silverman, D-at large, recently crowed about adding 7,600 new jobs to Montgomery County’s tax base last year, he didn’t mention the fact that Northern Virginia added three times as many and is now the nation’s third-ranking producer of new jobs, surpassing both the District and Maryland. In fact, according to George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis, Northern Virginia’s share of the regional economy has almost doubled since 1970, while suburban Maryland’s share dropped slightly. Fairfax has become the region’s job-creation machine; while Montgomery often seems to have fallen into a state of economic sleepwalking.
Given the fact that both counties have close proximity to the federal government and are demographically similar, why is Northern Virginia attracting such a greater share of the new jobs? Jerry Gordon, CEO of Fairfax County’s Economic Development Authority, believes it’s due to Virginia’s “generally supportive, pro-business environment.” For the past 25 years, Gordon told The Examiner, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, Virginia aggressively courted new companies. Fairfax County now has more tech jobs than Silicon Valley, he added, and recently set up an office in Palo Alto, Calif., to lure even more.
“So much of what we do is based on our reputation and image” as a business-friendly state, Gordon added, while acknowledging the “friendly competition” with Montgomery County. Fairfax County has dominated in job creation, snagging half of all new jobs created in the greater metropolitan area. It now has the highest median income of any large U.S. county and is poised to add more than twice the number of high-paying jobs over the next three years than its counterpart across the river.
As Maryland’s largest job center, Montgomery County is certainly in no danger of turning into a soup kitchen, but it’s slowly becoming less of a player in the global economy as Fairfax uses a hard-to-beat mixture of lower taxes and a sophisticated IT base to lure high-tech companies that have traditionally set up shop in Maryland. The 45,000 new jobs expected in Maryland over the next seven years — the largest influx since World War II — are mostly the result of military base closures and will primarily be located in Harford and Anne Arundel Counties, not Montgomery.
“The state of Maryland’s inconsistent, less aggressive pursuit of new business has accrued to our benefit,” Gordon admitted. Company executives tell him that Virginia’s more tax-friendly environment is one of the major factors they consider when planning a move. Meanwhile, Maryland’s recently passed Wal-Mart bill, its ongoing electricity debacle and generally more restrictive tax and regulatory climate send an alternate message to business: Keep looking … elsewhere.
