Tristan Wood
The Greater Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce released its January 2022 Community Scorecard earlier this week, which highlighted rising job availability but also a violent crime increase in Florida’s capital city.
The scorecard — which is made up of various employment, crime and economic data points — had yearly figures updated in its first edition of the new year. The data highlights improvements in nonagricultural employment in the Tallahassee metropolitan area, while highlighting rising violent crime rates and falling third grade reading scores.
The total of non-farm jobs around Tallahassee was 184,000 in December 2021, an increase of a couple thousand from 178,500 in December 2020. Unemployment overall also dropped 0.1 percentage points from November to December.
In a statement announcing the scorecard, the chamber also highlighted some areas which saw job growth in the past year. The leisure and hospitality sector saw a 16% increase in jobs. The mining, logging and construction trades saw a jump of 7.3%.
Trade, transportation and utilities jobs jumped 6.3% and manufacturing increased by 5.7%. All of those growth rates are higher than statewide averages in those industries over the past year.
The scorecard also highlighted some local issues. The share of passing third grade reading scores dropped from 61% to 54% in the area from 2019 to 2021. Additionally, there were 1,805 instances of violent crime in the area, an increase from the 1,699 in 2019.
The area’s GDP also dropped from $15.9 billion to $15.5 billion from 2019 to 2020.
During the chamber’s 2022 Economic Forecast event, Chamber President and CEO Sue Dick discussed the scorecard. According to the Tallahassee Democrat, she said further community planning is needed to get improvement across the board on the metrics the scorecard tracks.
“It’s good to see the green in the job growth. We’re going in the right direction,” Dick said. “But until the entire scorecard is green, we’re not really making the progress we need to be as a community.”
