Madison Aument
With 91.9 KVCR News, I'm Madison Aument. This is Economics IE, where I speak to experts from the Inland Empire to take the temperature of the region’s economic situation. For today’s episode, I spoke with San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman, who is also the president of the Southern California Association of Governments.
I'll start with just kind of getting a general sense of what the role of the Southern California Association of Governments is.
Curt Hagman
Sure. Southern California Association of Governments, or SCAG for short, is the largest metropolitan planning organization, the largest in the world, at least in North America, that encompasses six counties and 191 cities. And we try to be supportive of the counties and cities that are members, and bring out data on regional planning… connecting city to city, region to region, looking at the 30, 40 thousand foot level of data. And we do things like housing allocation for RHNA, transportation allocation, we study those types of things for master planning of a large area.
Madison Aument
What kind of data has the association gathered on the Inland Empire's economic situation?
Curt Hagman
We look at what type of job sectors, what kind of job you know, industries are growing lately. The last couple years has been government and healthcare. A lot of that is lower wage, that is higher wage depending on what side of healthcare you look at, a lot of government spending, as we've seen through the CARES Act and and the others that Congress has passed, a lot of government spending for infrastructure. Governments are doing a lot of more contracts lately, I think that will bubble out and start to decline over a period of time. So we're also tracking, you know, obviously warehousing is a huge part. You know, for Southern California, one out of 50 jobs is tied to Long Beach ports, one way the other. So we look at all that in a big global sense. We look at skill gaps. We look at new manufacturing starts, which ones are leaving. So we try to do that on a global level, as well as be, hopefully, the more urban planner for the smaller cities that may not have the bigger staffs. So we put on economic summits, we put on transportation summits. We do all that throughout the year.
Madison Aument
You've mentioned skill gaps a few times. What are you seeing?
Curt Hagman
Having access to vocation or higher education, I think is important. I think IE is very strategically located. For that, we have many colleges in IE, which is great. And my previous life, before being an elected official, I served on the Workforce Investment Board for many years, and saw what a little bit of training can do for those higher wage jobs. Now we have to plan for, hopefully, the change of economy out here… that be energy sector or manufacturing sectors in the future, but working with those investors, with those private companies out here to match it up with vocational both at the community college level and others to make sure that we have, you know, that's our talking point. We have an average young age here in the Inland Empire. We have new families, we have land, and we want you to come here, and we'll have the workforce to meet up with your job sector.
Madison Aument
That was Curt Hagman, who is a San Bernardino Supervisor and President of SCAG. Join us again next Monday for Economics IE. You can find this segment and others on our website, at kvcrnews.org/econie. Support for this segment comes from the Nowak Family. For KVCR News, I'm Madison Aument.