Economic tailwinds drifting up from the Bay Area and Capital Region will give the North State’s slow but steady growth a little extra push over the next year, according to Robert Eyler, an economist and professor at Sonoma State University.
There were few surprises in the prognostications Eyler made at the 16th annual Northstate Economic Forecast Conference, held yesterday at the Gold Country Casino in Oroville. Although measured and tepid aren’t usually associated with excitement, for most business leaders and policymakers modest improvement trumps boom-and-bust volatility every time.
“In the North State, and sort of in a summary way, things are growing, but there’s still lingering effects of the recession,” Eyler said. “The growth is slow. The growth is not necessarily broad-based — there’s still industries that are struggling, I’ll talk about that more in a little while — but the growth is there. Housing prices have come back to a certain extent, and things look better.”
With an economic base in agriculture and historically dependent on extractive industries such as logging and mining, transition hasn’t been painless. While the North State is somewhat off the beaten track, it is hardly isolated from national and global trends.
The closely watched Federal Funds Rate won’t make any drastic moves for a variety of reasons, he said, which should keep the housing sector on track for sustainable growth.
With general trends looking mildly positive, other presenters spoke of the potential of high tech industry to bring more prosperity to the region. Business consultant Rohit Shukla, spoke glowingly about the potential breakthroughs agriculture could achieve through technology. He said as the world’s population grows, humanity will grow ever more dependent on efficiency.
“If we’re going to be continuing our assembly line food production, which quite frankly if we have to feed 10 million people by the year 2050, we have to have some variant of this,” Shukla said. “We cannot all expect to be very cool organic farmers to feed 10 billion people. It just is not going to happen.”
Prem Chand, CEO of tech firm Milestone Technologies Inc., who’s global technology services company opened an office and continues to expand in Chico, urged policymakers to develop thorough plans to attract more tech companies and their jobs to the region. In a question, Oroville Mayor Linda Dahlmeyer said the slow roll out of high speed data networks by AT&T and Comcast is hampering efforts to attract upper echelon tech work that lives or dies by data transfer speeds.