Carroll County Unemployment Craters Thanks to Oil and Natural Gas Development

Unemployment continues to drop in communities around Ohio as they embrace shale development.  This week, Mike Chadsey of EID-Ohio checked out Carroll County, a community clearly changing for the better because of oil and gas:

"Yesterday, the Akron Beacon Journal reported that Carroll County, Ohio is the first county in the Buckeye State to host 100 Utica Shale wells.  That’s an important milestone for the County, and Ohio, but what’s more important is that this activity helped put a lot of Carroll County families back to work.

In fact, oil and natural gas development has helped the County halve its unemployment rate over the past two years.  In 2010, the small county of just over 28,000 people had a 16% unemployment rate.  Days we’re dreary and just about everyone knew someone out of work.  Now, just two years later, the County has a 7% unemployment rate—well below both the Ohio and national average. The new oil and gas activity and decreasing jobless rate have advanced almost simultaneously. If the patterns aren’t aligned, they certainly appear to be correlated.

You don’t have to look too far to see the positive impacts of oil and gas activity in the County.  The roads are a bit more crowded and the county seat of Carrollton has been bustling with increased activity. By and large, the industry’s arrival has been seen as a positive, much-needed, development. Glenn Enslen, the County’s economic development director, summed up the situation in an interview earlier this year.

 “Appalachian has been the forgotten part of Ohio for the last 50 years, and so, all of a sudden, we’re in the forefront of economic development in the State of Ohio. We’ve seen a huge impact from the oil and gas business.” –Glenn Enslen, Economic Development Director, Carroll County"

READ MORE: http://www.eidohio.org/carroll-county-unemployment-craters-thanks-t...

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