SOUTHWEST COUNTY: Report details job growth - Press-Enterprise

Murrieta and Lake Elsinore are leading the southwest Riverside County recovery from recession, while Temecula has far to go to regain the more than 10,000 jobs it lost, according to a new report.

Murrieta had 635 more jobs in December 2012 than it did at the pre-recession peak, and Lake Elsinore had 484 more, a report compiled by Claremont McKenna College for the Riverside County Economic Development Agency shows.

The Wildomar-Menifee area boasted 302 more jobs, the report says. The report lumps the new cities together, while separating Menifee’s Sun City district. Sun City is slightly ahead of where it was before the recession.

Murrieta has added more than 3,300 jobs after losing about 2,700. In December 2012, the city had a total of 23,087 jobs.

Mayor Rick Gibbs attributed much growth to hundreds of medical jobs created by the arrival of Loma Linda University Medical Center-Murrieta and expansion of Southwest Healthcare System’s Rancho Springs Medical Center.

The uptick, Gibbs said, means Murrieta residents may soon get what they have long desired: more eateries. He said residents often ask why their city doesn’t have as many restaurants as Temecula. And the reason is, their neighbor has jobs that feed the crucial lunchtime business. As employment accelerates in Murrieta, he said, restaurants will follow.

Also prospering is Lake Elsinore. The city is about 500 jobs ahead of its earlier peak, reaching 16,505 jobs in December, the report says. The established community by the lake lost about 2,000 jobs during the recession but has since gained 2,500.

It’s not hard to see why, said Mayor Bob Magee.

“We are building more homes than anybody else in Riverside County,” Magee said, adding that tracts are selling out within days.

And he said Lake Elsinore has benefited from rapid growth in the Warm Springs Business Park along Collier Avenue, west of Interstate 15.

“Two years ago you could shoot a gun out there and no one would hear it,” Magee said. “Today, you are hard pressed to find any open space.”

A surge in home building also is helping Menifee, said Tom Freeman, a spokesman for the county Economic Development Agency.

It helped, as well, that the Menifee Countryside Marketplace shopping center opened at Newport Road along Interstate 215 a few years ago.

“That came in at a good time and created a lot of jobs,” said Riverside County Supervisor Marion Ashley, who represents Menifee and Perris.

Perris, on the other hand, has regained only about half of the nearly 5,000 jobs it lost, the report shows.

Mayor Daryl Busch, however, said he is not discouraged. Besides the jobs that have returned, 600 more will be created this fall when a Home Depot distribution center opens in Perris, Busch said.

Hardest hit was Temecula.

That’s partly a reflection of Temecula’s employment dominance in the area; it boasted more than 50,000 jobs at the housing boom’s height, so had more to lose.

“As a city with a large employment base and a vast number of service jobs, it is not a complete surprise we experienced the brunt of the recessionary effects in Southwest Riverside County,” Temecula City Manager Aaron Adams said, in an email note. “…It (the report) was a glaring representation of the extent of job loss to our local economy over the past few years. However, we remain encouraged and optimistic by what we see in the city of late and the fact that job creation is trending up.”

The report follows the release a few days ago of a Temecula Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau study that said the city’s tourism industry — buoyed by Wine Country and Old Town Temecula expansion — is booming.

The county report says Temecula has added more than 2,300 jobs overall. The problem is, the city was still 8,236 jobs shy of its previous high of 51,592.

Adams said the city suffered from a contraction in service jobs and the downsizing of Abbott Vascular. This week’s announcement of 200 more layoffs dropped Abbott’s force to 2,000, half of what it was in 2008.

Even so, Temecula remains the area’s most-job-rich community, offering employment for 43,355 in December.

Gibbs emphasized it is important for all of Southwest Riverside County to bounce back, as the communities are tied together economically.

“The numbers that really count are regional,” he said.

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