If Snohomish County is ever going to wean itself from being a King County suburb, it needs to create jobs that will keep its residents here.
That’s the mantra of local leaders such as Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon and Everett Mayor Ray Stephanson.
The county is growing new jobs faster than any other in the state and the unemployment rate has almost dropped by half over the last year, according to the state Employment Security Department.
Both offer indications that county residents are staying home to work more than ever.
Thanks to the U.S. Census, those indications now can be replaced with facts.
The federal agency that does a nationwide head count every 10 years announced on Thursday that it is now counting how many people work in a city or county during the day, something it is calling a daytime population count.
For example, Stephanson now knows that his city loses about half of its employed residents to jobs outside the city limits but that it more than gets that back during the day when the city’s population grows from 91,500 to 125,000 people, based on year 2000 population counts.
The movement of so many people into – rather than out of – Everett says something positive, Stephanson said.
“It confirms that we’re not a bedroom community, that we’re a job center,” he said.
Snohomish County loses 105,000 workers, about a third of the county’s working population, to King County each morning, said Donna Thompson, a regional economist with the state Employment Security Department.
Most of those people come from south county cities including Edmonds, Mountlake Terrace and Mill Creek, which, according to the U.S. Census report, respectively lose 21 percent, 20 percent and 18 percent of their populations during typical work hours.
Snohomish County planners will use the census data to help plan for where they need to build jobs, retail centers for shopping and improved roads, said Ryan Countryman, a senior planner in the county’s long-range planning division.
Having real daytime population numbers “is a lot better than guesswork, which is sort of what we’ve used in the past,” he said.
Countryman said the data, over time, will also help the county and cities measure how well they are doing at recruiting jobs.
Brier is the community that loses the highest percentage of its population during the workday, with nearly half of its 6,383 people leaving each morning. Stanwood gains the highest percentage of people each morning, with its total population climbing from 3,923 at night to 5,499 during the day, a 40 percent gain.
Everett’s daytime population of 125,446 came in second, a population gain of 37 percent, and Arlington’s 15,831 people, a 35 percent gain over its nighttime population, finished third.
Herald writer Scott North contributed to this report.
Reporter Lukas Velush: 425-339-3449 or lvelush@heraldnet.com.
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