BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - Louisiana has recovered fewer than half the jobs lost during the coronavirus pandemic so far, but is seeing ongoing, slow employment gains as consumer confidence improves and businesses rebound amid the nationwide vaccination effort, a chief state economist said Thursday.
Legislative economist Greg Albrecht told the House Appropriations Committee that he doesn’t expect the state to reach pre-pandemic job levels until the end of 2022 or later.
“We have a fairly long way to go,” Albrecht said.
Louisiana’s unemployment rate topped 13% in April and May 2020, but has fallen to 7.6% in January, the latest data available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. While that’s a significant improvement, the state hasn’t returned to its pre-pandemic jobless rate around 5%.
The state lost 284,000 jobs - more than 14% of its total employment - in the earliest months of the pandemic, and had recovered about 121,500 of those jobs through January, Albrecht told the committee as it opened budget hearings for the financial year that begins July 1.
Albrecht said jobs in the oil and gas, manufacturing, real estate and finance industries, along with positions in government, are among those that continue to see declines rather than improvement. Meanwhile, he said retail sectors have recovered to 92% of their pre-pandemic job levels, while the hospitality industry has reached 52% of the employment it had before the coronavirus outbreak.
If Louisiana’s tourism economy doesn’t start to rebound more quickly, “it’s going to be a slower climb out,” he said. “We need the big conventions to come back and the big events,” such as music events, food festivals and Mardi Gras.
That will require people to feel safe to return to travel and planes - and for them to choose Louisiana as their destination.
Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne, the governor’s chief budget adviser, said Gov. John Bel Edwards intends to recommend that a portion of the more than $3 billion in federal COVID-19 relief aid headed to the state be spent on tourism marketing and assistance to tourism businesses. He said the state will need efforts aimed at luring leisure travelers and conventions.
“Tourism is going to need some help. They got hammered,” Dardenne said.
Houma Rep. Tanner Magee, the House’s second-ranking Republican, questioned if some organizations will ever return to the large conventions that happened before the pandemic, or if they’ll permanently shift those events online.
To start their weeks of budget hearings, House lawmakers sought information about Louisiana’s economic recovery from the coronavirus outbreak to give them a picture of the state’s tax collections. Those, too, are rebounding but not fully recovered.
But Albrecht said he’s more optimistic about the pace of the state’s economic recovery than he was two months ago, as access to the coronavirus vaccine widens and federal aid pours into communities. He said he expects to recommend to the state’s income forecasting panel, which is expected to meet again in May, that the projections should grow larger.
“We have mostly upside potential here,” the economist said.
Dardenne said if the forecasting panel boosts the projections, the Democratic governor will propose using those additional state tax dollars to increase his proposed K-12 teacher pay raise and spending on early childhood education.
The Senate Finance Committee kicked off its budget hearings Monday, ahead of the legislative session that begins April 12. Lawmakers likely won’t finish crafting a 2021-22 spending plan until near the end of the session in June.
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