Matthew Daneman

Staff writer

Think back to 1999.

Everyone was at the theater to catch Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace or listening to their Backstreet Boys' Millennium compact disc, when not fretting about the impending Y2K bug. And though its worker ranks were shrinking, Eastman Kodak Co. was still a local giant, with close to 25,000 employees.

Kodak today is far smaller. But another employer, the University of Rochester, has taken its place as the biggest game in town. And as of the end of 2013, UR's employment was 25,000, further solidifying its status as the area's single largest employer.

UR on Thursday put out its latest economic impact study measuring the school's impact on the economy. The reports are done by the Center for Governmental Research.

With the institution regularly asking the state and federal governments for economic development dollars for such projects as its College Town retail strip or its bioinformatics cluster, those economic development reports help make the case by showing what UR gives back to the local economy, said Peter Robinson, chief operating officer of the UR Medical Center.

Those numbers are big:

• 25,773 employees.

• Local payroll of $1.48 billion.

• $196 million spent locally on goods and services.

And those numbers are growing. Compared to the end of 2011 and the last such economic impact study by CGR, employment is up 9.7 percent; local payroll is up 14 percent; and local spending is up 36 percent.

About 1,000 of those additional 2,300 employees came from UR's 2012 takeover of Canandaigua's Thomson Health. The rest came from UR's expanded health-care work, its increasing research arm, and its growing undergraduate enrollment, and all the people needed for those operations, Robinson said.

Employment likely will continue growing by 300 to 500 people a year in coming years, Robinson said. However, he added that trend is not guaranteed as a variety of factors — a flattening of tuition growth, the federal government's decreased spending on university R&D, and the big emphasis put on controlling costs in Obamacare — all add up to an increasingly challenging financial situation, Robinson said.

MDANEMAN@DemocratandChronicle.com

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