Mike Cronin

mcronin@citizen-times.com

No great need for statistics, graphics and charts to tell the story when it comes to wages and job growth in the Asheville area. They help, but construction cranes will do the trick nicely.

“The other day, I counted five cranes downtown,” said Louis Bissette Jr., a partner at the Asheville law firm, McGuire, Wood & Bissette. “I’ve been practicing here since 1976, so I’ve seen a lot of ups and downs, and that’s never happened before.”

Construction, brownfield redevelopment and new businesses have ignited a surge in the professional and business services sector, which fueled overall job growth in the Asheville metro area during the past year.

The sector includes companies such as law, engineering, architecture, accounting and consulting firms offering high-paying jobs. The metro area - comprising Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson and Madison counties - recorded 1,400 new net positions from February 2015 to February 2016, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And BLS figures show that from January 2015 to January 2016, the metro area exploded with about 5,000 new jobs overall.

The professional and business services sector “has been the top job generator for six of the last seven months,” said Tom Tveidt, a research economist who owns SYNEVA Economics, a consulting firm in Asheville that focuses on local and regional analysis.

“It’s perhaps an early sign of our expanding economic pie,” said Tveidt, also a past chair of The Council for Community and Economic Research, a Virginia-based nonprofit organization. “Our traditional drivers – health services and tourism – are growing. But professional and business services aren’t competing for the same market or customers.”

Wages in Buncombe County also rose, according to the most recent BLS data. The time period for those figures trails the job-creation statistics. But they point to a diversifying Asheville-area economy.

Wages rose to $760 per week across all Buncombe County industries during the third quarter of 2015, from $730 per week in the third quarter of 2014.

The 4.1 percent increase outpaced the national average of 2.6 percent. U.S. weekly wages increased to $974, from $949 during the same span.

That improvement was just 0.3 percent shy of Mecklenburg County’s, which experienced a 4.4 percent wage boost to $1,119 per week from $1,072 per week. Charlotte is Mecklenburg’s county seat.

And the $30 margin represents the fourth-largest leap in weekly wages for any quarter year-over-year measurement dating back to the beginning of 2005.

The greatest increase during that time period occurred when weekly wages jumped $41 from the first quarter of 2005 to the first quarter of 2006.

Health care employment contributed about 29 percent to the net growth in total wages, despite accounting for roughly 17 percent of net new jobs, Tveidt said.

The addition of 1,000 manufacturing jobs and a 14 percent gain in construction gigs also are primary reasons for the wage jump, Tveidt said.

Surging construction labor typically is indicative of broadening economic health.

“When they do well, we do well,” said Matt Fogleman, vice president and Asheville branch manager of Engineering Consulting Services Carolinas, of the construction industry.

ECS Federal Inc., a geotechnical and environmental consulting firm, is headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia.

Fogleman said that 2015 was the Asheville branch’s best year ever in terms of sales volume. He and his colleagues also hired five more people during the past year or so.

ECS Carolinas saw a 10 percent increase in sales over the course of last year and its staff grew by 9 percent, Fogleman said.

"We are currently on pace for 15 percent to 20 percent growth, and at least another 10 percent staff increase through the first quarter of this year," he said. "The market, and the economy in general, is moving in a positive direction. We feel the winds blowing around us.”

Bissette, the Asheville lawyer whose firm employs more than 50, said his firm specializes in commercial and development services.

The recent growth in small and medium-sized businesses has provided McGuire, Wood & Bissette with more work, clients and reason to hire additional lawyers, Bissette said.

“We’ve just hired an intellectual-property attorney – the only one west of Charlotte,” he said. “We’ve never had one before.”

The most recent data available for Buncombe County show that for the five years from 2009 through 2013, the number of businesses with fewer than 20 employees grew to 6,385 in 2013, from 6,312 in 2009, said Heidi Reiber, director of research for the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce.

All five of those years companies of that size comprised at least 86 percent of the total number of businesses in the county.

The Asheville-area boom in hotel, multi-family housing and retail projects has caused “a tremendous uptick in work and kept us extremely busy,” Bissette said.

Retirees moving to the area who update their estate plans also have contributed to the business Bissette’s law firm is doing, he said.

So much so that the firm also recently retained “an elder-law attorney, which is a booming practice,” he said.

Expansion in all those areas has meant more work for the Asheville headquarters of Johnson Price Sprinkle, certified public accountants, said CEO Ben Hamrick.

“The financial world has gotten more complicated,” Hamrick said. “Businesses are looking to firms like ours to help them guide and structure their transactions.”

The discovery of and interest in Asheville, in general, has fueled work for Altamont Environmental Inc., said Stuart Ryman, co-founder and president of the downtown-based civil and engineering consulting firm.

Recent projects have included work on the Asheville brownfield site for New Belgium Brewing Company, based in Fort Collins, Colorado, Ryman said.

The roughly 30-person firm has added four people during the last 18 months, Ryman said.

“We’re proud of that,” he said. Altamont Environmental salaried positions average $60,000- $70,000 a year, Ryman said. The company’s revenue expanded 15 to 20 percent in 2015 over 2014, he said.

“Asheville got discovered. If thoughtful growth dictates how this place expands, then we won’t be in a position where we’ll say, ‘This used to be a good place to live – but not anymore.’”

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