After the workers were laid off through most of the recovery, city and county governments are now adding more jobs at the strongest pace recorded in the past five years, providing support for the economy’s overall payroll gains.
Stronger economic growth has been driving higher municipal revenue, allowing local governments to add more police officers and firefighters, reopen shuttered parks and make long-awaited street repairs. The move by the government has added more people to the payroll and economists say that new gain will help the United States economy gain the slow pace that had affected growth in the first quarter.
“We’re beginning to see cities and towns coming out of the Great Recession,” says Neil Bomberg, a program director for the National League of Cities.
But according to the economist Mark Zandi, chief economists of Moody’s Analytics, note that the total United States payroll has now topped over 200,000 each of the past four months. “A fair share of that is due to the swing in the local government.”
Zandi estimates that the local government job gains should now come to a total of 135,000 this year and 150,000 in 2015. Federal and State governments combined have cut 11,000 jobs this year so far according to Zandi’s analysis of the federal data.