Fairbanks North Star Borough officials say growth is steady in employment, construction, military troop assignments and tourism, while freight movement at the city's airport has declined.
According to the borough's community research quarterly report for summer 2006, job counts were up by 400 over the second quarter of last year. The growth rate in employment for the first six months of 2006 was up 1.1 percent over the same period of 2005.
Mining employment was up overall by 2,600 jobs when comparing the first and second quarters. Employment could have been better, but the Pogo Mine headquarters moved from Fairbanks to the mine site, just outside of the borough.
Borough assessing records show that over the past three years, new residential construction has averaged about 833 units per year, and early indications are that 2006 new residential construction season will follow this trend. Commercial construction, which has averaged about 83 units per year since 2003, may be down a bit from last year, the report said.
Borough officials said that bed tax receipts and air passenger traffic statistics indicate an increase in tourism for the quarter. The Fairbanks Convention and Visitors Bureau reported that this year cruise lines also brought passengers earlier in May, which may account for the increase.
The down side of the economic picture for Fairbanks as a regional air carrier hub involved a federal Department of Transportation decision to truck bypass mail from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay, where it is loaded onto planes, flown to Barrow and distributed. Until June, bypass mail destined for the Barrow region had been staged in Fairbanks, then flown to Barrow and distributed from there.
Since Department of Transportation statistics lag three months behind real time, data on the impact of this change will not be available until the next quarter, borough officials said. Still, when compared with the first quarter of 2005, the overall trend in 2006 shows a modest decline in passenger, freight and mail volume, the report said. Some reasons for these declines may include the price of fuel, increased airfares and diminishing disposable income, increased traffic to Anchorage, or most likely, some mix of all of the above, the report said.
The air transportation sector itself showed ups and downs during the second quarter, with long-awaited improvements to the terminal at Fairbanks International Airport now underway, while Lufthansa cargo flights that used to fly through Fairbanks have now moved to Kazakhstan.
The airport terminal upgrade will allow Fairbanks to better host newer large aircraft and have improved international customs processing. The first steps in the multi-year terminal upgrade project began in July.
Still, the departure of Lufthansa left the Fairbanks Airport with essentially no remaining international air cargo flights. Air France departed in 2003 and Cargolux in 2005. Airport officials are working with other international cargo carriers to encourage them to begin making stops at Fairbanks, but for now are logging only one Cargolux technical stop per week.
Airport freight also appeared to be trending downward, though figures for June 2005 reflect a significant anomaly that occurred last year, the report said. Evergreen International Airlines moved more than 60,000 pounds of freight through Fairbanks due to construction at the Anchorage airport. Holding for that anomaly, airport freight appears to be down modestly for the second quarter.
Margaret Bauman can be reached at margie.bauman@alaskajournal.com.
