East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania recently hosted the seventh annual Economic Outlook Summit at the college’s Mattioli Recreation Center.

Marcia Welsh, the president of ESU, gave the opening and closing remarks and talked about the theme — “Monroe County: Why do we live here?”

She said the Summit Committee created a survey that was answered by more than 740 people from all 20 municipalities in the county.

“It’s not surprising that the top three reasons people chose to live in Monroe County were natural beauty, quality of life and location,” she said.

Of the respondents, 75% of them said they would recommend Monroe County as a great place to live. But 23% said they were not likely to recommend it, stating high taxes, property values and infrastructure for their reasons.

According to the survey, 69% of the respondents were either born in the county or have family there. But 41% moved there for employment. Educational services was the top field of employment for the respondents.

2030 action plan

The summit also presented the results of economic research conducted by the Northeastern Pennsylvania Alliance, which was compiled into the sixth annual Monroe County Economic Scorecard, and the development of the Monroe 2030 Action Team Work Plan.

Business professionals from a variety of fields created the Monroe 2030 Action Team Work Plan, and where split into eight teams to tackle the work. The team categories include: business development, workforce, public health, sustainability, housing, marketing, youth entrepreneurship and collaboration.

On Sept. 12, the Workforce Action Team launched the Workforce and Training Survey and sent it to businesses throughout the region. They have been tasked with identifying training needs and implementing a workforce training plan.

The survey asks the businesses to list the skills their employees need to have in order to do their jobs, opportunities for additional training, employee turnover, and the skills the business thinks are most lacking in Monroe County.

Sharone Jones, director of Career and Workforce Development and ESU, said, “We would love to see an industry based consortia here in Monroe County. We have a huge health care industry. We have an enormous hospitality industry, and we have a growing manufacturing industry.”

Manufacturing brought in the largest gross domestic product in 2017 at $1.7 billion in Monroe County, according to the economic scorecard. Overall, the GDP expanded by 3.8% to $6.4 billion in all industries that year.

Higher unemployment

NEPA also reported in the scorecard that although the unemployment rate is 3.9% nationally in 2018 and 4.3% in Pennsylvania, it is 5.4% in Monroe County and 5.1% in the other counties served by NEPA. These counties include Carbon, Lackawanna, Luzerne, Monroe, Pike, Schuylkill and Wayne counties.

The average income for wage earners in Monroe County in 2017 was $55,115 versus $51,300 in the other counties.

The living wage needed to maintain a minimum standard of living in 2015 (data from 2017 was not available) in Monroe County was slightly higher than in the other area counties including Carbon. It was $11.77 per hour for one adult and $15.97 for a family (two working adults with two children) versus $11.15 and $15.52 in the other counties.

The poverty level was 9.3% in 2017 in Monroe County and 12% in the other counties. The national average is 13.4%.

In addition to employment, the scorecard report focused on the economic indicators of health care, education, earnings, business climate and housing.

The housing data NEPA derived from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey showed that the median gross rent is slightly higher in Monroe County at $12,852 annually than in the other counties at $10,286.

The national rate is $11,784 and $10,620 in Pennsylvania. From a percentage perspective, the gross rent to median household income in a year is 20.9% in Monroe County and 19.3% in the other counties compared to 20.4% nationally.

Affordable housing

“We need affordable housing,” said Leslie Perryman, director of RHD Crossroads Community Services/Street 2 Feet Outreach Center and a member of the Housing Action Team. “I think everyone can agree to that, but what everybody’s definition of affordable is varies depending on what your status is in the community and your socio-economic status.”

The Housing Action Team plans to develop a website that is a one-stop shop for renting, buying, building, disability housing, as well as financial resources including loans, tax incentives and subsidies.

Tourism continues to be big business in Monroe County. According to the Pocono Mountain Visitors Bureau, 27.9 million people visit the Poconos each year. While visiting, they spend more than $3.3 billion a year in the region.

Chris Barrett, CEO of the Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau, said the Pocono region, which consist of Carbon, Monroe, Pike and Wayne counties, is one of 11 regions in the state. The regions include Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Dutch Country, which is the area of Lancaster and Hershey.

“Since 2016, we have experienced 35% growth in revenue generated from tourism. That’s the fastest growing in the 11 regions in the state,” Barrett said. “We are growing at a faster rate than (Dutch Country) are. Essentially, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and the other regions are flat.”

Arthur Keith, the resort general manager of Kalahari resorts and Conventions, said, “We have not stopped building in the four years since we’ve been open. ... There’s been penned up demand for the Poconos, I believe, for a number of years.”

Keith said people are visiting the area multiple times a year and consider it a great place for a second home or to retire.

“We need to make sure we maintain the infrastructure,” he said. “The quality of our roads, that’s something that is very, very important to us.”