Frederick Maryland Online

An interesting story from the Frederick News-Post:

Each weekday morning, more than 100,000 people in Frederick County older than 16 get up and commute to work, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Some travel to jobs in Frederick while 41.1 percent of commuters travel on I-270 and I-70 to head out of town for the workday.

I’m one of the commuters that schlep down 270 every work day. This week has been great with bunches of people taking vacation, but I fear the return to normalcy (commute times clocking in at about an hour each way) in the next couple weeks.

According to Yahoo! Finance MedImmune will be expanding their operations in Frederick and other parts of Maryland.

MedImmune, Inc. (Nasdaq: MEDI - News) announced today its decision to expand the company’s biologics manufacturing capacity by building a new facility adjacent to its current site in Frederick, Maryland. The build-out of the Frederick site, in addition to the ongoing expansion of MedImmune’s corporate headquarters facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland, may result in up to 840 new jobs in the state by 2008.

Good news for Frederick, the more jobby jobs the better. The new facility will be complete in late 2009.

A story (reg req’d) from the Washington Post reports …

Wages in most Washington area counties rose faster than the national average in 2004, according to the latest government data, suggesting that a strong local economy is causing employers to write bigger checks to their workers.

Nationally, the average weekly wage was 5.7 percent higher in the final three months of 2004 than it was in the same period of 2003.

A handful of local jurisdictions were at or below the national rate of wage growth. The District and Frederick County both came in at 5.5 percent.

I hope some new businesses come to town and turn these statistics around.

The Frederick News-Post recently reported (reg req’d) that Mamsi plans to lay off one percent of their work force. I am not really sure how that will effect the Frederick area since Mamsi has other offices in the Mid-Atlantic region. But this news comes on the heals of another Frederick employer closing shop.

Does this mean the Frederick job market is weakening? Probably not. The Baltimore Sun reports (reg req’d) that “Clothing manufacturer Hartz & Co. says it expects to add 50 employees to its work force of 350 to meet demand for products, including men’s and women’s suits.”

Also, do a search of any of the job sites or newspaper classified ads and you will see there are jobs to be had. A search of the Frederick News-Post’s site found over 300 jobs. A similar search of the Washington Post found 250 open jobs in Frederick. These numbers usually go up on the weekends.

Here are a couple interesting jobs that I found. According to Monster.Com you can work for Buffalo Wild Wings opening soon in the area. I love me some wings. Or how about this one for a private investigator.

What do you think of Frederick’s jobby job market?

The Frederick News-Post has an article (reg req’d) about a recent survey of Frederick employers. The survey revealed that thirty-seven percent of area employers planned on hiring new staff.

The article also covered the type of companies that plan on hiring:

For the coming quarter, job prospects appear best in construction, durable goods manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, education and services. Employers in public administration plan to reduce staffing levels, while those in finance and insurance and real estate voice mixed hiring intentions. Hiring in non-durable goods manufacturing and transportation and public utilities is expected to remain unchanged.

Too bad I don’t have any of those skills. Some day I will find a cool jobby-job in Frederick.

From Yahoo! Finance:

Dobson Communications Corporation [...] announced that it plans to close its customer service center in Frederick, Maryland, effective July 1, 2005.

Approximately 150 employees work at the call center. Customer calls will now be handled by Dobson’s other call centers in Poughkeepsie, New York; Duluth, Minnesota; Youngstown, Ohio; and Oklahoma City.

The closure of the Frederick customer service center will not affect wireless services provided in the Maryland region, the Company said.

This blows! I hope that all those CellularOne employees find new and better jobs quickly.

The Washington Post reports (registration required) on area traffic and it is bad news as usual:

Washington area residents spend far longer getting to work and find themselves in daily traffic jams three times as often as commuters elsewhere, according to new local and national polls by The Washington Post.

Half of the region’s commuters spend 30 minutes or more traveling to work, or an hour each day to get to their jobs and back home. Even when compared with commuters in other major urban areas, the surveys suggest that Washington residents spend significantly more time on the road.
One big reason that drives are longer here is because traffic tie-ups are far more frequent. Nearly 6 in 10 commuters say they get tangled up in traffic jams at least once a week. And more than 1 in 4 — 28 percent — said they encounter serious tie-ups every day, compared with 9 percent of commuters nationally.

In spite of increasingly long and frustrating commutes, the survey found that Washingtonians remain addicted to their cars. Three in four area commuters drive to work alone. Carpooling is no more prevalent here than it is elsewhere in the country. Metro is widely admired but largely bypassed, a boutique transportation system that serves a hard-core constituency but is viewed by most commuters as inconvenient.

For Frederick commuters public transportation can be inconvenient. For example: I would have to drive about 10-15 minutes to a Marc station, then take an hour train ride, and then a 15 minute bus ride to my work. That is almost an hour and half commute or three hours a day. Driving, I spend about an hour and a half a day unless their is a bad traffic jam.

How is your commute?

A recent article from the Frederick News-Post reviews the results from a Maryland transportation survey.

Nearly 6 out of 10 workers in Frederick County have found work in the county and more than 7 out of every 10 Frederick County jobs are filled by Frederick County residents, according to the Census Transportation Planning Package on the Maryland Department of Planning web site.

“The public perception is that everybody is commuting out,” Frederick County Commissioner Jan Gardner said.

It is not a hard thing to preceive when you are sitting in traffic on 270 South everyday! The article continues:

Commissioners President John Thompson Jr. feels that the jobs here don’t keep up with the cost of living increase rapidly rising property values create.

“I think it’s safe to assume that the large wage-earning jobs are not here in Frederick,” Mr. Thompson said. “It’s been a long-standing trend on the East Coast that people tend to live upwind, upstream and uphill from where they work.”

The planning package also shows that the county is able to maintain a majority of its workforce in the county at all wage levels, though it does show the majority decreasing as wages go higher. In households earning less than $15,000 a year, 77 percent of the workers work in Frederick County, but in households earning more than $100,000 a year, only 51.8 percent of workers work in the county.

I hope that statistic will change as more buisnesses move their opperations to Frederick. Are you lucky enough to live AND work in Frederick?