'Ring the alarm': Chamber focuses on jobs crisis at home amid cloudy economic outlook

‘Ring the alarm’: Chamber focuses on jobs crisis at home amid cloudy economic outlook

Posted by author February 9, 2025 Jobs

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Despite projections, no one knows exactly how the economy will respond to possible tariffs, inflation and policy changes targeting immigration and fiscal impacts this year, a top federal economist said Friday.

David Altig didn’t make bold predictions at the 2025 Economic Forecast presented by the Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce.

Instead, he said expect this year to be much like 2024, “but less.”

“A little bit less growth, a little bit less employment, a little less inflation, but still pretty good,” said Altig, executive vice president and chief economic adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, to a crowd of approximately 250 executives, community leaders and others.

“Near as I can tell from the information we get from people like you,” he said, “everyone is sort of in the same camp.” And, he continued, everyone is waiting to see how various factors play out.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta serves the Sixth Federal Reserve District, which encompasses Alabama, Florida, Georgia, sections of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee, according to its website.

It’s part of the nation’s central banking system and plays a role in “setting national monetary policy, supervises numerous commercial banks, and provides a variety of financial services to depository institutions and the US government.”

Reaction from Chamber leaders following Economic Forecast

Past and present Tallahassee Chamber officials said they heard Altig’s message of uncertainty loud and clear while others said it’s time to “ring the alarm” on Tallahassee’s lackluster job creation.

Sha’Ron James, who chairs the Greater Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors, said businesses shouldn’t pursue solutions for potential problems if there are still “missing pieces” creating a fog of uncertainty at the federal level on down to the local level.

“So we take it one day at a time, and we hope for the best,” James said.

She also pointed to Altig’s comments about the importance of building a strong workforce, something she said the Chamber has prioritized for several years.

“We’ll continue to do that and really align workforce development and skills with those industries that he talked about, that are transformative in terms of wages,” James said. “It mirrored a lot of what we’ve been saying for a while.”

As of data released Jan. 24, Leon County has lost 904 jobs since last year and has a job growth rate of 0.6%, according to Florida’s Department of Economic Opportunity. The jobs outlook is illustrated in a county-specific scorecard provided by the Florida Chamber, which compiles economic scorecards using various indicators for all 67 counties in the state.

Terrie Ard said Leon County was facing a jobs crisis when she served as chairwoman of the Tallahassee Chamber’s Board of Directors in 2023.

Based on the recent data released on Leon County’s scorecard, Ard said, “it’s even more so.”

Ard said Leon County’s job creation record in the last year should be “a five alarm for our community.” She said efforts are needed to double down on retaining talent in Tallahassee, along with ramping up recruitment efforts and overall workforce development solutions “that will help to turn this around.”

“We have not had growth, and over the last year, every month, the number of jobs have declined,” Ard said. “We added Amazon, which was a huge win for this community. And, even with Amazon, we still have lost about nearly 1,000 jobs.”

Last month, Leon County’s scorecard said the capital has a year-over-year loss of more than 700 jobs, which was included in the Tallahassee Democrat’s coverage of the Chamber’s Annual Breakfast meeting.

Several days after the breakfast, Office of Economic Vitality (OEV) Director Keith Bowers wrote an opinion piece describing Tallahassee’s economy as “fostering economic growth has yielded significant results for our community.”

“Over the past five years, the Tallahassee-Leon County metro area has achieved remarkable success in job creation, adding more than 18,000 new jobs added — 97% of which were in the private sector,” he wrote.

He said OEV 80 different data indicators from various sources, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), to track economic trends and employment patterns. He said, over the past year, Tallahassee-Leon County achieved a 1.7% increase in job growth, outpacing the statewide growth rate of 1.5%.

Takeaways on “missing pieces” that may impact 2025 economy

Altig compared the current state of the economy as a “puzzle with missing pieces,” adding “There is no way to put it together at all … It’s just sort of where we’re at.”

Some of the missing pieces include: productivity, inflation, fiscal policy, immigration and tariffs.

Yet, he did share some statistics that, for example, debt held by the public is slated to rise each year. From 2025 to 2035, it swells from 100% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 118% —an amount greater than at any point in the nation’s history.

“I’ll just let you absorb that for a second,” Altig said.

As for inflation, Altig said year-over-year inflation has come down based on data released in December.

“But if you look at the last six months, the progress has sort of stopped. It’s sort of flatlined. That’s not what we were hoping for,” he said.

When talking about immigration impacts, Altig said there were five main industries that may see the largest direct impacts: agriculture, construction, personal services, leisure and hospitality and manufacturing.

He said there approximately seven to eight million “unexpected visitors” across the country from 2021 to 2024, resulting in two consequences.

Immigration was built in as a “revenue gain to the federal government” and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) historically “observed that revenue collected from immigration exceeded expenditures associated with immigration,” Altig said.

On the flip side, it had the opposite effect at the state and local level.

“That’s where the services are coming from; from an influx of integration,” he said. “This has revenue implications, and, importantly, has a lot of labor market implications.”

Contact Economic Development Reporter TaMaryn Waters at tlwaters@tallahassee.com and follow @TaMarynWaters on X.