The wait time was just two hours.
The good stuff came at 9 a.m. Tuesday when the state released November unemployment rates for cities and counties.
Ohio’s jobless nightmare sure isn’t over, but for Dayton, Montgomery County and most everywhere else, better things finally seem to be happening.
Unemployment in the city dipped to 11.8 percent and in Montgomery County the rate was 10.5 percent, both rates the lowest since December 2008 and each nearly half a percentage point below the October rates.
The month-to-month differences aren’t as significant as the year-to-year comparisons, and those were even better.
Both rates dropped more than a full point from November 2009, when Dayton’s rate was 12.9 percent and Montgomery County’s was 11.6 percent.
There was hardly time to savor this happy trend before U.S. Census Director Robert Groves in Washington, D.C., started spinning out the statistics of what had happened across the country over the past 10 years by unveiling the official 2010 Census.
Everybody expected bad news for Ohio, but that didn’t make the cold, hard facts easier to digest.
The statistics told the tale of a half-century slide into political and economic mediocrity. Ohio’s population growth in the past 10 years was a barely noticeable 1.6 percent.
Thank Santa Claus for Michigan, which actually lost people.
The only other states with worse growth rates were Rhode Island at 0.4 percent and Louisiana — which had the 2005 Hurricane Katrina for an excuse — at 1.4 percent.
The most obvious manifestation of Ohio’s decline will be in the U.S. House.
Starting in 2012, after new districts based on the 2010 Census are drawn, the state will have just 16 members, down from 18 and from a high of 24 in the 1960s. That’s a 33 percent drop.
New York was the only other state to lose two seats.
Political finger pointing won’t work.
There have been four Democratic governors — Mike DiSalle, John J. Gilligan, Richard F. Celeste and Ted Strickland — during Ohio’s fade.
There also have been four Republican governors — James A. Rhodes, who you have to count twice because he served two separate, eight-year stretches — George Voinovich and Bob Taft.
Ohio doesn’t have majestic mountains, awe-inspiring oceans or tropical breezes. The state, however, used to be an economic magnet, with good, high-paying jobs that attracted people from all over the world to come here, stay here and build good lives.
Republicans blame unions for chasing all this away.
Democrats blame global trade and greedy corporations.
Republican apostles of rugged individualism forget the union wages that vaulted their parents into the middle class or the inherited wealth that Ohio workers helped their families accumulate.
Too many union workers came to regard their well-paying jobs, good benefits and nice pensions as entitlements, rather than rewards for hard work, risk taking and even beatings from strike breakers that earlier generations endured.
This is pretty gloomy stuff, and no way to say “Happy New Year.”
It’s just the right time to dust off “Grand Eccentrics: Turning the Century: Dayton and the Inventing of American,” written by Mark Bernstein and published in 1996.
Bernstein tells a wonderful story of the Wright brothers, John H. Patterson, Charles Kettering and others who magically converged in Dayton a century ago to join with entrepreneurs and inventors around Ohio to create a political and economic powerhouse that became the envy of the nation and the world.
Maybe there are others like them around Dayton and the state today. Let’s find them, nurture them and keep them in the state.
If that happens, the 2020 Census could tell a happier Ohio story.
Contact this reporter at (614) 224-1608 or whershey@Dayton DailyNews.com.
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