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If Lane County’s economy were a traffic light, it would be flashing yellow.
Job growth has slowed — both in the county and across the state. Manufacturing and construction jobs are down from a year ago. The era of automatic population growth may no longer be a given.
Not exactly a rosy outlook, as a presentation last week by Oregon economic analyst and public policy consultant John Tapogna made clear.
A slowdown is evident in local employment numbers. One percent fewer Lane County residents were employed this summer than the summer before, according to preliminary data from the Oregon Employment Department. The last two times that’s happened? In 2020 during the pandemic, and in 2008 during the Great Recession.
Those two downturns were far more drastic than this one, at least so far (employment cratered by nearly 10 percent in 2020 and 9 percent in 2008). And it’s not like Lane County’s struggles are unique — Oregon is one of 23 states currently or on the verge of recession, according to an analysis by the prominent economist Mark Zandi.
But Tapogna’s presentation, delivered Thursday to a room of dozens of Eugene and Springfield city officials, University of Oregon leaders and Eugene Chamber of Commerce members, offered a stark message: What everyone here has committed to economic development work, hasn’t been working.
Not for a lack of effort.
Eugene and Springfield have wisely invested considerable time and resources working to redevelop the downtown riverfront and Glenwood areas, respectively. More housing and shops means more tax revenue for city budgets over the long-term, even if many of those projects need hefty subsidies to get off the ground.
But both of those efforts are decades in the making, and could take years or decades more to bear fruit. And neither really gets to the heart of the region’s economic development woes: the lack of new businesses moving to town, or existing businesses expanding.
Outside of the health care industry, Lane County’s most recent major job recruitment or expansion wins both happened seven years ago: cybersecurity firm SentinelOne’s opening of a Eugene office, creating 100 high-paying tech jobs; and Yogi Tea’s $21 million manufacturing plant in west Eugene that spurred new hiring to meet its expanded capacity.
Economic development in Eugene has been, at best, extremely uneven. As characterized by some, it’s been a failure. So what’s going to happen in our community to change this narrative?
The Eugene chamber last year launched Elevate 2028, a five-year effort to improve the region’s business climate and recruit new talent, while addressing issues like housing, childcare shortages and homelessness. Local business leaders contributed $5 million through the Elevate campaign to hire chamber staff that will dig into each of these issues and help secure grants to fund new initiatives.
There are good ideas there, but so far they’re slow moving, and it’s unclear at this point what the impact will be or when.
Things need to move faster. That should be the mantra of our time. If national economic headwinds don’t let up, Lane County won’t be alone in feeling the pain. But the county and state are at risk of spiraling into what Tapogna called a cycle of depressed growth and stagnation.
Oregon’s choice, as he put it, is to pursue modest, deliberate economic growth, or accept the cost of standing still. And there is a cost to standing still: an ever-widening gap between wages and home prices, perpetual cycles of city and county budget cuts, more housing insecurity and homelessness.
Lane County’s economy looks much different today than it did 20 years ago. There were 6,000 fewer manufacturing jobs in August 2025 than August 2005, driven by thousands of lost RV manufacturing jobs and the closure of the Hynix semiconductor plant in 2008. We’ve largely replaced them with a combination of health care, food and beverage, retail and hospitality workers, as well as some financial, professional and business services jobs.
Walking the path of modest growth will require an all-hands-on-deck approach from city, county and state leaders, as well as the business community and the public. Challenging circumstances may force us as Oregonians to reexamine some of the values we hold dear, from our land-use policies to our tax structures and regulatory frameworks.
We don’t claim to have the perfect prescription for our economic issues. But we do hope to see fresher, bolder ideas emerge from chambers of commerce, city halls and the Oregon Legislature. Faced with a future of modest growth or stagnation, we don’t have much time to waste.
