Cynthia Aikman's economic development motto is “slow and steady wins the race.”

The last thing the city of Auburn's planning and economic development program manager wants is a boom economy that pumps so furiously it breaks down and costs dozens, even hundreds, of jobs. She prefers “slow, boring growth.”

Jon Christopher's economic development motto is “don't put all your eggs in the same basket.”

The last thing the Cayuga County senior economic developer wants are companies so large their layoffs can rip the local economy into pieces. He wants a diversity of employers - dozens of smaller and mid-sized firms - to help buffer Cayuga County from the “individual pressures of the world market.”

With those goals in mind, both the county and city top economic developers think the local area is making economic progress. But that's an optimism that many area residents do not share, with the loss since the 1960s of the area's traditional bread and butter, manufacturing jobs.

More than 1 million New York manufacturing jobs - half of the state's manufacturing positions - have dissipated since the 1960s, according to a December 2004 report from the Buffalo Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Locally, between 1990 and 2005, manufacturing jobs declined by 15 percent in Cayuga County. A decrease of 2.8 percent came between December 2004 and December 2005 alone.

In other industries, however, state Department of Labor data over the last five years show small, but consistent, growth in many industries. Jobs in educational services have grown by 100 positions since 2001. Jobs in health care and social assistance have grown by more than 200 since 2001. Government jobs have increased by 500 positions.

That leaves government, health care and social assistance, and agriculture as the top three industries in the county, followed closely by manufacturing and retail trade jobs.

In total, the number of Cayuga County jobs ballooned another 1.4 percent between December 2004 and December 2005. Both public sector and private sector jobs grew 14.3 percent between 1990 and 2005.

Incomes have risen as well, even with an adjustment for inflation, according to an analysis Aikman did of the average family income in the 1930s, 1950s, 1960s and the 2000s.

“Going back to the golden era when there were all these jobs, average family income was still lower than when adjusted to the dollar today,” Aikman said.

Lower housing costs translate into higher disposable income, even with higher taxes and higher heating costs in New York, she said.

She also points to the diverse economy that employs no more than 25-percent of residents in one industry sector. Excepting top-of-the line biotechnology, she thinks Cayuga County has workplaces representing the rainbow of economic

endeavor. “We have the ability to fully sustain ourselves here,” Aikman said.

Christopher notes the small-business, entrepreneurial nature of the local area, where 45-percent of the county's employees work for a firm with a 10- to 99-person payroll. There are only 29 firms employing between 100 and 499 employees, but there are 377 firms with 10 to 99 employees and there are 1,264 firms with less than 10 employees.

With all of their optimism, though, Christopher and Aikman believe there is definitive room for improvement in the local economy.

The best-paying jobs in Cayuga County are still in the public sector and manufacturing, but the number of manufacturing jobs continues to dip and government salaries that come from the tax base do not build wealth in the community.

“The focus in economic development is private-side,” Christopher said. “The private-side creates the opportunity for public sector positions. You have to generate the tax revenue to support the public sector.”

The increase in public education jobs over the last five years also is eating up a significant piece in the local tax base if all of those jobs are related to the public school systems, Christopher said. New positions at the now-coeducational and increasingly popular Wells College, on the other hand, are helping create wealth in the economy.

Private-sector agriculture jobs can create as high as five spin-off jobs in the economy, and manufacturing can create two spin-off positions, Aikman said.

The importance of public sector jobs should not be discounted, said Matthew Maguire, the director of communications for the Business Council of New York State.

“We could not have a civilization without (public sector jobs),” Maguire said. “But in basic economic terms, they consume what the private sector generates: wealth. If you have too many jobs supported by the taxpayers, then you have too much wealth being consumed. Ultimately that will decrease the attractiveness of a community for private sector management.”

The council calls for sustainable tax cuts, less government spending and public policies in the pursuit of lower energy costs as tools to grow private-sector jobs. The council believes that the state must do a better job using its higher education assets in the pursuit of economic development.

A more fundamental change the council seeks is improved math and science education “so we can have a continuous flow of ideas that we need to help develop and sustain this innovation-sustained economy,” Maguire said.

The council's call for upping math and science standards is something both local education and development officials have made a goal because opportunities for low-skilled workers with limited educational backgrounds are becoming increasingly limited.

The loss of manufacturing jobs due to better and more efficient production technology and the export of some work overseas has been accompanied by a shift of manufacturing and other jobs to high-skilled occupations. Employment in high-skill manufacturing positions increased 37 percent nationally between 1983 and 2002, but employment in mid-skilled occupations dropped 18-percent and employment in low-skilled occupations dropped 25-percent.

It is predicted skilled job applicants will increasingly have the upper hand in the job search process.

Technical-oriented and math-based skills taught at Cayuga Community College and the Cayuga-Onondaga BOCES are under intensive demand from local employers, but both institutions are not able to recruit enough students to fill the employment need of these type of programs.

CCC's engineering program suffers for a lack of applicants, said college President Dennis Golladay.

“We need to find ways at a very early age to interest students in the glories of mathematics and science,” Golladay said. “So many jobs are going to be jobs that demand mathematical skills and technological ability. We've got to find a way to intrigue more students from middle school in those areas. Somehow we've got to make a way to make them see it as appealing rather than drudgery.”

BOCES has also found that graduates of its graphic design programs, computer information technology program, computer aided manufacturing and trades programs are nearly guaranteed jobs, said Bill Speck, the director of career technical education with oversight over BOCES' 15 different career technical education programs and five professional development New Visions programs.

Mike Burnham, the 26-year veteran guiding the BOCES' computer aided manufacturing program, had four calls within three days last week from area machinist and welding shops looking to snatch up the six students graduating from his program in two months.

One student is entering college with the goal of majoring in engineering and another student is enrolling in welding school, but the other four will be guaranteed to have job placement if they are ready for it, Burnham said.

“The jobs are there for these kids,” he said.

Students going through his two-year program need to have some comfort level with mathematics, but he can teach the higher-level math of geometry and trigonometry they need to program machines like lathes to make metal and plastic parts that in the commercial world are used in motor vehicles, military applications and in the aerospace industry. It is a field that requires some math skill, but it is accessible to students, especially when they see the application of the math to actually make something in comparison to a classroom setting where math seems more philosophical than practical, Burnham said.

Machines that were once manually set to make a part have shifted to computer control. Now students learn to input a design on the X-Y-Z axes of a software program's graphs, which is then communicated to the machines.

He would like to have up to 24 students, 12 in the morning session and 12 in the afternoon, but this year he only had 14 students. He also wishes more girls would enter his program, noting women are numerous in the engineering field.

“Job prospects are available,” Speck said. “The flipside of that is these are high-skilled jobs. Computers are at the foundation of everything I mentioned. Computer literacy is driving everything now in the marketplace.”

Along those lines, CCC developed its geographic informational systems program and prides itself on its criminal justice program, which tracks students into some of the county's top employers, the state Auburn and Cayuga Correctional Facilities.

Golladay is also percolating a new idea of developing a degree in entrepreneurial studies, which would help train local students to become the business leaders of Cayuga County's future.

“It's an important aspect of the county's economy,” he said. “Most new jobs creations come out of small- to mid-sized businesses, not manufacturing concerns.”

Staff writer Amaris Elliott-Engel can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 282 or at amaris.elliot-engel@lee.net