A county-by-county study from the Washington Employment Security Department found that the federal government shutdown cost Clark County workers $584,847 a week in lost wages.
The shutdown lasted five weeks, which means that employees in Clark County collectively missed out on $2.92 million since Dec. 21.
Most of that should be restored in back pay following the announcement Friday morning that Congress and the White House struck a deal to temporarily reopen the government.
According to the report, Clark County is home to 3,398 federal jobs, or about 0.7 percent of the population. Of those, an estimated 333 employees were directly impacted by the shutdown — Southwest Washington’s largest federal employers, including the Bonneville Power Administration and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, operate on funding independent from the contentious federal budget and remained unscathed during the D.C. standoff.
In an interview with The Columbian last week, regional economist Scott Bailey said that the economy in Clark County wasn’t hit as hard as other parts of the country.
“If I’m one of them, it’s significant, but in the overall economy, it’s not a big factor,” Bailey said.
However, that 333 figure doesn’t count the Clark County residents who commute to Portland for federal government jobs, mostly as security workers at Portland International Airport and the U.S. Coast Guard.
It also doesn’t count the private government contractors impacted by the shutdown who won’t receive any back pay, or the lost revenue from businesses who might have seen a downturn in revenue as a result of less disposable income among federal workers.
“There’s been stories of small business that somewhat depend on federal employees spending money,” Bailey said. “Those folks never get their money back if sales drop.”
Unsurprisingly, the hardest-hit county in Washington was its most populous. King County is home to 8,207 federal workers who were furloughed or unpaid over the last 35 days. Collectively, they weathered an estimated $16.58 million a week in postponed wages, totaling $82.9 million.
Across the state, an estimated 15,675 federal employees were impacted by the shutdown — a little more than a fifth of total federal employees in Washington. Together they missed around $146.5 million.
