Good morning everyone. My name is Natalie Fanny Gonzalez on the chair of the economic development committee. We are here today for our next work session on the Montgomery County Economic Indicators 2nd quarter 2024. We have Council member Lori and sales on Zoom. Is she on there? I see her now. Hello. And with that, I'm going to pass the mic to council staff to kick us off. And then we'll have everybody on the panel introduced themselves. And we're going to hold Q&A at the end as we always do. Thank you. Morning, members of the committee. For this edition of the quarterly indicators, we have MCEDC in the planning department. This is a document that reviews and analyzes economic data on a quarterly basis related to employment, real estate development, and venture capital. This month's edition or this most recent edition has a new look to it, which you can appreciate in the attachment, starting on Circle One. You can see a summary of some notable findings on page two, but I think it just makes sense to turn it over to the experts to walk you through their findings. And then there's also a special briefing led by the planning department on the rebound and population growth in the county. Good morning, Bill Tomkins, President and CEO of Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation. And as we go down the line, we are not going to go through each slide. We're going to sort of highlight what's new or different and those changes. And then we're going to jump over to Montgomery Planning to talk about a focus on population. And then we're happy to answer any questions about this or where we're going. Yes and good morning. My name is Wes Serhan. I'm the research analyst with this paper and I'm going to be assisting Dr. Klogsten as she walks through what we're doing today. Hi, good morning. I'm Frankie Klogsten. I'm the vice president of research and policy at MCEDC. And I'm pleased to be with you here this morning. Hi, good morning. I'm James Lee. I'm the forecaster and demographic research specialist with Montgomery Planning. Should I go? Hi. Okay, great. I'm as bill indicated. We're just going to go ahead and give you some of the highlights that you normally get in the quarterly indicator. Not too much has changed. I think we've given you a little bit more context. For example, we looked at some other neighboring jurisdictions when we looked at the real estate market. And, you know, at least for now, we are starting out by trying to make some statistics pop. Some of them are just kind of marginal differences. Some of them are of bigger note when we look year over year. So we're going to look at the annual change in some key indicators and let's go ahead and do that and then onto real estate and briefly onto VC. And I won't go over this in too much detail, but looking at this front page, you can see the unemployment rate has gone to 3% versus 1.8%. This is a year over year. So this is the quarter two of 2024 to quarter two of 2023. We're still below the national rate of 4%. So that's probably not too concerning, especially because the good news is that the labor force participation has gone up 1%. And that's something you've heard. I'm certain that is very, very important for the county. And statewide, the comptroller noted in her annual report at the beginning of the year. Labor force participation had gone down from groups that are, for example, 18 to 44, which is the primary group that in terms of productivity and also for women notably because they lost child care services and were making different decisions. There's also going to be natural effects, a silver tsunami that's going to take people out of the workforce and people that are going to go out during COVID and choose not to return. But guess what? Good news. Labor Force participation is up a little. Those other two areas kind of cancel each other out and just tell us that we're pretty strong in our key industry of science and life sciences. And then on the second line, Office of Aconcy Rate, we are up to 18.3 percent, but let me go ahead and preview what's on an earlier slide. Excuse me, what's on a later slide. You don't have to turn to it, but that would be slide nine. Actually, what we'll go ahead and turn to that after I've just read these other two data points. Meeting the median home price. I'm sure you're not surprised that it's gone up year over year. And then VC raised and VC deals. We'll go over that in a bit. The VC raised is such a kind of big disparity between last year and this year because of one big deal with Adelaide that took place in the second quarter of 2023. But if you look to see where we are in terms of pace between last year and this year, you'll see that it's 20 deals. And so we're on good pace with VC. So we're going to go all the way now to slide nine. 9. And I wanted to point out that a few things that we have not had, I think, displaying each month, which are how Montgomery County compares to neighboring jurisdictions. You can see that it's kind of in the ballpark. Arlington is a little higher, and Fairfax is also a little higher at 18%. And that's being driven by some of the same submarkets that we saw when we looked at it last the last time we met being Rockville, Bethesda and North Rockville, all in the 18 to 19 mark and then a couple being above 20 that being Kensington submarket and the Bethesda Submarket. He had others that are below 10% as well. And what I wanted to do, but I can tell you authoritatively, though I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, that I looked a little bit under the hood at Arlington and Fairfax. And Tyson's is just a little bit higher than it reflects for the whole county and also that's the case with Reston and looking at Arlington County also above 20% were, for example, Crystal City in Boston. So just to give some context because everybody is concerned, and we should be about our vacancy and our housing market. So just to turn to VC page, because I've kind of found some interesting fun stuff when I looked at VC and that's going to be on slide 13. Okay. You can turn back to slide 12 if you like, just to show that that's our trend line and over the quarters from 2014 to 2024. And you know, we, that, that horizontal line represents two quarters. And as you can see, the first quarter being at 20 and the second quarter being at 20. So we are below what we'd like to be at, but let's turn the page and take a look at the kind of diversity of companies that we're having. And we saw last time that I was here that the companies were kind of in predictable sectors. They were like all AI companies. I don't know, the top four out of five were AI companies or health tech companies. But I think what this chart showed me when I looked at these companies was that there is a diversity in the, there is a diversity in terms of industries where the VC is flowing. And just to give you a little flavor of this first company coin, which raised 13.7 million, is a company that is a Visa credit card company that donates a portion of every transaction you make to support conservative charities. So it's not exactly what you might expect, and it's based in Potemag-Mareland. And it got the most investment. And then the Fridonia Group is looking at international business research company. And Gardens for Wildlife has a variety of plans to bring back butterflies, birds, and native bees to your area. And then you see a couple therapeutic companies, Immunic and Amphlex in Rockville and Gathersburg respectively. So I think it's great to see a nice diverse spread. Of course, we nurture our life sciences industry most among our key industries. So I think it's great to see a nice diverse spread. Of course, we nurture our life sciences industry most among our key industries, but it's nice to see the spread. That's all I have. We can do questions now or we can give it to Mr. Lee. I turn it to Mr. Lee, but now you can be thinking, what's Bridge Book? You have it on your slide. Oops. Yeah, that's our source. It's kind of the authoritative source. Okay. If you're looking at investment in BC, and probably that's your mentioning here. Yeah. If I'm wondering, everybody is. Yeah, no, I'm sorry. It should say source code. Yes. Bridgebook. And we'll be more careful about that. It looked like a company in the future. Thank you so much for that. Mr. Lee. Okay. Shall we go to slide 14? So we will look at the slides here because they do provide a little bit more of a visual to show the population and the components of change. So there's three slides. I'll go over the first slide and then I actually I will jump to slide 16 afterwards. So the big news for this past year is that the US Census Bureau has provided population estimates for 2023 which shows a rebound in the population. For people that may not be aware, there were two years of population decline from 2020 to 2022 and those were actually related to the COVID pandemic. Now just to provide a little bit of both historical context and regional context. So Montgomery County was growing in population during the 2010s, one of the highlights of the 2010s was that Montgomery County actually reached 1 million people around 2012 and up until 2020 the county was growing since then. Now with the sort of the regional context context the region as a whole was growing as well but the region also lost population During the COVID years so what you're seeing with this two-year loss During the COVID years is actually not unique to the county itself most of the population losses were not just in Montgomery County, but in our neighboring jurisdictions, Fairfax, Prince George's District of Columbia, and so forth. Let me go over to slide 16. So 16 actually shows the annual change in the number of people. So one thing that really strikes out is that during the 2010s, there was a slowing down of the population growth. And I will get to the reason here in slide 15. And as I pointed out, population loss was from 2022. Let's jump back to slide 15 please. So this is the last slide of this portion of the presentation. This breaks down the change in the population to what's called the components of change. So natural increase, which is in the blue bars, that's the difference between your births and your deaths. Your red bars is your net international migration. So, the balance of people who move into the county from international locations, places outside the country minus the number of people that move out of Montgomery County to other locations outside the country. But for the most part, the red bars, they're inbound people. The gray bars is your net domestic migration, so that's your difference between the number of people who move into Montgomery County from other places in the United States versus the number of people who leave Montgomery County for other places in the United States. And this really highlights the reason behind your population loss during the COVID years. Really what happened was a natural increase declined, partly because we had slightly more deaths due to the COVID pandemic. But the really big driving factor were your two migration components. So international migration was heavily decreased, especially during 2020 and going into 2021, but then you look at the gray bars, a lot of people actually left the county for other places in the United States. So, what happened was during those years, natural increase and international migration was not able to make up for people moving out of the county to other places in the United States. Now, if you look at the historical context, the pattern has been that natural increase and international migration has been able to make up for people that moved out of Montgomery County to other places in the United States. But during the COVID years, domestic migration sped up, we had a lot fewer people coming in. So that was what drove the decrease in the population. But going into 2023, the story with the population rebound is that we, the county has somewhat gone back to the pre-pandemic trends with more international migration. We have a little bit of a bump in the natural increase, so fewer deaths from COVID. And then a lot less people moving out of the county as well. So some of the domestic migration was probably driven by, for example, telework, for example, remote work, people having more of an ability to leave Montgomery County for other places, cheaper places to live. And that actually wraps up the presentation for my part. Do you, thank you for that. Do you have data going back to the rebound, which I think is exciting. It's great. We want more people moving in. Do you have data on the income levels of those who are moving into the county, recent data on that? So my colleague, Ben Kraf, who is actually behind me, he's done some work on migration based on income levels. I believe it's based on IRS data. So he's actually has done a blog on the Montgomery Planning website. But basically, there's some data to indicate that. It's on the middle income families, households that are moving out during this period. So Mr. Kramer, is because you have talked about the decision for not us before, is the last data that you share with us, the latest thing that you have have or is there anything new? There's, we've analyzed so far, I think the blog James is referring to. We've done a few separate things, but the most recent is that we have been losing middle-income people and while gaining the group that gained the most was the low-income group. The high-income group was gaining, but overall their share of the population was staying flat. There's a lot depending on how you define you define middle income and low income and high income, but based on the best we could do, that's what we kind of determined. So that's been the long-term trend. And we can certainly look more in depth into shorter-term trends. And the IRS data, we have looked at that. It tends to just vary a lot year to year. Who's coming in and who's going out? It tends to be that we lose high income retirees is always a big one. So that's kind of its own phenomenon. So yeah. Thank you. Yes, pretty much similar to what you mentioned the last time you were here. Thank you for that. I'm gonna assume in next is Mr. Tomkins. I was just gonna make a couple of comments, which may be part of your questions. One of the things I look at is, is the overall population trend and the employment base growing sets that we can accommodate what business needs are here. So we still have a ways to go. We're still short of what's needed to fill the job openings that are here and that's what's going to drive business growth. So as we look at migration patterns, for instance, thank God the international population is growing, the question is, are they coming in to the sectors where we're seeing growth? Are they coming into life sciences? Are they coming into technology? And when you look at the migration out, are we losing critical talent, or are we losing critical talent or are we losing wealthy retirees? And it looks more like we're losing high income retirees, I would suggest. Yeah, that tends to be, I think, the large component of what we lose. I don't think we have a great data on exactly, you know, it's very to get kind of in Cummings and goings based on industry and level of worker might be very difficult. We could probably look at something like that, but I do think, you know, historically, we will be the most income that tends to leave, tends to leave with retirees when they go. So yeah. If I may also add, so adding onto that, the census data that we've had going back, least for several decades, the highest out migration groups tends to be that age group from about 55 to 75. So it is people that have retired, from about 55 to 75. So down and whether that's good or not come back, but from an to New York. So I don here in Montgomery County. Thank you Before I open it up to my knows this committee has done a lot building buildings that are office to have everything in our power, especially as impact access and it includes this. One other commendations that came from staff, the committee endorsed, and all of us, everybody who's not part of the geo committee that was at that work session, is to create a task force looking at impact taxes and other things. This is a very complicated matter. And as somebody who has, this is my third time working on the growth industry policy. And the idea of having a task force that includes the state delegation is key. And now we'll see that coming to the full council pretty soon, I think it's more of our, that's a positive. And I think this whole question on impact taxes for conversions from office to housing should be part of that conversation of the task force. I want to do it now, but I don't think I have the word. So it should be a part of the task force because I don't think we're going to get six people. I'm just going to tell you. With that, who wants to go first? Cancel member Balkan and I'm assuming cancel member sales. He also want to speak. So I'm going to go Balk in glass and then sales, okay? Thank you, thank you all for being here today. Just a couple things, I'll start with the vacancy rates. So we've had a lot of discussion about vacancy rates in this committee. And one of the things that we're concerned about is the cliff of lease renewals and so we see an increase and there's a difference I I can't remember the sources, but there's two different sources of vacancy rates and there they're a little bit different both of them are are worrisome. So the increase, the 2% increase over the past year in the vacancy rates, we know that it's getting worse. Can you talk a little bit about just monitoring the leases and the assumption that lease renewals they're taking less space when they renew? Sure. So just I think this came up about a year ago. We look at both sources of data for the vacancy rates and this one I think came from co-star if I'm in the same direction. And then I think it's CBRE that does the other one. And typically there are two points different, but we do. They always move in the same direction. They just include different properties in their database, so we do look at both. You are gonna see the vacancy rate continue to rise, at least in my opinion through 2025 both here and in the region number one and that's going to be caused by a couple of factors whether it's New office leases being signed but across the board I would say 90% of leases that are being renewed are being renewed at 40 to 60% of their prior space. And that's a major, major issue so that when you look at absorption over time, that's also going to decrease. It's, there's going to be an announcement every week. I don't know a company that is not reducing its footprint. And in every company we're talking to when given the opportunity companies are going to reduce their space. So what we need to focus on is whether there are not their opportunities to either take some of that space off the market and repurpose it. One of the trends that you will see, which was in the report that was done by the Council, by the committee last fall, is that you're seeing a lot of buildings being bought and torn down because there's a financial advantage to doing that. And you've got a couple of local companies that have been very good and aggressive in doing that. And that's a good thing. And they'll hold on to that and repurpose that land when the time is right. The other thing that you will see is that, if you look at building permits, there's just not gonna be any new construction in the commercial office market. So over time, that helps in the sense that you take the stock that is here and that's what gets addressed. But I think we should never give up on business attraction, because that's all new. And while some of the attraction that we've had has been small businesses adding 20 employees here, 20 employees there, there is some business attraction that's taking place. And you'll see us both not just because of this, but to be more competitive, us being much more aggressive in terms of attraction across the country, especially in key markets. It's very expensive in Boston, very expensive in San Francisco, and there also quality of life issues in those markets as an example. So it's not just about the fact that they're there because life sciences is number one in Boston. There are quality of life issues that give companies reasons to think twice about where they're located in terms of their expansion and while we may be more attractive financially we're also becoming increasingly attractive because of the quality of life to 360 factor. Okay. And you mentioned the probability of redevelopment of old spaces. I think we need to be a monitor what impact that has on our small businesses because just like with our residential, the redevelopment of old stock is going to impact affordable rents for small businesses. So I think we need to monitor that as this redevelopment happens. Does anyone look like? Thank you, Madam Chair, and I appreciate the reference to last week's Government Operations Committee and the ongoing growth in infrastructure policy. All of this intrinsically tied, trying to make sure we continue growing and as we grow with our infrastructure, we have to grow with our job base and so appreciate this presentation. I have a few questions and also appreciate Councillor Bribalco drilling down on that vacancy rate. I want to go first to home sales prices and it's noted that the median home prices was is $650,000. The last time we had this update, I asked for more specificity with regard to home sales. Do you have the number for the average single family home that is sold. We have access to that but we do not we don't have it. Okay. Today. No, I don't think I mean I I think where it's it's much higher. That's correct. Yes. So I don't think we have the. So what I will what I would request yet again is that as we do this update, please delineate further, because I think it is really important for a number of reasons to this council and to the public about the different price points of the different types of housing stock that we have in Montgomery County. And yes, the last number I recall seeing over the summer was $960,000 for the average single-family home sold over the summer. Next question I had was regarding migration. And you kind of talked a little bit about that, the average or more likely person who is leaving outward migration 55 to 75 year old. I think that's really important to note. I had read an Axios article just a few weeks ago that talked about migration flows in the D.C. region and nationally. And this seems to be the flow according to the data that they shared from the census. DC residents are moving to Montgomery County, Prince George's County, and Arlington. Montgomery County residents, the single highest place that they are going to, the place that they're going to with the most level of frequency, is Virginia, Fairfax. And in Virginia, they are moving to San Diego and Honolulu. So they like the sun there, right? And also noted that Virginia has one of the highest numbers of out of state moving. There's a lot of churn. And for anyone to argue that one jurisdiction alone has the biggest worst flow of migration is not looking at the data. There's a lot that we can distill from the data even further, but there is this constant churn in the DC region and ultimately as DC residents move the Montgomery County moved to Virginia, they're leaving the region. So I think that's important to note, but I think even more important to note is who is leaving Montgomery County as was noted. and it is people towards the end of their career who are taking their net worth with them and that is changing the dynamics here in Montgomery County. I should also say that we, I think I thought you guys did the report but we looked at the net migration patterns a while ago in much greater detail similar to what Axios did. And there are a couple of other observations. We talked about the older households leaving, but you also have to look at age groups. And we're losing in the, I think it's like 21 to 44. Those aren't the exact numbers. But the reason we need to pay attention to that is because that's our the core of our workforce. So if we don't keep those people here then we've got a double whammy with the blend of people who are here in terms of who's working and who's not. I think the long-term trend is that for Montgomery County we're not as I would like to use a different word as sexy or exciting as we used to be in terms of attracting people here overall. And interestingly, you're seeing, and you're in the neck of the woods in Boston and certain parts of Arlington and Fairfax County, they're attracting younger people in much larger numbers. So it's about age income and then where they're going and where they're coming from. And that's been a longstanding trend. I've been in the U.C. region for more than three decades now and you're dating yourself. And hey, it's all public information if people want to find out how old I am 47, by the way. And so three decades in total. But it's every time I know people who have now have kids who are moving to Northern Virginia, it used to be friends and classmates of mine at American University or other young people. I was at a taste of Bethesda two weeks ago and was absolutely impressed by the number of young people, younger people who were walking around and enjoying themselves, which was great. And that's a festival activity environment. But it's also the reason why we former County Executive Ike Legget created the nighttime economy task force more than a decade ago, about 11 years ago, which I and a number of colleagues on the council were members. Still more work to do. Essentially that task force looked at liquor laws primarily, but housing affordability, jobs, public transportation, and other amenities were chapters in that report. And I think we need to elevate those from chapters to policies. And again, that is another larger conversation we are having here at the Council. Moving forward with a number of my other questions. Regarding jobs, do we have the breakdown of private sector versus public sector jobs. And I think that is a really important question as we look towards the next three weeks. And thank you, Madam Chair, for spending a lot of time in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I was there two weeks ago. But depending on how things go after election day, there might be a migration of federal jobs away from the DC region. So do we have any of that data? I mean, I might, I believe that the data in these reports are both public and private. You guys can correct me for it. It's all everything combined. We did, we did look at this a few issues of the indicators report ago where the, you know, for the most part, our public sector jobs are relatively flat. You can call that flat and stagnant or stable. You, depending on how you want to call it, but they don't are, our private sector economy, just like any place is, is more dynamic and that, that has, you know, it's gone up and down. It's the, it is kind of growing back again, but, but yes, our public sector employment, especially federal, which is our, what's unique about us compared to other places, public sector employment tends to be, tends to have been relatively flat and that flatness has contributed a lot to our overall economies flatness over, over these years. And, and yes, I agree that if we probably shouldn't be paying attention to federal, national political implications of elections because that could have a big impact on our county where so many of these civil servants live. Oh, and I just want to add, we have started talking about that. It's also the breakdown of which agencies are here because some agencies are easier to move than others. And we got a precursor to what could happen depending on which way an election goes based on prior history. When I look at organizations like NIH and the FDA, which are predominant here. I think we are in better shape, but there are 18 federal agencies here. And so we just started talking about the fact that even within our organization, while we have historically not spent as much time, we do spend time with the GSA, but on federal government leases, which are important that it needs to move to the front and center. And this thought about the fact that we want to diversify away from that. Forget that. They're too important. They have to be front and center, especially given what could possibly happen. One other issue, the GSA is also reducing its footprint across the country. So you have a double whammy of them doing the same thing that the private sector is doing. But we also look at the potential for what could happen with a change in administration. I wish I could say more. But there are a couple of agencies that are not in Montgomery County that are looking at Montgomery County. And there's one agency that is here in downtown Silver Spring that is looking around. So it's a very dynamic environment. And I believe to further this point of the jobs, public sector jobs and federal jobs being relatively flat, we did a breakdown in this report here of what we consider our life science sectors. And a very large component of that was capturing public servants. It's actually under the category of public health administrators, public health sector administrators, something along those lines. And what you'll see in that sector there is that there's actually a slight decline in those jobs, even though there was an increase overall in the life sciences sector. So while I can't speak to the exact specifics of the percentages of federal public versus private jobs, there are indicators that while there could be some sectors that are slight decreases, we're having increases overall. Appreciate you raising that point because according to the data you've provided Montgomery County accounts for 49% of all life science employees in the state of Maryland. Are you saying that 49% captures all the federal NIH FDA, all those employees? Yes. Okay. I'd be curious if you can separate out again within that sector, within that subset, the private sector versus public sector. We can do that and we certainly can bring that back here. We will also appoint anyone that's interested to the life sciences, land use and compatibility study that we did as a company for our great, the great Seneca plan, which was recently approved, which does have a pretty good breakdown of the life science sector and breaks out private versus public employment. And our private life science sector has over the last, you know, a couple decades been very dynamic. And we've really, it really has been growing significantly. And that's the purpose, right? It is to, you know, we know and we tout and we support and celebrate the life sciences sector, but we are spending so much of our energy on the private life sciences sector that we wanna see what those numbers are moving forward. So thank you. Those are all the questions I have. You know, I'll leave with a, I'll end with a footnote that depending on how November goes I would like to engage about a potentially different presentation Given the dynamics and the movement and potential. I hope we never have to have that presentation but we can engage Four weeks five weeks from now. Thank you. I know, right? Thank you so much. Great questions, two things before I pass the mic. Two council member sales who's in Zoom right now. Number one, just because it's important, FBI. Montgomery County has been a strong support of having the FBI, New Headquarters in Prince St. Giske County. We understand that we don't make the assumption that every employee of the FBI is going to live in Prince St. Giske County. So a significant number could decide to live in Montgomery County and take the purple line. So that's a positive. And it speaks about the effect of making sure that the entire region is strong. It's not just when you think about Boston, it's just not the seat of Boston. Or California, it's not just San Francisco, it's San Diego, it's so many other things. We're looking at the cluster and the impact that the region has, DC, Virginia, Montgomery County, Prince Harry's County, at the end of the day, we are a team. And although we're looking at things in the Montgomery County lens, having things in the real perspective is really important. The other thing I will mention, especially because the comments on the hospitality that we wanna increase jobs and so on and so forth, it brings the question of the conversations that we have had in this committee and the ones that we're about we have had in this committee and the ones that we're about to have on with MCPS and Montgomery College and the University of Shady Grove regarding trades, making sure that we are developing the next generation of students from middle, high school, going into college with careers that impact the economy in Montgomery County, including hospitality, not every child is going to be a scientist. Okay, and that's a good thing, right? We want to have diversity in our economy. And we are going to have a joint committee work session with Education and Culture Committee, right before Thanksgiving with MCPS looking at the trades industry in a state tool on that because I think you're not going to be speakers in that session, you show a bad tension to what is being said. With that, I can remember sales. All right. Thank you Madam Chair and thank you to the MCDC for the quarterly report. Just a few questions to ask about the approach for this report. I know that we've been going year over year to look at the contrast in the data. Are we able to look at the prior quarter in addition to the year over year comparison? Yes, we should be able to do that. I think we can go quarter to quarter. The often the reason that in these kinds of things you do year over year is because things are very, a lot of parts of the economy can be seasonal and highly volatile from quarter to quarter. So that's why we tend to look at the same quarter and compare those over years. Tip, if we can certainly do quarter to quarter, it helps to use a longer, have a longer length of data if you're going to do that. And we had been doing that, I think, for a while, and still to some extent, we kind of everything's kind of pre-pandemic world and post-pandemic world at this point. We're still kind of in that. So we have a few pre-2019 or 2020 data points. But we can certainly look at what we try to do in our special sections usually is to, you know, put draw out on a special topic and look at that over time. So that is one of the things we do. We can see sometimes what if you could already look at the tables, they're already long and there's a lot of data in them. So partly what we try to do is just minimize the amount of statistics and, you know, numbers that people have to look at and digest at once But yes, we can certainly look at some you know Quarter to quarter That also Just to see if we are making any progress throughout the year instead of year over year Thank you We also talked about the labor force during our last meeting. And I think councilmember Glass asked a little bit about this, about getting more information geographic location of some of the demographics for the residents who are under employed, unemployed, and potentially working with WorkSource Montgomery. Do we have any updates on locating this data or where we can find this data. We did talk with WorkSource Montgomery and they have a data sharing agreement that allows them to access information from labor, Maryland labor, for a fee of $2,500. But they haven't access the data in about two years. And it outlines that information can only be shared to show aggregates to just little information obviously so that you can't identify anyone individual. And they said they'd be happy to reach out to get the data, but at our cost. So we made that choice not to spend $2,500 on that data at this particular moment. Let me just add to that. So before, so what I believe they're referring to is that data that we actually do have access to at planning. But that data, there's only one department of labor set of micro data about the employment that I'm aware of, and that is what we have. It does not. Again, it gives us locations. We again cannot share that except in some sort of aggregated fashion because it is it's anonymous data that we can't report that way. It also does not give us good information, any breakdowns about the the socio-economic status of the employees. It's very it's the number of employees you have the and really it's really not much more than that. It's just you know just the business location and the number of employees from quarter to quarter. So it would not necessarily answer that, the question that you're getting after, which it's very hard to get that. There's kind of a longer discussion. There's just, there's not a great way to get that. You can get it from residential, you know, the same data that we often use from the American Community Survey or the Census where you're typically getting the residents of the county, not necessarily the workers, you know, residents who could be working in elsewhere in the county and that's typically how we look at how we have looked at our, you know, those kind of socioeconomic comparisons that we just use residential data for the most part. So it's a tough question. Yeah. Okay, thank you for that. Another previous follow-up question that I wanted to find out more about the retail sector. We wanted to know if we were experiencing any rapid growth or decline in specific parts of the county. I know that that was also some information that the Department of labor may have been able to compile for us. Was this also part of the ask or is this any of the kids on whether we can identify this data? We can. Good morning for the record, Kerry McCarthy McCarthy Division Chief of Research and Strategic Projects at Montgomery Planning. We've done a couple studies about the retail sector over the year. We did the 2017 countywide retail market strategy study. We did the retail and diverse communities study. It's going to be in our planning board has to go to the planning board first, but it's expected to be in our fiscal year 2016 budget request to do a comprehensive retail market study again, given all the changes from the pandemic. I think you mean 2026. Yeah, that's like that 2026. 2026. 2026. Yeah. So yeah, it is a sector we would like to look more in depth with. It requires a significant effort to go out into the community and survey businesses and talk to people. Oh good. That's going to be helpful. Thank you. And then on circle five, it looks like the county's office vacancy was lower than Arlington or Fairfax in quarter two. However, since 2019, office vacancies have increased more in Montgomery County than any other major jurisdiction. Have we identified what may have led to this trend in Montgomery County versus other jurisdictions? this trend among Montgomery County versus other jurisdictions. There are pockets so you can go back to your favorite taste of it as the downtown, but as the if you look at where we were several years ago, the office market was flooded with new great properties. Also in other parts, whether it's Pikenrose, that we have added a lot of inventory. And so as a result, trying to absorb that at the same time where you've gotten, have declines relative to what may be built in Arlington, which is older, and Crystal City. That's why Amazon went there because they had all that space available. So the bottom line is we had a lot of new inventory that came on the market. Okay. That's a short and dirty answer. I don't know if you want to add to that. I would just add the third place where there seems to be a high vacancy right now is rock spring. And again, to Mr. Tompkins' point about flight to quality, to better newer buildings, and flight to locations near transit. And that is why at the PHP committee, I voted to have it at red zone for the rock spring because we do want to incentivize that in state too for that work session for the county council. Would they be very exciting at least for me? Anything else on the bristles? Do you have more questions? Yes, yes I did. at least for me. Anything else? Oh, Council members, so you have more questions? Yes, yes, I did. Regarding the housing indicators, are we able to tell how many of the closed home sales are from first time home buyers? I know that we put some money aside for our first time home buyers assistance program and wanted to see if anyone's taking advantage of those resources. Yeah, I don't again, I feel bad because I feel like I'm always the one here saying, well, the data can't tell us that answer that question, but I don't believe we can get that other than through administrative data that would come from the program. I'm not sure that we can tell based on existing data sources. Although I would not be surprised when we do the breakdown that Council Member Glass has asked us looking at the average sale of a price in a given neighborhood. I think you could make some assumptions. There are probably very few people who are buying their first house at a million bucks, but that's more my supposition and you probably could look at whether they're townhouse sales whether they're there's $600,000 homes or the if there are any left I don't think there are $400,000 homes, which is unfortunate, but It would be very difficult to tell. I can also add that I mean this is a type of discussion that we have at the PHP committee. So I can ask and see if we can get an update on the latest data that we can share with the committee. Okay. Okay. And then my last question, we met with the state delegation last week and delegate David Moon, the new house majority leader. He raised the issue of population growth. He shared that this is a long term goal for the state to address. And just wanted to know if we are preparing for this population growth here in the county. Are we seeing this as an upward trend? Really population decline across the state and wanted to see what we are seeing here in the county. I'll go ahead and mention that. So growth has been the norm for Montgomery County for decades. The last time there was a population decline before code was actually in the 70s. So we do expect growth to return. It has returned, although one year's worth of data is not exactly a trend. Okay. So more time. All right. Thank you for the updates. I just have. Thank you. I'll go ahead. No, I just have a clarifying question for a council member, Foundry Gonzalez, when you talk about impact fees, can you clarify because many of us, some of us think that having impact fees across the board is not good, but you got to replace that income with something. So are you suggesting that you're going to look at impact fees overall or only in selected categories? Because it would be great if we looked at them overall. You asking me on that question? Well, that's what we're doing that overall at the G.I.O. Committee and it's coming to a full can soon. We can brief you after it happened last week, but we can brief you. And then the idea is also to create a task force to have a deep dive on impact access in general on because it's been years since we established the current policies and we need like I said have a deep dive with different stakeholders planning, transportation folks, state folks. So pretty soon I think we are going to be seeing that task for to be brought up to the county council. You were required to have a resolution by the county council to move forward, but it seems that we're working towards that direction. And usually task force take a year, at least, to come up with their recommendations. So we'll see how that goes. Thank you. Good job. Mm-hmm. Just adding to what the chair said, when we are engaging in this conversation, very, very public conversation here in the county right now about growth and infrastructure and about impact taxes and additional fees, when we have the planning board and the county executive agreeing that impact taxes are an imprecise tool, I agree. And we all, and Councilor Malcolm shared her thoughts when there was a supermajority of the council at the G.O. Committee last week. There was, if not universal agreement, we were clearly going towards a consensus of creating a task force to figure out a new way forward since there is near universal agreement that what we have is not working. Of course, I'll chime in on this very important topic. So I think that one of the great reasons why we have an economic development committee is because we need to look at how all the various policies that we have throughout the county impact our economy. And the topic of impact taxes is significantly impacts, not only our commercial development, but our housing stock. And like many things we do, we have a lot of really great goals and a lot of great ways that we want to serve our community, but they're often conflicting. So I am just as anxious to get into the discussion about impact tax. So thank you. And with that excitement about talking about re-learning impact taxes, I think I want to thank each one of you for a great presentation. Lots of follow-ups that we're going to have in the near future. And with that, this committee is adjourned.