As experts are increasingly in agreement that the national economy has hit bottom and is slowly mending, statistics also reveal this may be true of Madison and Dane County.
According to the Wisconsin State Journal, unemployment in Dane County was down to 5.4 percent in December 2009 after a peak of 6.3 percent in June. In the city of Madison, the unemployment rate for 2009 was 5.8 percent, compared to 9.7 percent nationally, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
However, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said he is cautiously optimistic. He wrote in his blog Tuesday that unemployment in Madison is still twice what it is normally.
""We should feel fortunate that our local economy, while still hurting, hasn't hit the depths of much of the rest of Wisconsin or the nation as a whole,"" he wrote. ""[But] we need to stay on task to keep the recovery coming.""
According to Ald. Mike Verveer, District 4, Madison has historically been somewhat ""immune"" to swings in the national economy. In fact, forbes.com listed Madison as one of the top ten places in the United States to find a job in 2009.
""We have weathered the storm better than many other communities around the country,"" Verveer said. ""Things are certainly better here than they are state-wide and nationally.""
Verveer said Madison could attribute this success to the presence of ""economic generators"" such as UW-Madison and the state capitol. ""Having the tens of thousands of jobs that those institutions bring … makes a lot of the difference,"" he said.
However, social service programs in the area, such as food pantries, say there has been a large increase in the number of people who need help, according to the WSJ.
Cieslewicz said the city could use the lessons from the recession to strengthen itself. ""That means we need to use the downturn as a slingshot to make us face up to our weaknesses and improve where we need to [and] take stock of our strengths and encourage them to grow,"" he wrote.
