Mountain States City Scoop, February 2022: Salt Lake City
City Grill
Rich Thorn
President/CEO
AGC of Utah
With a statewide unemployment rate of 1.9% as of December and only 13,000 unemployment insurance claims reported by the last week of January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says the state is one of country’s leaders in finding jobs and getting people back to work after the pandemic. Last year, Forbes magazine ranked Utah’s economic growth first in the U.S., and over the last five years, the state’s GDP grew by 19.1%, the second-highest growth rate out of all 50 states.
“Utah’s construction industry outlook for 2022 looks promising,” Thorn says. “Our state has weathered the challenges brought by the pandemic in pretty strong fashion. Our legislative leaders are enjoying a budget surplus, with a significant amount of that surplus possibly heading to our state’s construction industry via infrastructure spending, buildings and one of the top legislative priorities, water projects. We anticipate, and the data supports our forecast, that our biggest challenge will be finding a skilled workforce. Utah’s unemployment rate, at the time of this writing in early February, is below 2%, and there are literally thousands of construction jobs just waiting to be filled.”
