Brevard County's economy is doing much better than it has been doing several years ago and it's showing.
Recently, the Space Coast jumped to No. 63 from No. 153 on the annual Milken Institute’s "Best-Performing Cities 2017 Index."
Brevard was among a handful of communities, including four others in Florida, showing significant gains in the annual Milken report.
Topping the Milken list were Provo-Orem, Utah and Raleigh, North Carolina.
The Milken index, which started in 1999, uses what it calls fact-based metrics in nine area to review a community's relative growth of metropolitan areas. Among the metrics used by Milken are growth in jobs, wages and salaries, and technology output.
Also studied are high-tech fields whose concentrations in a metropolitan area are higher than the national average.
“This report echoes the incredible activity our community is experiencing," said Lynda Weatherman, president and CEO of the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast.
"To jump 90 spots is a tremendous achievement, and places the Space Coast in the top third of large (metropolitan statistical areas) which includes cities such as Nashville, Seattle, and Dallas," she said. This third-party recognition will reflect positively as the EDC continues to compete with communities more than twice our size.”
Helping that rise in the rankings has been a slow, but methodical gains in business investment and job growth. Keeping in mind when the space shuttle program ended in 2011, Brevard lost 8,000 jobs and the unemployment rate that year averaged nearly 11 percent.
Today, unemployment in Brevard is at 3.9 percent. The December 2017 jobless numbers for Brevard are to be released on Friday.
In Florida, other communities making big gains in the Milken, were:
- Tallahassee, going to No. 117 from No. 172
- Pensacola, to No. 107 from 160
- Lakeland, to 70 from 114
- Gainesville, to 74 from 100
Contact Price at 321-242-3658 or wprice@floridatoday.com. You can also follow him on Twitter @Fla2dayBiz.