← The Spokane Employer Scorecard
How the grades work, where every number comes from, and, just as important, what this data can’t tell you. If you find an error, the corrections policy is at the bottom. Errors get fixed and disclosed, not buried.
The scorecard grades one question: is Spokane attracting employers that raise wages?
The theory is old, boring, and well supported. A regional economy grows when its employers sell to the outside world: manufacturers, software firms, engineering and professional services, headquarters. Those employers bring new money into town and tend to pay above-average wages. That money becomes local paychecks, paychecks become disposable income, and disposable income is what lets a coffee shop on Monroe or a storefront on Garland make rent. Local-serving sectors like health care, retail, and government are essential, but they mostly circulate money that’s already here.
So when the scorecard says “good-fit employers,” it means employers in traded sectors that pay above the regional average and hire the skills Spokane already has. The eight measures follow that chain: jobs, who’s creating them, what they pay, what households have to spend, and whether that spending is reaching storefronts.
Green, shown on the scorecard as Strong, means Spokane beats its benchmark (usually the U.S. or Washington state) or is clearly improving. Yellow, shown as Mixed, means near the benchmark, or the signals point in different directions. Red, shown as Weak, means below benchmark and not improving. The color names and the plain-language names are the same three grades. Earlier change log entries use the color names.
The overall call. The top of the scorecard reports one verdict for the region: off track, mixed, or on track. The rule is fixed before each reading and applied mechanically. Off track when weak measures outnumber strong ones. Mixed when they tie. On track when strong measures outnumber weak ones. Yellow and mixed measures never decide the call on their own; they are the middle of the board, not a tiebreaker.
There is deliberately no letter grade and no composite score. The eight measures are neither equally important nor independent of one another (spending and storefronts move partly because jobs move), so averaging them would imply a precision this data does not have. A three-state verdict gives a reader the headline without inventing arithmetic to justify it.
Grades are judgment calls, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. A formula would look more objective while hiding the same judgments inside weightings nobody reads. Instead, every grade is argued in one paragraph, in public, next to its source. If you think a grade is wrong, the evidence to argue with is right there. That’s the point.
One rule keeps grades honest over time: a grade only changes when the data changes, not when the news cycle does. Each quarterly update notes every grade change and why.
| Measure | Source | Updates |
|---|---|---|
| Job growth | WA Employment Security Dept. (ESD); BLS | Monthly, ~6 week lag |
| Sector mix | Spokane Workforce Council (Lightcast); ESD | Quarterly to annual |
| Unemployment | ESD / BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics | Monthly, ~6 week lag |
| Wages | BLS Occupational Employment & Wage Statistics | Annual, ~1 year lag |
| Household income | Census American Community Survey | Annual, ~1 year lag |
| Retail sales | WA Dept. of Revenue quarterly releases | Quarterly, ~2 quarter lag |
| Storefront vacancy | CoStar, as published by local brokerages | Quarterly |
| Population | WA Office of Financial Management; Census | Annual |
Geography: figures cover Spokane County or the Spokane metro area unless a city figure is available and noted. That’s a data constraint, not a choice. Reliable employment and wage statistics don’t exist at the city level, and they definitely don’t exist for Emerson Garfield or any other single neighborhood.
Read the scorecard with these six limits in mind. They’re why some claims you might want to make from this page shouldn’t be made.
Two sources deserve a specific disclosure: vacancy data originates with CoStar and sector data with Lightcast, both proprietary datasets republished by local institutions. They can’t be independently verified from raw public records, so they’re cited exactly as published and treated as directional.
The calculator is a teaching tool, not a forecast. It illustrates the local multiplier: the well-documented finding that jobs selling to the outside world create additional local jobs, while jobs serving local demand mostly don’t. Multiplier ranges are adapted from published research (Moretti’s estimates run about 1.6 extra local jobs per manufacturing job and near 5 per high-tech job) and are deliberately widened and discounted, because economists debate exact sizes even while agreeing on direction. Every other assumption appears on the tool itself in round numbers. It does not model incentive costs, housing pressure, or the odds of landing any particular employer.
This scorecard is maintained by one Spokane resident on personal time. It takes no money from anyone, is not affiliated with the City of Spokane, any campaign, party, developer, or business group, and exists for one reason: to keep attention on the numbers that decide whether this region’s neighborhoods thrive.
Corrections: if a number is wrong, send the source. Verified errors are fixed within a week and logged below, permanently. Disagreements about grades are welcome too, and the strongest counterarguments will be linked so readers can weigh them.
v1.3, August 2026. Presentation only. No figure, source or grade changed. Rebuilt the scorecard page around progressive disclosure so a reader gets the story in ten seconds, the eight measures in two minutes, and the full evidence when they want it: each measure now opens to reveal its benchmark chart, its “why it matters” paragraph and its sources, with nothing removed. Added an overall verdict at the top (off track) under the mechanical rule now published above, replacing an unlabeled tally the reader had to interpret. Added plain-language grade labels (strong, mixed, weak) bound to the existing color grades. Added a homepage teaser for the employer calculator, showing multiplier ranges only. Turned the lever map and the four city case studies into cards, carrying their status lines and citations across verbatim. Prose that previously ran ahead of the numbers now sits behind “read the longer explanation.” Nothing was deleted from the page.
v1.2, August 2026. Added the lever map (“Who moves which levers”), assigning specific levers to the city, the regional recruiters, higher education, anchor employers, the state, and residents. Status lines there follow the same rule as grades: tied to a graded card, tied to a source, or stated as an open data request. Higher education is not yet graded; its first measured item will be transparency itself, starting with program-level graduate retention in the region.
v1.1, August 2026 (pre-launch review). Re-graded unemployment from green to yellow and made its labor-force caveat the headline; replaced the household-income headline with per-person income (yellow) pending full-time earnings data; updated retail sales to the newest county quarter and labeled the city figure’s vintage; added geography labels throughout; tightened the calculator’s multipliers (tech capped below Moretti’s published maximum per more conservative county-level research, health care raised for Spokane’s regional referral-hub role); added Pittsburgh as a fourth case study. Net effect: fewer greens. Honesty over comfort.
v1.0, August 2026. First publication. Eight measures. Planned additions: new business applications per resident (Census Business Formation Statistics), city permit turnaround time, corridor-level storefront vacancy, and an attention audit counting the share of council agenda items that touched employer attraction. Also queued: median earnings of full-time workers (ACS S2001), working-age employment rate (Spokane Trends 2.4.2), pre-registered numeric grade thresholds, and a peer-metro comparison column.