From the Editor: St. Mary begins to get moving again

Life continues to return to something like normal after more than a year of COVID-19 fears and restrictions. A few bumps remain in the road ahead.
The Council on Aging senior center in Franklin will reopen next month, but seniors who rely on the Morgan City and Patterson senior centers will have to wait a while.
At the June 23 St. Mary Parish Council meeting, Council on Aging Director Beverly Domengeaux invited members to the 10 a.m. July 9 opening of the Franklin senior center, which has been closed since COVID-19 mitigation rules went into effect in March 2020.
The Morgan City and Patterson centers still have “structure and other issues we have to clear up,” Domengeaux told the council. Staffing also continues to be a problem.
The council is accepting donated fans during its Sizzle the Summer with a Senior drive, Domengeaux said. Donations of water, wash cloths and soap are also needed.
The Center of Hope in Centerville, meanwhile, is planning a red carpet extravaganza to welcome clients back to work.
The center provides job training and work for people with developmental and physical challenges. Some of its work has been carried out online with tablets since the pandemic began. But the onsite work has been shut down since March 2020.
At 8:15 a.m. July 6, “we will line up in the Center of Hope parking lot and cheer our folks on as they return to work for the first time in 16 long months!” says a flyer from the center.
People are encouraged to bring signs, streamers and posters, but no balloons, please.
Fits and starts
The local economy is showing signs of revival, but the state of employment and commerce in St. Mary doesn’t deserve streamers and red carpets yet.
St. Mary unemployment was at 8.1% in May, reports the Louisiana Workforce Commission. The rate was unchanged from April. The number of people employed in nonfarm jobs was up by 119 from April.
In May 2020, unemployment here was at 14.1%.
But you may remember that the St. Mary economy wasn’t exactly robust even before COVID-19, due mostly to a 7-year-old slump on oil prices.
We’ve seen some good news there, too. The Wednesday morning price for both West Texas intermediate and Louisiana light crude was above $73 per barrel. The prices have been heading generally up since dipping below $40 last winter.
Of course, the picture looks slightly different when we’re standing at the self-service gas pump. And we don’t know yet whether the rise in prices will generate more offshore energy production, which would help St. Mary.
And while St. Mary employment has climbed back above 17,700, remember that the number was over 27,000 before the oil price decline began in fall 2014. The early word is that the 2020 Census results may show a St. Mary population decline of 10% since 2010.
One bit of good news came this week when Delta Biofuel announced that it’s looking at the Iberia Parish portion of Jeanerette as the site for a plant that will turn sugar cane bagasse into pellets to be used for fuel. The plant would employ 149 people for construction and 126 people if the plant begins operation.
The plant would not only provide jobs, but it would help diversify the regional economy into the sustainable fuels sector.
Inflated
Resuscitating an economy turns out to be a complicated business. For proof, look at the freak-out report on the rise in the Consumer Price Index released this spring.
The CPI is a broad measure of inflation. The feds said the CPI rose 2.6% in the year ending in March 2021, which is about where it’s been most of the time since the mid-1980s.
But for the year ending in April 2021, the CPI rose 4.2%.
“Aha!” said conservative economists, and some not-so-conservative economists, who had been ringing alarms about inflation caused by the trillions Uncle Sam has been throwing at the pandemic economy.
Maybe. But a lot of things were going on, many related to shortages of one kind or another that, we hope, will work themselves out over time.
Shipping containers were in short supply because they’d been taken out of commerce and piled up in ports because of pandemic restrictions.
There were shortages of lumber and labor.
And if you have to point at one cause, look no farther than the used car.
Bloomberg reported that used car prices jumped 10% in April alone and accounted for about a third of the 4.2% increase in the CPI.
Why?
There was another shortage, this one a shortage of computer chips, because of COVID-19 restrictions and a couple of major fires at chip plants in Asia.
The chip shortage slowed production of new U.S. vehicles, so there was more pressure on used car prices.
And then there’s the rental car industry.
Usually, the big rental companies release thousands of vehicles into the pre-owned market each year to make room for new vehicles in their fleets. But in spring 2020, when no one was going anywhere, they slimmed down their inventory.
So this year, they didn’t have as many used vehicles to unload when they upgraded. A smaller supply of used cars raised prices.
We can look ahead to the rest of 2021 with confidence that it will be better than 2020. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.