Feb. 23--CHAMPAIGN -- What happened to the good old days, when Champaign County's unemployment rate was in the 2 percent range?

Those days are long gone. During the last half of 2008, Champaign County's unemployment rate topped 6 percent in all but one month.

But for five straight years in the late 1990s, Champaign County had annual unemployment rates below 3 percent, dipping as low as 2.4 percent in 1999. For several years, the county vied with McLean County for the lowest county unemployment rate in the state.

The 2001 recession came and went. But the unemployment rate did not go down; instead it climbed to the 4 percent range for most of the decade before shooting up to the 5 and 6 percent range in 2008.

According to the Illinois Department of Employment Security, several things happened over the last decade: The labor force bumped up sharply in the late 1990s and, after several years of stability, began growing rapidly again in 2005. In 1998, there were 94,992 in the labor force. The number swelled to 99,075 by 2000 and stayed there five years. Big spurts in 2005, 2006 and 2007 pushed the labor force up to 105,053.

The number of jobs also grew. In 1998, there were 92,483 people employed in Champaign County. That climbed to a peak of 96,044 in 2001 before falling back. In 2005, the number of people with jobs began rising again, reaching 100,486 in 2007.

So while Champaign County's labor force grew by slightly more than 10,000 from 1998 to 2007, the number of people employed increased by only 8,000.

John Dimit thinks this decade's higher unemployment rate may well be the result of job diversification in Champaign County.

Dimit, the chief executive officer of the Champaign County Economic Development Corp., was previously executive director of the county's Regional Planning Commission.

As such, he was in a position to keep tabs on both job and population growth. But he said his observations are based on impressions, rather than data analysis.

"In the 1990s, the economic development strategy for the county was to diversify," Dimit said. "That came about as a result of the loss of Chanute (Air Force Base) and a couple decades of steady-state enrollment at the University of Illinois.

"Rantoul and the rest of the county were fairly successful at diversification, and that was probably the cause of the uptick in the labor force in 2000," he said.

As for more recent growth in the labor force, Dimit thinks it could well be associated with the UI and retail growth along North Prospect Avenue.