Kansas construction employment

Tip to the Wichita Eagle editorial board: When a lobbying group feeds you statistics, try to learn what they really mean.

When investigating the claims of a lobbying group, Kansas Policy Institute found that the statistics — when examined closely — do not support the narrative the group promotes. Unfortunately, the Wichita Eagle editorial board did not examine the group’s claims closely enough to determine their validity.

At issue is the claim that transfers from the Kansas highway fund have lead to the loss of highway construction jobs. It’s repeated not only by the state’s highway construction lobbyists, but also by others. The statistics that are cited deserve further investigation, which is what KPI did on its article Media and highway contractors mislead again. KPI’s Dave Trabert found:

Had the Eagle bothered to examine Mr. Totten’s claim, they would have learned that only 2 percent of the construction job decline was attributable to highway construction and that the loss of 100 jobs is less than 1 percent of total highway jobs.

In addition to learning that Mr. Totten was grossly exaggerating, they would have learned that employment for construction of new homes and non-residential buildings showed very nice growth and the real problem is in specialty trade contractors for non-highway projects.

Trabert is referring to the Wichita Eagle editorial board citing figures from a self-interested lobbying group — in this case, Bob Totten, executive vice president of the Kansas Contractors Association — without investigating the true nature of the figures.

I’ve taken the same numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Because these values are available only in not seasonally adjusted form, I’ve created a chart using the moving average of the past 12 months. A second chart shows the change from the same month of the previous year. The charts confirm what KPI found, which is employment in the “Heavy and Civil” category is not responsible for the decline in Kansas construction jobs. In fact, employment in this category is on an upward trend over the past 18 months. It is employment in the category “Specialty Trade” that has fallen. This isn’t related to highway construction.

This data is available in an interactive visualization which you may access here. For more information on highway spending in Kansas, see Kansas highway spending.