The state’s unemployment rate continues on its downward trend with February dropping down to four-point-one percent from January’s rate of four-point-two percent. Iowa Workforce Development spokesperson, Kerry Koonce, says it’s the fifth straight month with a drop. “We continue to see drops in the number of people who are unemployed. We are down four-thousand from a year ago for the number of people who are unemployed,” Koonce says. “And our number of people who are actually receiving unemployment insurance is down almost 12-thousand from last month as well.”

The number of unemployed dropped, even though the state lost some jobs in the month, the first decline in jobs since September.”We dropped 400 jobs, which isn’t very big. Most of that being in the trade, transportation and utilities area. We saw a larger growth in that last month than really was expects, so I think that was just some leveling out,” according to Koonce. “We saw nice growth in manufacturing, nice growth in education and health services — so those really helped the state as well,” Koonce says.

Workforce Development figures show manufacturing added 12-hundred jobs, the education and health care areas increased jobs fueled entirely by gains in private education of one-thousand jobs. The number of unemployed Iowans dropped to 70-thousand-100 in February from 71-thousand-800 in January. Koonce says warmer weather should lead to more job gains.

“Because you will have a lot of those people who are on temporary unemployment coming back to work. And we saw some gains in construction this month, the biggest gains are coming in industrial, which is good, because that shows overall growth,” Koonce says.

The national unemployment rate was five-point-five (5.5) percent in February.

(Radio Iowa)