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Economic baseline reference (BLS QCEW + US Census ACS)

Committed localized economic baseline for a site’s corridor: employment by industry and each sector’s export-orientation, the quantitative ground beneath the data-center deal. Regenerated by watermark economics; the site reads baseline.yaml (no live pull).

Which county a copy covers is the site’s own — the reference build keeps the un-slugged reference/economics/baseline.yaml, and every other site’s is reference/economics/<slug>/baseline.yaml, reduced to that site’s profile county. No county is named in this file; each one is named in its own data.

Files

What the numbers are

• Total covered employment — all-ownership county total (QCEW agglvl 70, own 0).
• Sector employment — private employment by 2-digit NAICS sector (QCEW agglvl 74, own 5), ranked by jobs.
• Location quotient (lq_annual_avg_emplvl) — the county’s employment share in a sector divided by the national share. > 1 means the county does more of that work than the nation (export-oriented); < 1 means under-represented. QCEW publishes this directly; it is the standard county-level proxy for an import/export ratio.

Known gaps & caveats

• Population is the US Census ACS 5-year estimate (B01003_001E), pulled for 2010/2015/2020/2023. The Census API requires a key (WATERMARK_CENSUS_API_KEY); without one, employment + location quotients still regenerate and baseline.population is left null (the site page says so) rather than committing unverified figures. ACS 5-year is a rolling estimate, not a point-in-time count.
• No clean county import/export series exists. Census USA Trade and the FT900 are state/port-district level, not county. The location quotient is the honest proxy surfaced here — no trade ratio is fabricated.
• QCEW annual averages lag ~1 year (the latest annual is the prior calendar year). Figures are connector-pulled and regenerable; columns are selected by name, never by index.

Cataloged datasets — generated from data/catalog/reference/; run watermark catalog render --apply after editing an entry.

A {…} placeholder in a title resolves to the site reading it — a slug-scoped dataset holds each site’s own copy, so its title names each site’s own county.

abatement-parameters — {county_state} Abatement Parameters + What-If Scenario Knobs

Source: Ohio Revised Code (5715.01 assessment ratio; 122.175 DCTE scope; 3735.671(A)(2) school-compensation floor) + Ohio Department of Taxation county sales-and-use rate + a stated commercial-millage assumption; the withheld-knob bands are cross-referenced to reference/datacenter-industry/priors.yaml · License: U.S./state statutory material (public domain); the assumption bands are this project’s stated modeling inputs · Access: public · Site scope: slug-scoped · Refresh: on-demand, last 2026-07-29

economics-baseline — {county_state} Economic Baseline (BLS QCEW + US Census ACS)

Source: BLS QCEW annual averages (keyless) + US Census ACS 5-year (B01003_001E population, B19013_001E median household income) · License: U.S. Government work (public domain) · Access: keyed · Site scope: slug-scoped · Refresh: annual

Regenerate: watermark economics