Job fair draws hundreds

Bob Trimble, laid off from the Virginia Department of Transportation in June, traveled from bustling northern Virginia to small-town Culpeper Monday in search of a job.

“We’ll make it,” said the Centreville resident at a job fair at the Daniel Technology Center, referring to his financial situation at home, noting he collects unemployment while his wife is still employed.

Twenty years in the field of transportation, Trimble said he was open to trying something different. The Centreville resident said he found some good leads at the job fair and expressed high praise for its host — Congressman Eric Cantor, a Richmond Republican who represents Culpeper and surrounding counties as part of Virginia’s larger 7th District.

“Republicans understand it is the economy,” Trimble said of what’s most important. “Democrats think it is healthcare.”

About 750 well-dressed job seekers passed through the job fair Monday at which Cantor spent a couple hours interacting with job hunters and potential employers.

“Clearly there is unemployment in and around Culpeper and that’s exactly why we called for and created this job fair today,” Cantor, minority whip in the U.S. House, told reporters before he left around noon, his blue Suburban idling outside.

Asked if he thought the economy was getting better as growth in the gross domestic product seems to indicate, Cantor said no.

“People do not live and breathe the GDP,” he said. “They are about their own circumstances and when you are out of work, there is an economic crisis in the household.”

Cantor, as he has repeatedly in recent weeks and months, condemned the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress in February as “an utter failure.”

“Much of the stimulus money, when it was allocated to the states, went to filling budget gaps,” he said. “We know here in Virginia $3 billion went toward plugging a hole. What are they going to do now? It was staving off tough decisions that had to be made.”

Cantor said the stimulus funding should have been “focused like a laser on job creation” and that Democrats were too concerned about passing a health care bill.

“You sort of have to ask yourself, ‘are they kidding?’”

Up the road in the nation’s capital, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was in tune to Cantor’s job fair in Culpeper and ready to react — a year before the 2010 elections.

Jesse Ferguson, southern regional press secretary with the campaign arm for Democrats in the U.S. House, called Cantor a hypocrite.

Many attending employers, Ferguson said, were able to create jobs because of the very stimulus package Cantor has consistently railed against.

“The continuing hypocrisy from Republican leaders like Eric Cantor, who try to block solutions in Washington and then take credit for them back home, is reaching epidemic proportions,” Ferguson wrote in a follow-up e-mail to the Star-Exponent.

“If Rep. Cantor’s ‘Party of No’ policies were in effect, this event would have been an unemployment fair, not a jobs fair.”

He sent over an attachment he said showed how more than a dozen of the nearly 50 employers at Monday’s job fair had benefited from the stimulus bill — including millions allocated to Culpeper County and the public school system.

Dawn Faulconer, representing the Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office, said it was taking applications in order to fill vacancies “pretty quickly so that we can keep the sheriff’s office functioning at the highest capacity possible.”

Shelly Foreman, representing Culpeper County government, said the county is looking to fill positions for an HVAC maintenance mechanic and an EMT.

Cantor, asked about participating employers benefiting from the stimulus, said he could not “speak to the individual circumstances of these companies or agencies here.”

“I voted against the stimulus bill because it’s not worked and I don’t think it will work,” he said.

Young mother Jeran Dickerson of Culpeper hoped to find work at Monday’s job fair now that her 4-year-old, Kaylyn, standing beside her, had started preschool.

“I need a job,” said Dickerson, filling out an application at a table being manned by Averett University. “Now it is time.”

She was also interested in furthering her education, having taken a few classes at community college.

“I’m trying to start somewhere — anywhere,” Dickerson said.

Of the 47 or so exhibitors, about 21 were government agencies. Five colleges also participated along with about 20 private companies, including Continental Teves of Culpeper.

Valerie Reid, human resources manager with Teves, said the company would be hiring machine operators through an employment agency. She said there had been a lot of interest in the manufacturing jobs.

Over at the U.S. Army Culpeper Recruiting Station, Staff Sgts. Danny Dillow and Donnie Tingle were working the crowd.

“We want to let people know we are here,” said Tingle, mentioning their office in the Kohl’s shopping center. “We are not scary to talk to and there’s no contract under the table to sign.”

In September, according to the Virginia Employment Commission, 5,405 people in the five-county area collected unemployment benefits. The figure does not represent folks who are underemployed or those who are jobless, but not collecting unemployment.