Rising County Jobless Rate Reaches 7.6% : Recession: Optimism is in short supply as more than 28,300 people are on the unemployment rolls, matching the year’s high. Both state administrators and workers hope for extended benefits.

The jobless rate in Ventura County edged up again in August, matching the year’s high of 7.6% recorded in January, according to state figures released Monday.

That means that 28,300 people in the county were seeking jobs in August, compared with 21,900 a year ago when the rate was 5.8%, according to the state Economic Development Department.

Since the start of the year, unemployment rates in the county declined slightly, then began to rise again. Unemployment was 7.2% in June, rising to 7.5% in July.

The county has not seen a higher rate since July, 1986, when it reached 7.8%, said Linda Reed, an EDD labor market analyst. The figures count only those people out of work who are actively searching for jobs.

Job seekers expressed little hope for a quickened economic recovery Monday as they waited in the Oxnard unemployment office.

Oxnard resident Richard Peters, 29, said he has been out of work for five months, after being laid off from a Saticoy warehouse that went out of business. He tried for a month to find a job without applying for unemployment insurance before the bills began to pile up.

“That didn’t work out. Got to pay the bills,” he said.

Peters, who collects a $188 check from the state each week, fears that he won’t find a job before his benefits end this month. If he doesn’t land work soon, he said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Mike Bussie, 20, who recently moved from Ventura to his parents’ home in Los Osos, is in the same boat. Also out of work for the past five months, Bussie has applied for a range of jobs, from waiting tables to an apprentice pattern-maker position in the plastics industry such as the one he had. He has had no luck.

Bussie said he was frustrated. Employers have told him that “it’s too slow” to hire anyone right now, he added.

Officials in the Simi Valley and Oxnard EDD offices said many people have asked if unemployment benefits have been extended, a proposal Peters said he backed wholeheartedly. President Bush, he said, should stop loaning money to foreign countries, “and take care of us first.”

U.S. Senate and House negotiators agreed last week on a $6.4-billion bill that would extend unemployment benefits for 20 weeks past the 26 weeks now allowed, moving Congress closer to a veto showdown with the President. Bush last week threw his support for a $2.5-billion Republican bill, extending benefits for 10 weeks.

Suzette Cobb, assistant manager of the Oxnard EDD office, and Pat Baldoni, employment service supervisor of the Simi Valley office, both cited a need for longer-term benefits.

“Our lobby has been full, brimming full, the whole month of September,” Baldoni said. “We aren’t seeing any kind of break in it.”

“I think that people are staying unemployed a lot longer than in the past,” Cobb said. “The economy has not recovered as quickly as we’d hoped to see. There are a lot of people that really need that (benefits) to keep going.”

The Simi Valley office processed 2,159 new unemployment claims in August, up from 1,812 in July, and a huge increase from the 1,429 in August, 1990, Baldoni said. On the bright side, however, she said the number of job notices posted in the office jumped from 140 in August to 230 last month.

Cobb has witnessed a different scenario. She said the number of unemployment claims filed in Oxnard has dropped dramatically from July to August, which she attributed to the end of the strawberry harvest in July. In July, 4,296 people filed claims, compared to 3,178 in August.

The county’s economic picture for the rest of 1991 isn’t bright for those searching for work. A recent Ventura County National Bank survey of business owners reported that 71% do not expect to increase their work forces within the next six months.

“The general overall outlook is one of wait-and-see,” said William E. McAleer, the bank’s president. “We haven’t seen any optimism bursting forward.”