ARIZONA'S YAVAPAI COUNTY

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Government agencies rank among Prescott's big employers (there's a long-established Veterans Administration Center, as well as the Prescott National Forest headquarters, with its annual payroll of $2 million). Incoming retirees make the housing market strong. Many small contractors are in lively competition with each other, and I was told that people with such skills as cabinetmaking would probably find jobs plentiful; so would medical and legal secretaries. Small entrepreneurs have been successful in the region, too. Still, I was warned that, while minimum-wage service jobs are available, people moving to the area had best be skilled at some trade or profession and have the means to survive for six months until they become established. (Last August, unem ployment in Yavapai County was 6.1%, below the national rate of 6.8%.)

Mining in Yavapai has dropped, but traditional cattle and sheep ranching still play a large part in the economy. Commercial agriculture, however, has begun to fade, unable to compete with produce shipped in from California, Colorado, and Mexico. Even small truck farmers are going broke.

More recently, the area has profited from the services stimulated by tourism and Prescott's renown as an ideal retirement area. In fact, over a third of the city's population is 50 or older. Active in all areas of life, the over-50s volunteer their services to numerous city, county, and civic organizations.

Retirees, however, usually want the same public services they had in the cities they came from. Fulfilling these expectations tends to raise the very taxes that such people wanted to escape. (Prescott levies a 1% sales tax on top of the county's 1% and the state's 5%, bringing the total to 7%. Property taxes generally run about 1% of true market value. State income tax is approximately 10% of federal.) On a positive side, the retirement community has drawn many physicians, and the 127-bed Yavapai Community Hospital offers a complete range of medical services.

Partly balancing Prescott's older generation are the students who attend the city's colleges and university. Yavapai Community College (5,300 students) is a public two-year college with a broad academic transfer program and a technical vocational program. Its offerings include 90 areas of study with 45 degree programs, 23 certificate programs, and a special Retirement College for students over 62. Prescott College, a four-year liberal arts college with an enrollment of around 200 and a student-faculty ratio of 10 to 1, awards bachelors degrees in outdoor action, environmental education, human development, humanities, and Southwest studies. It recently added a degree program fitted to the leisure hours of working adults.

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