Lakeport is the county seat, and there are many service industries there offering employment. Tourism, especially the Konocti Harbor Resort, sustains many local businesses. The County of Lake is the biggest single employer.
Retail trade (12%), recreation or tourism (10.1%), and educational, health and social services (25.3%) are the three largest employment categories in Lake County. By contrast State statistics show that educational, health and social services, followed by manufacturing and professional are the three top employment categories.
Agriculture, including the winegrape and pear sectors offer 4.6% of county employment. County wide there are over 200,000 acres devoted to agriculture, with 5,465 bearing acres in winegrapes and 3,024 acres in pears. Lake County produces about 20% of the annual pear crop in California-38,000 tons in 2003, though acreage is tending to reduce in favor of conversion to winegrapes. Field crops, cattle and calves and walnuts also bring in significant income. In 2002 total agricultural production was $64 million.
Construction, with 8.8% of county employment is very active throughout the County catering for the growing housing demand as the population increases.
Calpine, operating many geothermal power plants in the Mayacama mountains between Lake and Sonoma counties offers many well-paying jobs. In addition there are successful small businesses such as Best Image Marketing, developers of the Number1Expert brand, who built and maintains this website and those for 1300 highly successful realtors throughout the country, employing almost 50 people. Self employment is high with a lot of people working from home and taking advantage of the affordable housing and pleasant environment. So we have a lot of computer personnel, artists, book indexers and so on. Consequently unemployment is below the state average in the south of the County and not excessive in the County overall, averaging 7.4% for 2003.
The median income is $32,757 (2004) for the County, though this reflects the large number of retired people. The County has 31% of its population 55 years and over as compared with 18% State wide. The County will continue in the future to be attractive to retired people with its beautiful environment, benign pace of life, recreational possibilities, easy access to the San Francisco Bay area and affordable housing.
Request my Free Cobb, Middletown, Kelseyville Relocation Package. It's packed full of useful and important information about the Cobb, Middletown, Kelseyville, California area. Don't move here without it! Remember: I'll send it to you for free and without obligation. Just fill out the form and I will send it right out...
- NUMBER1EXPERTS™ 
