AUSTIN-Thirty Austin business people are traveling to Boston this week to shore up Austin's job base and try to attract more jobs to Central Texas. The trip comes just over two months after a similar journey to the Silicon Valley.

The Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce has organized both trips, which have drawn participants from a range of businesses including real estate, technology and banking as well as university officials and economic development officers from surrounding cities.The economic slump has pushed the city's unemployment rate to 5.2% in March, up from 2.7% in March 2001. With about 24,000 layoffs since January 2001, the number of unemployed workers had doubled to 40,086 in March from 20,010 a year earlier. The city's overall office vacancy rate–including direct and sublease space–has risen to nearly 22%.

Those kinds of figures and their impact on the Central Texas economy have pushed the chamber to reinstate economic development trips after a five-year hiatus. In recent years, the chamber and others in the area tried to cope with digesting its explosive growth.