Miami-Dade seems likely to avoid a big chunk of lay-offs this year, extending the county’s rebound in tax-funded employment.

South Florida’s public sector has enjoyed a much better recession than the private sector, losing fewer jobs during the downturn.

The charts above track changes since January 2005 in private employment and local-government payrolls, which include public schools. We used a 12-month rolling average to compensate for seasonal hiring at schools and other government employers.

Though far below past peaks in hiring, Broward now has more local government employees than it had in 2005, and in fact never got below 2005 levels throughout the recession. Miami-Dade took a bigger hit in the recession, but now local government payrolls are making up ground faster than private payrolls are.

Federal stimulus dollars helped cushion the blow for police and school hiring, as did a delay in sharp drops in property-tax revenue as assessments caught up with a collapse in values. Both insulators are basically over now, putting more pressure on elected leaders to cut costs and shed payroll.

Short-term, the numbers show only a little bit of strain. Broward’s local government employed 86,000 people in December, basically flat from a year ago but slightly worse than the .7 percent growth in the private sector

.In Miami-Dade, local government employed 115,000 people, up 1 percent from a year ago. The gain was the 12th straight in 2011, after a bruising stretch that saw local payrolls down as much as 6 percent in 2009 as schools and local governments cut costs.

The Miami Herald’s Economic Time Machine tracks 60 local indicators in an effort to chart South Florida’s recovery from the Great Recession. By comparing current conditions to where they were before the downturn, the ETM attempts to measure how far back the recession set the economy. The answer so far: June 2002. Visit ETM headquarters at miamiherald.com/economic-time-machine for the latest updates.