10/27/97

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

As the city elections approach in Missoula, the debate over growth management has heated up considerably. In fact, it appears that this is the issue that is energizing the contests for city council positions. For several years, those concerned about ongoing physical growth of the human settlement in the Missoula valley have used the mayor’s office and the city council to express their concerns and demand action to manage that growth. Campaigning on both neighborhood protection and growth management issues, several people associated with the New Party have been elected to the Missoula City Council.

That has been both frustrating and frightening to development-oriented interests who have recruited and supported a set of pro-growth candidates to run against the growth management incumbents and candidates. At times the rhetoric has been reminiscent of the cold war area with the New Party folks being labeled communists, socialists, and totalitarians who are out to seize peoples’ private property and take away their freedom.

It seems to me that the business and development community is way off base on this one. Whether they like it or not, whether they admit it or not, the advocates of growth management are doing the business community (and most of the rest of us) a favor.

Growth in the Missoula area, like growth throughout most of Western Montana, is fueled by new residents and businesses relocating here in the pursuit of what they perceived to be higher quality living environments. The living environments that are drawing people here are not just "pretty landscapes" and outdoor recreation opportunities. They also include the social and human-built environments. In fact, people regularly indicate that the social environment, the quality of the community into which they are moving, is more important than the quality of the surrounding natural environment.

This means that the social and natural environments are a crucial element of the area’s economic base and the major source of economic vitality. Given that physical growth can systematically erode an area’s quality of life, that growth tends to be at least partially self-limiting: As the attractive characteristics that draw and hold people here deteriorate, we will no long draw and hold as many people. Air pollution, the disappearance of open space, community conflict and confusion, deteriorating schools and other public infrastructure, pollution of ground and surface water, rising local taxes, increased local cost of living, etc. etc. work to systematically choke off growth.

The no-growthers out there will cheer, and there is probably a little of the no-growth sentiment in all of us. But there should be no cheering. The growth is choked off because we have lost what it is that drew us to and held us in this place. We have all lost what was unique and attractive about our collective home. Growth may slow or come to a halt. But we will all have paid a steep price and will be poorer because of it.

What growth management seeks to do is reduce the gratuitous damage that growth can do to those qualities of our community that are important to all of us. I say gratuitous because unplanned and unregulated sprawl does damage that is not necessary in order to accommodate the residential or commercial needs of our fellow citizens. Unplanned and unregulated sprawl inefficiently trashes our community and reduces the social and physical carrying capacity of the area. The potential development opportunities shrink because scarce community resources are inefficiently wasted in ways that contribute little to residents and business and which actually hurt most of us.

Trying to make sure that we use those scarce community assets well is at its core a fundamentally rational economic policy. This is especially the case when that policy focuses upon insisting that developers pay the full infrastructure and environmental costs associated with their location decisions. This does not block development. It tells the developer what the costs are at various locations and then lets the developer decide whether to pursue a high or low cost site, knowing that the developer, and not the larger community, will have to pick up the bill. This is simply good business management on the part of the community. Labeling it anti-economic or a "communist plot" shows either gross economic ignorance or the hysteria often found among pigs feeding at the public trough when their supply of free, subsidized, slop is threatened.