[Vision2020] Building and development planning

[Phil Nisbet]

It’s kind of the paper and others to let us know that there is strong 
movement afoot to increase the property development in Latah County and that 
such activity is a major economic engine for growth on the Palouse.  Couple 
that with the desire in Whitman County to expand and get more houses built 
in the non-urban realm of the rural setting and you can see the joys we get 
from build all those new houses and housing developments.

That they note that the thrust of this development is advertising that we 
are an excellent location of out of area retirees is also interesting.

The problem with all of these calculations is that retirement housing is not 
a long term economic stimulus.  The reality is that retirees pay less in 
total taxes than they receive in services and they are replacing people who 
pay more in taxes than they require in services.  Study after study of the 
long term effects of transition from rural business, be it logging, mining 
or farming, to retirement community status show that from a base of about 
0.7 tax to service requirements for rural business and families, rural 
counties experience a change to about 1.6 tax to service ratio as retirement 
community status is attained.

And the problem of groundwater is compounded with all of that development.  
The compaction of soils and the alteration of the groundwater infiltration 
from development has been identified by the EPA as the largest single 
contributing factor to groundwater quantity reductions in the USA.  From the 
amount of estimated construction in the recent articles, we are covering 
hundreds of acres of critical ground a year and what exactly are we getting 
out of the economics of that?

As the articles note, outside developers are very interested in building 
here, so even the little economic benefit derived from the building phase is 
being siphoned off.  You can see the same thing from the building projects 
that U of I just completed, in which Spokane and out of area contractors 
received most of the work.

The whole thing is a prescription for sprawl, in which only if we continue 
to attract more and more retirees can the area sustain an economy and with 
each new batch that comes in we need higher and higher taxes to give them 
the services that they want and need.  It’s a Ponzi scheme that works so 
long as a new and growing list of victims is acquired annually, but what 
happens when the music stops?  What happens once they have built across the 
entire basin and do not have enough water?  What real businesses will be 
here to carry the tax burden?

Some people might think that it’s a wonderful idea to take the Palouse and 
turn it into a regional Phoenix Arizona, but I remain to be convinced.  It 
seems to me that covering the best farmlands in the Pacific Northwest with 
houses and driving out the rural things that make the Palouse a wonderful 
place to be is short sighted.  But that is the direction we are traveling in 
and recent events and preferences for development are driving this train 
full speed to that destination.

Phil Nisbet

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