[Vision2020] The Future

[Andreas Schou]

Donovan --

In small businesses, economic inefficiencies -- prices too high,
salaries too large -- keep wealth locked in the closed system of the
region. If salaries are too high, it's local goods that the overpaid
stockboys are buying. If prices are too high, the money that's
overspent remains in local pockets and returns to buying local goods.
If you're paying 20% more, someone locally is making 20% more. Some of
the profits from a big-box, on the other hand, go to the real prizes
for municipalities: regional management offices, the national office.
Most of the profit goes to the real winners -- stockholders. Although
we can both agree that increasing the value of the stock market
improves the economy, it improves conditions in Moscow in only the
most general sense.

Most big box development, by competing with local business, drives
down median wages. Why? Not because big-box retail pays a lower wage
to the stockboys -- the wages paid to small business retail employees
and big-box retail employees are comparable -- but because small
businesses provide substantially more supervisory and ownership
opportunities than a big-box retailer employing the same number of
people.

There are ways for a community to benefit from big-boxes. Those ways
require a business to attract shoppers that would otherwise have not 
shopped in town. We can't hope to compete with Spokane. Lewiston
already has a head start. Any attempt to beat them out would involve a
race to the bottom: land give-aways, favorable zoning, tax-breaks that
would only provoke competing municipalities to drive up what they're
willing to bribe.

As a community with a university and prime downtown real estate owned
by exempt entities, we have to be realistic and leverage the
advantages we actually have. Alturas is an experiment in doing just
that. We don't have the tax base to be able to offer favorable tax
conditions to big-box retailers. We don't have a head start on big-box
development. Plus, we have a reasonably solid downtown with privately
owned retail, in which, I might add, we are investing a great deal of
money.

We cannot afford an expensive tug-of-war with regional competitors.
Taking only regional concerns into account -- and there are other,
national concerns which may be more important than these* -- we cannot
afford to spend a great deal of time and money attracting big-box
retail. It's just not smart development.

--ACS

* If you've got some spare time, check out what a $2.97 gallon jug of
Vlasic pickles is really costing you:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html