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Nature's Plan
Booming growth is everywhere. Even the idyllic farming communities of eastern Idaho are feeling the pinch as more and more newcomers choose the allure of open space over congested city life. For communities wanting to manage growth in a way that benefits not only community coffers but also the environment, there’s the Sonoran Institute.
Ray Rasker, senior economist for Sonoran’s socioeconomic program, conducts workshops to help communities identify opportunities for environmentally compatible forms of economic development. Currently, the institute is working with the town of Salmon in Lemhi County.
Salmon’s interest in developing a sound plan was spurred in part by the experience of Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, which many see as a textbook example of how unmanaged growth can eat away at quality of life. The area’s population has more than doubled in the last 30 years, with a resulting loss of elk range, forested lands and, according to many longtime residents, the very core of what once made the valley a western treasure.
The Sonoran Institute only works with those who seek its help, Rasker says. When Lemhi County applied for a workshop co-sponsored by the National Association of Counties, a team of elected officials was flown to Estes Park, Colo. Joining with four other teams from the West, they learned the basics of land planning — how to create an economic profile, how to rally community support for land use planning, and the legal and economic impact tools available to communities.
Following the workshop, the Salmon Valley Stewardship Group was formed to follow up and look at a possible revision of the comprehensive plan and to garner community-wide support for land use planning. The Sonoran Institute hired a manager to work with the group, free of charge, with the goal of eventually helping them become self-sufficient.
“The biggest problem for land use planners in the West is that although land use planners are experts on the subject, they often develop their plans behind closed doors,” Rasker says. “There’s little community involvement. We don’t want that in Lemhi County. We want community buy-in every step of the way. If the community supports it, it will last much longer than if it’s imposed on them from the outside.”
Rasker has seen an increased interest in land use planning over the last decade. “People are beginning to understand the significant costs of not doing land use planning. Planning is smart, fiscally,” he says. “People are also starting to understand that environmental entities — quality of life — are an economic asset. Land use planning is a way to protect that asset.”
Although protecting the environment and preserving wildlife are high on Sonoran’s priority list, the institute addresses the planning process more from an economic angle. “Ten years ago, land use planning was a way to save the environment and protect habitat for wildlife,” Rasker says. “Of course it still does that, but it’s also a smart move economically. Environmental issues are often polarized, so even though we care very much about the environment, we want to talk about planning in a way that is more politically acceptable. Today the impact comes from much more conservative folks who are looking at this as an economic issue.”
Rasker sees an increased interest in helping communities grow the right way, and in having the direction of that growth be determined by the community. Because that is the institute’s mission, it fields more requests for assistance than it can handle. In addition to Lemhi County in Idaho, the institute has worked with Fremont County as well as the cities of Driggs and Mackay.
In addition to giving their clients tools to manage growth, such as information on how to run a public finance campaign and get voters to agree to tax themselves, they offer tips on how to control the cost of services to new development. Rasker says that in 54 studies done nationwide, the average cost of providing services (roads, schools, utilities and maintenance) is actually 25 percent higher than property tax revenue collected. Suggestions to combat this problem include planning communities that require fewer roads, clustering homes closer together and planning annexed rather than leapfrogged subdivisions.
“So if county commissioners are debating land use plans — for instance, whether to allow developers to build wherever they want to or requiring development close to town — we can do the economic calculations for them,” Rasker says.
The Sonoran Institute has been helping Western communities for the past 15 years. Headquartered in Tucson, Ariz., the Sonoran Institute has additional locations in Phoenix; Carson City, Nev.; Grand Junction, Colo.; and Bozeman and Helena, Mont. In addition to his work at the Bozeman location, Rasker is an adjunct instructor in the Earth Sciences Department at Montana State University. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from the College of Forestry at Oregon State University.
To learn more about the Sonoran Institute, visit www.sonoran.org.
Written by Kathleen Craven
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