How would you restart the economy?

Posted on April 9, 2013

by Buzz Eggleston /The Calaveras Enterprise

Housing – call it residential development – has to be a major part of any economic recovery in Calaveras County. We have more land, and more suitable land, for new housing than our neighboring counties, and we have a strong incentive – jobs.

We just need to be smarter when we build housing. The mistakes of the past are all around us. But housing is not just construction jobs.

Housing is providing lumber, concrete, sheetrock, counter tops, furniture, appliances and landscaping. It’s roads, water and electrical systems. Housing is jobs that cater to people who move into those houses, jobs that provide them with clothes, food, transportation and more, jobs that provide an income for the people who buy those houses and live in them.

Housing is an investment in our future.

As we build those new houses, we should apply what we’ve learned from past mistakes, take care to avoid sprawl, build schools, public services and retail stores close by, not just to protect open space but to save time and transportation costs. The days of massive school bus fleets and wasted fuel are behind us.

As taxpayers, we might want to subsidize some infrastructure to encourage new housing, but developers should not pocket profits at our expense. They should pay a fair share for the public services they will consume and for the impact they have on the environment. Too often in the past developers were long gone when the bills came due.

As I’m illustrating here, one of the problems that comes along whenever people begin to discuss economic development is they tend to get on a soapbox. We all have ideas, but not all of them are good ideas and not all of them are ideas we all can agree on. Some ideas, when we’re talking economic development, might actually do us harm. So community leaders would be wise to move in reasoned steps and build consensus around economic development.

At some risk, I’ll put some of my thoughts on the table with the caveat that no one should take what I have to say with any more seriousness than what the next person offers. The idea is to find common ground.

First, the county’s effort to build a new general plan, a road map to future development, is finally coming to fruition. That will go a long way toward helping prospective builders find the right locations for projects. It will also help to remove uncertainties that create conflicts between builders and the county. I also think that the new plan will help put housing and retail stores and public services where they do the most good. Driving long distances to shop for essentials needs to become a thing of the past.

Second, some places let the business sector do the heavy lifting of organized and ongoing economic development and other places assign the task to an agency or office of government. I prefer the latter. That’s because the private sector has long driven economic development efforts here and can claim little success. It becomes ridden with special interests, both for and against development, and that stalls progress.

Not that government efforts can claim to have done much better. But we’ve witnessed with admiration what has been accomplished in neighboring Tuolumne County – a joint effort by county government and the city of Sonora led by a hard-charging director. It has repaid the city-county investment many times over by creating jobs and increasing retail development.

We might also look seriously at a more regional approach to economic development

SED, the Sierra Economic Development Corp., is a nonprofit organization formed decades ago by four counties north of us: El Dorado, Placer, Nevada and Sierra. It offers a regional approach to economic development and provides expertise, in its own words, “often lacking in small local governments.”

Closer to home, the Central Sierra Economic Development District, which includes representatives of Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, Tuolumne and Mariposa, plus a dozen cities, could become a platform for regional economic development efforts. In the past, though, it has often been little more than a table where rival officials meet to divvy up federal or state money allocated for infrastructure. If not the CSEDD, then, perhaps a hybrid could be created, promoting Calaveras economic development in concert with our neighboring counties. It’s worth discussing.

So are your ideas. The Opinion page of the Calaveras Enterprise is an ideal place for the public to engage in discourse on economic development. Give us your thoughts. Share, too, your knowledge of those places that are setting a good example for us. As your newspaper, we’ll look closely at them and share our findings.

Contact Buzz Eggleston at editor@calaverasenterprise.com