Montana’s cities engines for solid growth – State in better health than a lot of our peers.

Sometimes I think the whole state of Montana is suffering from an advanced case of hypochondria.

Even when we hear from a doctor that we are quite healthy, we refuse to give up the long-cherished pleasure of complaining about our supposed ailments.

Ed Kemmick
CITY LIGHTS

http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2004/05/23/build/local/45-kemmick.inc

In Montana, Dr. Larry Swanson (hey, he’s got a Ph.D.) has spent most of the past several years trying to persuade us that we are no longer sick, that in fact we’re in better health than a lot of our peers. But the second and third opinions that we get from politicians, economists and (I have to add) some editorial writers cultivate the perception that we’re on our death bed.

The party line, the hypochondriac line, is that Montana is near the bottom of the barrel in wages, per capita incomes and economic growth.

What Swanson, associate director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana, has been saying to anyone who will listen is that most of the state is actually doing quite well.

Swanson’s diagnosis rests on a discovery he made a few years ago, when he and a semi-retired Harvard demographer living in the Bitterroot Valley were analyzing 2000 Census data and other information on Montana. They were hoping to demonstrate statistically what they thought everyone knew – that Montana could be divided neatly into eastern and western regions.

A new picture

As soon as they began to chart their findings, Swanson saw something else, and it was clear as day: Montana was actually divided into three – west, central and east. Almost every indicator they graphed showed the same thing: steep increases in almost all of the west, moderate to substantial increases in the central area and either minuscule increases or sharp declines in the east.

Swanson also found that in Montana, as in other Rocky Mountain states, people, jobs and money were moving into urban centers near mountains, national forests and other public lands. Those urban areas – Billings, Bozeman, Missoula, Great Falls, Kalispell, Helena and Butte – and their nearby counties, where 85 percent of the people in Montana lived, had economies that bore little resemblance to the state of Montana as a whole.

In Billings, for instance, the per capita income in 2000 was $26,628, not exactly a fortune, but much better than the statewide per capita income of $22,569. And when compared with 29 other "peer cities" selected by Swanson for having similar demographic profiles, Billings’ per capita income ranked fifth in 2000.

Great Falls ranked 13th and Missoula ranked 16th. Helena and Bozeman, which weren’t on the list of peer cities, would have ranked just behind Billings. But what figure do we all talk about year after year? The one showing that Montana is 44th, 45th or 47th in the nation (our ranking in a few recent years) in terms of per capita income.

In other comparisons with those peer cities – many of them in the region and all of them west of the Mississippi River – Billings was third in construction growth, fifth in educational attainment, 12th in employment growth, 12th in median family and household incomes and 14th in income growth.

Where people want to be

Swanson says Billings and similar cities in the Rocky Mountain West are growing because people who can choose where they want to work are choosing us. His main point is that we’ve focused for too long on how to solve problems – reviving agriculture, bringing back mining, developing businesses on Indian reservations – in sectors of the economy where there is very little to work with, or where most of what happens is beyond our control.

Meanwhile, we ignore the economic growth that is being handed to us on a platter. Swanson says cities are the new engines of economic growth, and they ought to be charting their own economic futures, and helping the whole state in the process, not waiting for guidance from Helena. Just as generals usually fight the last war, politicians usually try to fix the last decade’s economy.

Swanson doesn’t try to pretend he has all the answers, or any answers at all. He’s got the information – so much of it that I can hardly begin to summarize it here. He promises to have all his statewide data posted by Thursday on the city of Billings Web site, http://ci.billings.mt.us, and the Celebrate Billings site, http://www.celebratebillings.com.

I don’t care if people attack his data or his conclusions, as long as they look at it and try to learn from it.

Swanson told me Friday that his credo is simple: "Good people with good information make good decisions."

Ed Kemmick can be reached at 657-1293 or [email protected].

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