The paradox: paying to ruin what we love

When Mark Haggerty is asked to assess the economic impact of sprawl on communities in the Rocky Mountain West, he can gauge a lot, he says, by reading the expressions on peoples’ faces down at the county courthouse, and from the information offered by windshield surveys.

By Todd Wilkinson Bozeman Chronicle

Drive around any valley and there’s a perception, stubbornly defended, that all growth is good no matter what form it takes. "The notion among many people is that when they see a rural county rich in farmland, they think ‘this is a poor county,’" Haggerty notes. “But in fact it’s often the other way around." Before Haggerty went to work for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition in its private lands program, he was on the ground level of a new movement, championed by true fiscal conservatives, that brings the real cost of sprawl into sharp focus.

While getting his post-graduate degree at the University of Colorado, he worked alongside agricultural economists and policy wonks from the American Farmland Trust in developing “Costs of Services Studies.” The studies, which are being embraced by dozens of counties in the West, analyze how tax dollars generated from residential subdivisions carved into farmland stack up against the costs billed to taxpayers for providing services to those developments, such as police and fire protection, sewer, water, new schools, roads, and stoplights.

In the Gallatin Valley, every dollar generated by farm land delivers a net 75 cent gain to county coffers; every dollar generated by commercial developments creates a windfall of 82 cents, but every dollar generated from a subdivision cost taxpayers 45 cents.

The same trend holds for Carbon, Jefferson, Broadwater and Flathead counties. Wherever one finds a county with open land and a strong ag community, there’s a strong likelihood, he says, that taxpayers are not swimming upstream against a flood of red ink. But if instead you drive around a county and see ranchettes, roads, weeds and no ag implement dealers, you stand a good chance of entering a county courthouse filled with employees who are stressed out by dealing with growing pains.

You’ll also find potholes in the roads, traffic jams, crowded school classrooms, harried sheriff’s deputies and a fire department worried that it might not be able to reach your home out in the middle of nowhere because rural sprawl has increased response time. Since the 1950s, county governments have operated under the premise that by greenlighting development after development, communities automatically prosper.

It’s a traditional point of view that increasingly, however, is being met by a backlash at the polls from citizens who are angry over rising taxes and diminished landscapes. Moreover, it has become the impetus for the now famous “Code of the West,” adopted by county governments to warn pampered newcomers they ain’t moving to Scarsdale. Developers bemoan Cost of Community Services studies because they know it exposes the public subsidy they receive and the sound argument that can be made for impact fees.

In Bozeman, the problem isn’t that fees push sprawl into the county; it’s that the county, with open arms, dragged its heels in adopting land-use regulations and is coming to terms with problems the public will be expected to fix. "Developers will never agree to foot the full bill for their projects because they say it is too expensive.

Yet they are willing to pass along that expense to taxpayers," Haggerty says. It’s bad enough to be paying a de-facto tax citizens never approved, but in effect the subsidy also fuels the destruction of open space, wildlife habitat and other community values they hold dear. "I look at it this way,” Haggerty says. “One way or another we’re going to subsidize growth but we, as fiscally-concerned citizens should have the choice, not the developers, with how we spend our money.

By keeping housing closer to town, and away from farm fields, we as a community can pay less to have more.” Writer Todd Wilkinson lives in Bozeman. His column appears here every Monday.

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