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Economic state of Missoula is better than we think

SUMMARY: Old habits make us tell ourselves we’re at the bottom of just about every economic list. But our economy has a lot more going for it than we think.

Missoulian Opinion

Sometimes we Montanans set ourselves up to stand in the back row. We tell ourselves the same negative stories so many times that we believe them to the exclusion of all others. There’s no exception when it comes to talking about our economy.

On Monday at the Missoula Area Economic Forum, Center for the Rocky Mountain West economist Larry Swanson argued convincingly that we’ve got to stop.

What we tell ourselves is we’re poor, it’s getting worse, everybody else makes more money than we do, we’ll never be OK again until we get logging and mining back. We have nothing going for us.

In truth, we live in a region where personal income is up, the number of jobs is up and taxes in real dollars are only 7.8 percent of our incomes, slightly down. In the 1990s, at least 57,000 new people joined us, many of them bringing outside income and resources. We have tremendous growth and vitality.

We fall into our old trap by looking at "Montana" as an economy. There is no "Montana economy," Swanson argues. The state has three regions so disparate that lumping them together presents a false picture of all of them. It’s a gloomy one, in which we lead the bottom of lists in incomes, teachers’ salaries and, as the governor is fond of saying, "good-paying jobs."

What has happened in Montana is growth and economic development in the mountain region of western Montana – 21 counties – and the same in the state’s urban centers. Eighty percent to 90 percent of the economic growth in the past decade has been in these seven centers, the cities and their surrounding areas. Growth in population, personal income and employment has been greatest in Missoula and Billings. Employment has grown stoutly in the Bozeman and Kalispell areas, grown some in the Helena area and grown a little in the Great Falls and Butte regions.

During the 1990s, growth in the seven regional centers and the counties linked closely with them accounted for 96 percent of all the income growth in the state. And total employment in the centers grew by 92,000 jobs and by 28,000 jobs in the closely connected counties. The entire rest of the state grew by only 5,700 jobs.

We are determined to be negative about our change to a services economy. We think "services," and we think everybody works as convenience store clerks for minimum wage. But services, which have seen the blast of economic growth in the Rocky Mountain region in the past decade, mean real estate, insurance, stockbrokers, engineering, auto dealers and services, doctors and nurses, wholesalers, building contractors and restaurant owners. In Missoula County between 1990 and 2000, the business of health care grew a whopping 72 percent, or just more than $100 million. These services need an urban environment to develop and prosper.

Our growth spurt will level off. If we are merely reactive, the mopey Eeyores of "Winnie the Pooh" books, we won’t harness the change for the lasting good. We will be, as Swanson puts it, looking at the future through the rear-view mirror and wondering what that was that blew through.

http://missoulian.com/articles/2003/10/21/opinion/opinion3.txt

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