Idaho leaders gauge success of rural initiative – Speakers say at plan’s halfway mark, state showing incremental progress

North Idaho has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in the last three years from a state program designed to help struggling rural areas.

Becky Kramer
Staff writer Spokesman Review

Since Gov. Dirk Kempthorne unveiled his rural initiative in 2000, the state has chipped in more than $115,000 to build a business park in Smelterville.

Shoshone County received $500,000 toward the infrastructure that will allow a golf course to be built on a Superfund site. And the city of Sandpoint has received more than $300,000 for a treatment facility that can handle the oily waste Litehouse Foods generates when it makes salad dressing.

Throughout Idaho, communities have received more than $6.6million for projects that will create 500 new jobs, said Karl Tueller, deputy director of the Idaho Department of Commerce.

"This is hard work out there," he said. "Those 10 or 15 or 35 jobs are hard to come by."

Economic development leaders from around the state gathered in Coeur d’Alene on Wednesday for the 2003 Idaho Rural Summit. The summit was a chance to assess and critique the progress of Gov. Dirk Kempthorne’s rural initiative. The initiative’s goal was to stengthen rural communities over a five-year period.

Key programs included $3million in financing each year for public projects that will create jobs and allow existing companies to expand. The state also funds 12 economic development professionals in areas such as Shoshone and Boundary counties, which couldn’t afford to hire a full-time economic development professional on their own.

Midway through Kempthorne’s five-year plan, success of Idaho’s Rural Initiative is best measured in small increments, speakers said. Such as the fact that the community of Preston was able to keep 35 manufacturing jobs from moving out of state. Or that the Kootenai Tribe, Boundary County and the city of Bonners Ferry crafted a historic agreement to jointly work on business recruitment.

"Rural Idaho really is a story of one and two, three and four, and 25 jobs," said Richard Westerberg, an economic development professional in southeastern Idaho. "It’s a story of incremental progress."

Tueller said that leadership from local communities remains one of the biggest challenges to economic development in rural Idaho. The state can assist, but it takes a sustained effort from local leaders to see a project through, he said.

"I say it takes only five people to make it work," Tueller quipped. "You have to have the chairman of the county commissioners and the mayor both working toward the goal. You to have the chamber president on board, the largest employer supporting you, and you need a full-time economic (development person) to make it work."

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