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From: "Betty J. McArdle" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: FW: Growth Mgmt - Don't blame region's growth on the children
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 10:03:13 -0700
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-----Original Message-----
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Sent:   Monday, April 26, 1999 5:00 PM
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Subject:        Growth Mgmt - Don't blame region's growth on the children


Don't blame region's growth on the children
by Kery Murakami
Seattle Times
April 26, 1999


Whenever slow-growthers talk about - what else? - slowing growth, their
opponents have had a devastating retort.

Our kids make up about half our growth, the argument goes. So as
tempting as it may sound to stop growth, the only way to do it is to
tell our children to move away.

The argument has shaped the view that growth is inevitable, said Brian
Derdowski, a Metropolitan King County councilman who represents
anti-growth sentiments on the Eastside. "It's killed us because no one
wants to see their kids go away."

The Republican councilman says he has new numbers that change that view
of where our growth is coming from. Only a third of the region's
population growth, he says, are our own children, and mostly we're being
crowded by people moving here from elsewhere.

"The nature of the whole debate changes," Derdowski said. "If it's not
our kids, growth is not inevitable. It is something that is
controllable, and something we can influence."

Calculations done for Derdowski by a researcher at the Puget Sound
Regional Council estimate that only about 32 percent of the region's
growth since 1974 can be attributed to natural population changes: the
number of births minus deaths. About 68 percent of the growth, the
research suggests, has been people moving into the area.

The new numbers came about when Derdowski asked a researcher at the
Puget Sound Regional Council a big "what if."

What if King, Pierce, Snohomish and Kitsap counties had pulled up the
drawbridge in 1974 and not let any more people move in than moved out?
What would the four-county region look like today?

The researcher, Christopher Mefford, calculated how many children the
region's 1.8 million people likely would have had, how many people would
have died. He estimated that instead of 3.1 million people living in the
four counties today, there would be only 2.3 million.

The region would only have had to make room for about 500,000 additional
people, instead of 1.3 million.

The traffic would not be nearly as bad, Derdowski said. We would not be
scraping public coffers to build more roads, more sewers and more parks,
he said. And there would still be trees in areas razed by subdivisions.

Previous calculations by the state Office of Financial Management and
the Puget Sound Regional Council, a body of elected officials that looks
at growth and transportation issues in the four counties, considered
births part of the natural population increases regardless of whether
their parents had moved here from someplace else.

Derdowski asked Mefford to look at it a different way: If the parents
had never moved here, then their children wouldn't be here either.

The Puget Sound Regional Council does not back Derdowski's view of the
findings. Mefford says he only ran the calculations because Derdowski
asked him to and that there's no way to say precisely what would have
happened if the region had put up a wall around itself.

Nevertheless, Derdowski says the new view of the region's growth gives
impetus to arguments that growth can be slowed. And with Derdowski
recently named chairman of the County Council's growth-management
committee, slow-growth arguments will have more prominence.

County Councilwoman Cynthia Sullivan says Derdowski's numbers are
meaningless. Even if most growth comes from elsewhere, there's no way to
stop it, she says, "short of having guards at the gate."

Derdowski says he thinks the county can slow immigration by requiring
newcomers to pay more of the costs associated with growth. He says that
by paying most of the cost of new roads and sewers, taxpayers are
essentially subsidizing people who move into the region.

"I'm not saying nobody can come, but we don't need to stand here with
our checkbook inviting everybody over," he said.

Higher impact fees also could drive up prices for residents who want to
buy new homes. And aside from the question of whether slowing growth is
possible, there's wide disagreement over whether it's even desirable.

There might be less traffic had the counties decided to keep out growth
25 years ago, said Bob Watt, president of the Greater Seattle Chamber of
Commerce. But, he said, Microsoft also would not have moved here from
Albuquerque in 1979.

"We'd be missing the largest broad-based wealth creation in history. We
would be considerably poorer. Our children would have all moved out
because there would have been no places to work," he said. "We'd find
ourselves an uninspired and dispirited community wondering why the world
had passed us by."

And there's something else the area might be missing: Brian Derdowski.
He moved here from California in 1979.


Copyright 1999 The Seattle Times

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