An interview with Dave Gardner

Q: Our city grew rapidly from 1992 to 2007. Yet today it’s making drastic cuts in essential services. Shouldn’t that growth boom have provided community prosperity?

Gardner: While the recession adds to the severity of our budget crisis, we were actually digging our city into this hole throughout the growth boom. There was ample evidence this was happening, but we were blinded by the long-held belief that growth creates prosperity.  We couldn’t bring ourselves to believe the costs of growth were strangling our community.

Q: Why is growth no longer creating community prosperity?

Gardner: National studies show residential subdivisions rarely provide enough tax revenue to cover the cost of serving them. There used to be economies of scale. The bigger we got, the less it cost per household to provide city services. But we are beyond that now. Each new gallon of water is the most expensive. Costs of mitigating transportation gridlock, declining air quality and stormwater runoff, for example, increase exponentially as our city expands.

And since we cling to the superstition we’ll profit from growth, we also subsidize growth heavily. To name a few, growth subsidies include tax rebates and other incentives, stormwater fee caps, tax-free financing, and utility tap fees and development review fees that don’t cover costs. New developments don’t reimburse the community for costs of increasing regional roadway capacity, new or expanded service facilities, additional snowplows and buses, or for constructing schools and libraries. Subsidizing these costs for new development accelerates the unprofitable growth, and robs our community of resources that could otherwise be spent dealing with growth impacts.

Q: So, how can we have a healthy, vital community?

Gardner: The healthy community of the 21^st century won’t foolishly depend on a Ponzi scheme of constant influx of new people and businesses for its prosperity. We’ll prosper instead by supporting our locally owned businesses. We’ll invest in our community’s assets, our neighborhoods, parks, and children. You’ll be amazed how well we can afford to care for the community we have, once we stop wasting resources on growth subsidies and the increasing costs of growth’s impacts.

Q: Are you suggesting we stop growth?

Gardner: I’m suggesting we require new developments to cover all the true costs that today are shifted to the entire community. This way market forces can work efficiently: if expansion makes economic sense it will pay its own way and not starve our community of precious resources. If continued growth doesn’t make economic sense, then it will stop of its own accord.

Q: Utility rates rise steeply year after year, and we see tax increases on nearly every ballot. Will you do anything to rein this in?

Gardner: Many tax and utility increases are made necessary because growth doesn’t pay its way. Growth has become ridiculously expensive. With your help I’ll eliminate the growth subsidies that create this steady stream of tax increases and double-digit utility rate hikes. Since my opponent clings to the old notion that growth creates prosperity, he favors growth subsidies and other policies to encourage more growth. So if you vote for him, you may as well save up for those utility rate hikes and vote to approve every tax increase going forward.  

Q: Growth seems to come up frequently in this race. Aren’t there other issues?

Gardner: I hear and care about diminishing water supply and drought, carbon emissions and renewable energy, park maintenance, traffic congestion, public transportation, snowplowing, unemployment, homeless, and rising crime rate. We should continue to focus on each of these. But every one of them is either created or worsened by growth, or is starved of resources by growth costs and subsidies. If we don’t get our city unhooked from its addiction to growth, the best we can hope for these issues is to apply band-aids to the wounds. We need to eliminate the sniper inflicting those wounds.