Flathead Gauges report takes area's pulse
By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian

Wildly diverse group lays out numbers on people, environment, economy

KALISPELL - Drive through the Flathead Valley and it's pretty easy to see what's up.

The population's up. So's employment. So are wages. So's the construction boom.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll see what else is up.

Drug use, for instance. And taxes. And the size of the landfill. And the cost of a house.

Drive further and you might also see what's been going down. Water quality, for instance. And jobs in timber and aluminum.

Turns out, the Flathead is enjoying a period of relative prosperity, but it's coming with a price, and not everyone who pays that price is also enjoying the benefits.

"A healthy community is a community with a sense of balance," said Milt Carlson. "If you tip the balance on one side, then everything starts to tumble off the other side."

Carlson is chairman of the Sunrift Center for Sustainable Communities, a group of wildly diverse interests that come together every now and then to check the Flathead Valley's vital signs.

They are conservationists and timber company representatives, education veterans and economists. The local hospital is involved, as is Plum Creek Timber Co. The Chamber of Commerce helps out, and so does the EarthSong conservation organization.

"It's unbelievable," Carlson said. "I've never worked with such afantastic group."

Together, they produce Flathead Gauges, a report on the Flathead's people, economy and environment. The report doesn't make any judgments, doesn't offer any suggestions, doesn't support any agenda.

Instead, it just lays out the numbers, gathered mostly from local, state and federal government sources. It takes the community's collective temperature, Carlson said; but it's up to the reader to decide if the patient is healthy or sick. More importantly, he said, it's up to the reader to connect the dots, sorting out the interdependent web that weaves demographics with economics with environment.

An example: Flathead County grew by 14 percent between 1980 and 1990, then swelled another 26 percent by 2000. Between 1990 and 2000, median family income increased 43 percent. Between 1985 and 2002, the median price of a home jumped 153 percent. As of 2000, the number of families with young children that live below the poverty line finally climbed above the 20 percent mark. And in the last five years, air quality improved, but juvenile drug offenses climbed by 74 percent.

What's the connection?

"You have to determine that for yourself," Carlson said. "But I suggest that it's all connected - population, housing costs, poverty, crime, threats to the environment. You can't make a decision about any one of those things without affecting the others."

At the point where demographics and economics and environment overlap, he said, is quality of life.

Which is why he and his collaborators publish Flathead Gauges. "We want to help people make decisions in context of the whole," he said.

The whole includes the fact that three decades back, there were 7.7 people per square mile in Flathead County. Now, there's nearly 15 people per square mile. The number of residents receiving Medicaid assistance has been rising steadily since 1995, from 7.6 percent to 11 percent. Also on the rise is the number of kids receiving subsidized school lunches. School budgets lag when compared to similar Montana communities. Property taxes, however, do not: Flathead County taxes went up 32 percent between 1997 and 2002, compared to a statewide average increase of 25 percent.

As taxes went up, employment in the lumber and aluminum and railroad industries went down. New jobs cropped up in health care and construction and business services.

One of the biggest changes, Carlson said, is the fact that in 1970, 74 percent of the money people took home came from labor wages. Today, those wages amount to just 60 percent of the money in the bank.

That, Carlson said, is likely because the fastest growing part of the population is between ages 45 and 64. In other words, retirees are moving in, buying up land (between 1982 and 1997 the county lost 25 percent of its farmland to development), driving up housing prices, and bringing their teenagers with them.

"What we've discovered is that everybody is interested in at least one part of the report," said Rem Khort, a retired forester and board member of the Sunrift Center for Sustainable Communities. "But we hope that they will see the whole picture, how their little part interacts with all the other little parts."

Khort and Carlson and others on the board first began working together back in the early 1990s, when they were crafting vision statements for a proposed countywide land-use plan. The plan was foiled at the polls, but "we had discovered that we worked well together, and really respected each other's work," Carlson said.

They had a working consensus group, he said, "and we didn't want to lose that."

And so they turned their attention to the notion of "community sustainability," a concept that grew naturally from their work on the master plan document. Carlson defines a "sustainable community" as a "community in which citizens can meet their needs without compromising future generations' ability to meet theirs."

Khort defines sustainability as "exercising economic, social and environmental responsibility."

The group agreed there were certain "gauges" by which to measure sustainability, and so was born the first report back in 1995.

For instance, if populations explode and crime rates climb and the amount of garbage each person puts in the landfill increases by 12 percent in just three years, is that sustainable?

If farmland disappears but conservation easements expand (from 3,398 acres between 1992 and 1996 to 18,814 acres between 1997 and 2002), is that sustainable?

After the first report was issued, Carlson said, dozens of communities across the nation clamored for a copy. Missoula patterned its own "Missoula Measures" report from the first "Gauges" document, he said.

But one of the bigger frustrations has been that folks closer to home have not made better use of the information, Khort said. Everyone looks at the same numbers and statistics, he said, and everyone comes to largely the same conclusions. But then no one acts.

"Everyone agrees," he said, "but no one wants to address it."

Carlson shares some of that frustration, and says doing the work of publishing all the data is "a little bit like dropping a feather into the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the echo."

But as the pace of growth quickens, he said, the echo is getting louder.

Take, for instance, the fate of Haskill Creek, which tumbles down from the Big Mountain ski resort to supply the city of Whitefish with drinking water. A recently released consultant's report shows the stream - home to one of the last remaining genetically pure populations of westslope cutthroat trout - is being polluted by development at the ski resort.

And on that stream meet the three Flathead gauges: a changing demographic is bringing people with the money to build up the resort; that build-up is changing the economy of the town, as housing costs soar; and those changes are affecting the environment. Of course, the clean environment is precisely why the people are coming in the first place, connecting the last of the trio back to the first.

It is a prime example, Khort said, of how the pieces of the puzzle overlap to create quality of life.

"It's like a human body," he said. "You have to feed it, put air in it, keep it warm, get rid of the waste. If you change any one part, it's going to affect the other parts. You can't do anything in any one area without affecting all the other areas."

But don't ask him how Flathead Lake's declining water quality is connected to taxes.

"That's not what we want to do," he said. "We're not advocates. We just want to put the information on the table."

But he will, however, share his personal solution to the valley's problems, his own recipe for sustainability.

"Convince everyone to act prudently and responsibly," he suggests. "Now how do you do that? With good data."

Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.

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