Missoulian - Experts: State missing chance to invest in growing urban areas<br>Posted on Jan. 30

HELENA - As Montana’s economy booms around its urban areas, the state is missing the chance to invest in these vehicles of economic growth, a pair of experts told legislators and other leaders in Helena on Monday night.

“We can focus all our energy on our biggest problems or we can focus all our energy on our biggest opportunity,” said Larry Swanson, a Missoula economist. “This is vitality that needs to be harnessed.”

Swanson, director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana, said major cities in the state are unable to respond to economic growth because they can’t raise money for things like infrastructure and schools.

Local, voter-approved city sales taxes are one way to finance these needs, but cities can’t do that without authority from the Legislature, he said.

And John Cech, dean of the two-year MSU-Billings-College of Technology, said while there’s big demand for skilled workers in these centers of growth, the state faces a critical labor shortage in many fields.

A big part of the reason has been all but static funding for higher education, particularly two-year schools, he said.

Montana is “dead last” in the percentage of its college-age population enrolled in two-year colleges, with only 21 percent, compared to the nationwide average of 45 percent, he said.

Cech and Swanson spoke at a Helena event organized by leaders in Billings, to bring these concerns to lawmakers meeting at the 2007 Legislature.

The Legislature will get its first look at a local-option sales tax proposal this week, and education funding also is a big part of the budget debate before lawmakers.

Only a dozen or so legislators showed up for Monday’s event at the Great Northern Hotel in Helena, which also was attended by some local government and industry lobbyists and Billings officials.

Local government officials, led by Montana’s cities, have been trying for years to get the authority to ask voters to approve a local sales tax, but have yet to succeed.

Swanson said with a 3 percent local-option tax, Billings and Yellowstone County could raise $12 million a year and Missoula could take in $9.6 million.

While a local-option tax often is seen as benefiting only the city where it’s levied, Swanson said the money also will help the surrounding areas, which is where most of Montana’s growth is happening.

It simply makes sense to invest in these areas where growth is occurring, helping it expand outward into the areas within 50 miles of major cities, he said.

“Instead, we’re almost disabling local governments,” Swanson said. “I can’t go to a school board meeting where their backs aren’t against the wall.

“In this state, we have a human resource economy, and we are disinvesting in human resources.”

Cech said the state and the nation are facing a “perfect storm” of labor shortages, with millions of the baby-boom generation preparing to retire and nowhere near enough people from the next generation to take their place.

All states are facing the same dilemma, so “there’s no place to look but from within,” when it comes to solving the problem, he said.

Montana has been lagging behind on its funding for public schools and higher education and in encouraging those missing out on education to get training that can mean better-paying jobs, Cech said.

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