Familiar vision emerges at economic summit

The Daily Triplicate/Michele Gargas Thomas

“We’re moving in the right direction,” he said, “but we’re moving really slowly.”

Presenters at Saturday’s summit portrayed Del Norte County as a place primed for growth, not only in its economy, but in the number of people who call this place home.

Labor Market Consultant Dennis Mullins of the state Employment Development Department said Del Norte is expected to double its population over the next 40 or so years, which is a higher projected growth rate than the surrounding counties of Humboldt and Mendocino. This builds upon a nearly 23 percent population boom that occurred from 1990 to 2007.

“It’s growing fairly fast,” Mullins said, “which is a good thing in terms of some kind of economic development.”

There was also expansion in the local labor market over the past couple years despite a downtrodden economy. Del Norte increased its labor force by about 400, and also upped the number of work establishments in the area by 14.

Mullins said the county boasts the highest average weekly wage in the region — a statistic that Pelican Bay State Prison surely has a hand in.

“Del Norte’s holding its own,” Mullins said. “Even in spite of this economy — it’s a mess — Del Norte County’s still growing, so that’s a good thing.”

How to facilitate growth, and to do it the right way was the subject of a presentation by Marjo Curgus, a representative of the Sonoran Institute, a non-profit that works predominantly in the Western United States to conserve cultural and natural resources in rapidly growing areas.

While the projector screen showed a slide of a cartoon town littered with fast-food restaurants and other generic store signs, she said rural communities need to ensure they don’t lose what makes them unique in the face of change.

“That’s a challenging thing to do,” Curgus said. “The natural and cultural assets are a huge part of a community’s identity.”

With technological advances, global industry has changed, and people no longer need to live in large cities to be commercially viable, she said. She added that since the 1970s people have been moving away from urban centers to rural communities, and, in particular, to places that have natural and man-made recreational amenities.

“People can pretty much live and be where they want to,” Curgus said, adding that they tend to pick places where they can go hiking, biking or walking along the beach. The availability of these amenities, she said, “are predominantly the reasons a place is growing.”

But in a lot of places throughout the West Coast, this can create conflict as well.

“The West has a very long history of being based in extractive, rugged industries,” Curgus said. “We’ve viewed the earth as a source of wealth.”

This has certainly been true in Del Norte County, a place where many made their living through logging and fishing before those industries started to dwindle and die. Most days you can still see trucks driving around with bumper stickers that have slogans such as, “Earth First! We’ll log the rest later” or “Save a logger, eat an owl.”

But Curgus said the people who are moving to rural places now tend to have different ideas about how to use their environment.

“They view the earth as a setting,” she said. “It’s viewed as a way in which you do things on top of it.”

These differing ideologies can clash when a community is trying to redefine itself. Instead of embracing its resources and figuring out a way to market them to attract business, Curgus said towns can get stuck thinking about “what it used to be” instead of “what it could be.”

“Communities tend to get stuck and not be able to transcend that,” she said. “We can’t control the global economy and we can’t tell people not to move to our community.”