No Downtown Can Truly Keep A Town Down

Post Falls, the booming little city along Interstate 90 known for its factory outlet malls, plans soon to build something even more exciting - a downtown.

A month from today, Louisiana-Pacific Corp. will auction off 32 acres that Mayor Gus Johnson hopes one day will become the downtown.

That this boom town would long for a downtown says something about a community’s need for identity. It suggests downtowns have a value that goes beyond economic development and growth.

Post Falls has enjoyed plenty of that. Throughout the 1990s no city in Idaho has grown faster.

Today, thanks to the outlet malls and a rush in housing development, Post Falls has a population of 15,000, according to city administrator Jim Hammond. This is double the 1990 census total of 7,349. By 2002, Washington Water Power estimates Post Falls will be home to 22,000.

For all of this progress and prosperity, however, the mayor believes the city’s best days are still ahead if only a downtown can rise from the site of the L-P lumber mill down by the river.

“Downtown would give us an identity,” Johnson explained. “And an identity is the one thing we don’t have.

“We have a chance here to use that land right on the river to develop a downtown that will give Post Falls a personality, gave people who live here a place to go and enjoy. It’s very important to us that a downtown develops. It will finally give us what it seems like everybody else around here has,” Johnson said a few days ago.

How fascinating to hear the mayor speak longingly of the downtown Post Falls never had as Spokane and Coeur d’Alene worry about losing the downtowns they have long enjoyed.

Last Monday, 150 residents in Coeur d’Alene met with some of the best consultants in the nation to discuss ways to breathe life into the city blocks that once were the heart of downtown.

Sandy Bloem, a fourth-generation Coeur d’Alene resident whose family once owned Dingle’s hardware and now runs Johannes Jewelers, helped organize the session. She did it, she says, because sales in downtown Coeur d’Alene have dropped 40 percent in the past two years. The drop corresponds with the opening of the second and third phases of the outlet malls in Post Falls.

Bloem helped organize the Lake City Coalition not just for business reasons but because she thinks downtown is a place where the community should center. “Downtown is the place where all kinds of people come to feel part of a community,” she said. “That’s the way I remember downtown and that is what I want to retain in downtown Coeur d’Alene.”

This desire for a community center is the driving force behind downtown rediscovery around the country, according to Dolores Palma, president of HyettPalma Inc., the company hired by the city of Coeur d’Alene.

People want a place where they can experience local culture, feel a sense of closeness, belonging and pride.

“And what they are doing in Coeur d’Alene is really state of the art,” Palma said. “They are involving the community, building a vision, building on the strengths they have, and pursuing an economic solution not just a beautification solution.”

Very simply, Palma says, the lake is not enough. The future of downtown Coeur d’Alene, like the future of downtowns across the country, depends on economic development that works.

And there is one more thing. “The public and private sectors must work together on downtowns,” Palma said. In her company’s most successful downtown revitalizations, in such places as Boise and West Palm Beach, Fla., public-private partnerships have been the key.

“The public sector (usually city government) has a tremendous investment in downtowns,” Palma explained. The cities have streets, sidewalks, police and fire responsibilities. “it’s important for the public sector to come together with the private sector and see that they have a shared interest,” she said.

In Coeur d’Alene, it is already happening. The shared interest and common vision of public-private partnerships are taking shape.

In Post Falls, the mayor pledges to do what he can to make it happen. “I know what my role will be with our new downtown. I will do what I can to get this to work with a private developer because if we can make it work for them it works for the whole city,” Johnson said.

And in Spokane?

Well, the issues of a vital downtown and the need for public-private partnership have become a focal point for political bickering.

The mayor and City Council have seen the need to be partners in some private downtown development.

Now, political opponents are beating up the developers and the politicians in the weeks before the city elections.

Too bad.

Maybe a drive to Post Falls would be in order.

, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the editor of The Spokesman-Review. His column appears each Sunday on Perspective.