News Article

Date: June 7, 2006
By JOHN TORINUS

PDRs for Washington County
Keep in mind quality of life and business attraction

As the Washington County Board gets down to crunch time on whether to save prime farmlands or to let rampant development continue, it’s important to get the basic elements of the decision right.

There are many ins and outs to the administration of a PDR program (preservation of development rights), but the decision by the 30 supervisors on June 13 should be about the big picture, not about details and specifics. As with any major legislation, those can be worked out as the regulations to implement the program are fleshed out.

Tons of information has been brought to the supervisors on this issue, but they need to cut through it and be policy makers, not micro-managers. We didn’t elect them to dot the Is and cross the Ts.

The big elements of this decision, one of the biggest in the history of the county, are the size of the investment and returns from that investment.

The annual cost of the investment to county taxpayers from the sales tax would be $800,000. But that must be put into context. Other county spending seldom gets the kind of scrutiny that this program is receiving.

We spent $19 million on the new fairgrounds, presumably at least partly because the agricultural side of life is seen as important in Washington County.

We spent $10 million on a new garage, $17 million on a courthouse addition and a couple million of the expansion of the UWWC campus. There was little debate on these capital expenditures. There was no call for a referendum.

We are about to spend up to $13 million on a sheriff’s radio systems, and there has been no serious debate or call for referendum.

We will be spending $4.5 million on Cabela subsidies. That was hotly debated on the floor of the County Board, but there was no referendum.

Indeed, the level of debate on continuation of the sales tax itself was limited, even though half of the $8 million it raises annually is now being ear-marked for operating expenses. There was no call for citizens to be involved in that decision at the ballot box.

It certainly could prove to be true that if the PDR program is successful, more funds could be sought down the road. A lot will depend on what kind of matching funds can be drawn from the state, the federal government and private sources. The experience of other states that have gotten serious about farmland preservation is that funding comes from many sources.

One example of such funding already exists in Washington County. The state Department of Natural Resources is already buying easements (the essence of a PDR program) in the northeastern part of the county along the Milwaukee River.

So, how about the other side of the equation, the returns?

The people who have long been involved in economic development in the city and county have been worried greatly about the fall-off of manufacturing jobs in the nation, the state and the county. Only Hartford seems to have been able to fight the trend toward fewer jobs in manufacturing.

So the citizens and professionals in the county involved with job retention and creation have developed strategies that concentrate on the drivers of the economy. Manufacturing is still one of them; indeed, now it is referred to as "advanced manufacturing." Disciplines to support higher order manufacturing are offered at the West Bend campus of the Moraine Park Technical College. That is a way of supporting an important economic cluster.

The same strategists, such as members of the West Bend Economic Development Corp., have figured out that it makes sense to be part of emerging clusters in the knowledge-based economy, such as the bio-medical explosion in Milwaukee. We need to get aboard that train, and steps are being taken to do so.

The strategists applaud the successes in what is known as the FIRE cluster (finance, insurance and real estate). The recent announcement about the expansion of West Bend Mutual Insurance was the best economic development news this year. It is a big win for the county.

Even thought it’s our oldest cluster, agri-business still merits support and respect. It includes players like Dairyland Seed, Gehl’s Guernsey Farms, West Bend Elevator and everyone who buys from or sells to farmers in the county. All told, direct and indirect, it comes to 5,000 jobs.

None of this can be sustained if Washington County goes the way of Waukesha County, where little contiguous farmland remains.

Agricultural zoning, while useful and necessary, has proven ineffective against development pressures. But farm zoning in combination with an easement program like PDRs has proved effective in other states.

There’s nothing wrong with good residential or commercial development, but it doesn’t have to be done at the expense of prime farmland. Development can be properly channeled with good land use planning. Some builders are subtly opposing the PDR program, but the enlightened ones know that good land use planning raises the values of their subdivisions.

For my money, and that of other people interested in protecting and growing the economy, the PDR program is economic development of the highest order. It’s all about jobs in agri-business.

It has the added benefit of preserving our quality of life, which allows other businesses to attract other businesses in the county to attract and retain talented employees. That also is economic development of the highest priority.

The return on investment for the PDR program will be high for current taxpayers and for their descendants.

(John Torinus is CEO of Serigraph, Inc. in West Bend and a past general manager of the Daily News.)