Letters - May 13, 2010

LaCrosse Community Pride

An Open Letter to our LaCrosse area friends and neighbors:

We’ve been working as a committee to help preserve and refurbish one of the finest old buildings in town—the big brick building that for more than ninety years was the community grocery store. We hope to see the building once more become a community center for groceries and perhaps other enterprises, too. Our hope, through developing a nonprofit entity, is to assist in improving the long range prosperity of our community. We’ve decided that the best route is to organize a PDA (Public Development Authority). We’ve unanimously agreed that this can be a way to organize that can make a difference as we all work together for the long term prosperity and success of our town and our area.

LaCrosse area residents don’t have to look to far from LaCrosse to see the blueprint of success. The town of Odessa, population of 980, working together through a PDA, earned an award recently for bringing five new businesses to town. In the process they earned kudos for creating 40 new family wage jobs and they are on target to create an additional 80 more family wage jobs. A prime example of what a successful PDA can do for a small community.

A grocery store is an anchor to any community. The presence of one in town helps attract qualified teachers for local schools, helps encourage businesses to come to town or start-up, encourages senior citizens to stay in the community and helps make community sponsored events more feasible and successful.

As individuals, and as a committee, we encourage our neighbors and friends to support forming a PDA for our LaCrosse community. We’ll be following the examples of many other towns— Ritzville, Harrington, Republic, Garfield, Tekoa, Reardan, Odessa, Uniontown and 54 others across the state. We feel that our LaCrosse area would benefit from the development of a PDA which would facilitate the process of establishing a viable grocery store for our community.

The concept of a PDA has been around since 1974. Some larger successful PDAs, include Pike Street Market, Meydenbauer Bay Convention Center, Vancouver Maritime Museum, Monorail of Seattle, and Seattle Art Museum. Other PDA’s have been formed to create nurseries, historic home renovations, dispatch centers, jails, EMS Services, business parks, business incubator centers, hospitals and many other great projects.

Why not simply create a nonprofit organization? Experiences of people in other rural communities who’ve made them work have shown us that PDA’s offer many potential grant and funding opportunities that can be vital for towns like LaCrosse. We learned of eight grants that we might well have qualified for—in the month of April alone—had we been up and running as a public development authority. We wouldn’t have qualified without that status. We’ve also learned that PDAs that are valuable not only for the immediate project at hand but future endeavors that would benefit the community.

We wanted to share what we’ve learned as we have been working hard to help on a goal all of us share—helping see that our community and our part of the county remain strong and vibrant economically and a good place for current and future businesses, and generations, to put down roots. We believe this goal will lead other residents to supporting us the enactment of a PDA for LaCrosse at the town council meeting tonight, slated to vote Thursday May 13, 2010 on this issue.

LaCrosse Community Pride Committee,

Jeff Andrus, Carol Audet, Jen Broeckel, Ed Casey, Judy Harder, Darleen Knott, Jeannine Larkin, Scooter Lyle, Alex McGregor, Jerry Townsend, Gary Wargo, and Jennifer Broeckel

Credit to Cubs

As a frequent user of the Colfax trail along the Palouse River, I would like to compliment Cub Scout Pack 595 and their associated parents with their cleanup efforts shown in the past Gazette. It was a much needed task, and they all performed it extraordinarily well.

The use of this trail is a privilege extended to the public by various land owners and unfortunately there are users toward one end of this trail that have abused this privilege by leaving shell casings, broken bottles and trash while using it for a gun range and party spot.

The hard work performed by the Cub Scouts will go a long way in promoting goodwill between the land owners and the trail users. Way to go scouts.

Gary Burns,

Oakesdale