New Century Plan Gets Fine Tuning Group’s Initial Priority Will Be Increasing Local Wage Levels

Spokane citizens offered some directions for fine tuning but didn’t alter the principal themes of the New Century Plan during a town meeting this week.

About 150 people showed up Tuesday night to offer their comments on the plan that is designed to guide community and economic development efforts for Spokane and Kootenai County over the next five years.

Now, the New Century steering committee will focus on the goal of raising wages in Spokane.

While the New Century plan has a multitude of goals and strategies for achieving them, Tom Stevenson, co-chairman of the steering committee, says increasing wages is the top initial priority.

“We are really going to be focusing on raising private-sector earnings per job,” said Stevenson, who is the managing shareholder of the McFarland & Alton CPA firm. “That’s a very tangible thing the community can point at as something this group can achieve.”

One of the plan’s five benchmarks, by which progress in achieving its goals will be measured, calls for Spokane’s average private-sector earnings-per-job to exceed the U.S. average by the year 2000. In 1993, Spokane’s private-sector earnings would have been $740 million higher if they had matched the national average.

Stevenson said this week’s town meeting ended the planning process on a strong note.

“Our steering committee was just thrilled by the way the community responded,” Stevenson said. “What really impressed me is that so many people came so well prepared. Their thoughts were very organized and articulate.”

Stevenson, said that about 25 changes were made in the plan published Sunday in The Spokesman-Review. But those changes mostly involved clarifying or rewording parts of the document. The principal focus of the plan was not altered.

The New Century process is an effort to coordinate the long-range planning of a number of different business, government and civic groups and build a broad-based consensus that will direct community and economic development.

Tuesday’s meeting completed the planning aspect of the project. Now, the steering committee is beginning to recruit groups to take responsibility for implementing the various strategies spelled out in the plan.

“We’re involved in outreach,” Stevenson said. “We are speaking to a lot of groups and finding a lot of enthusiasm.”

Stevenson said little criticism of the plan surfaced at Wednesday’s meeting. But meeting participants did have suggestions.

“Some of the people thought we were a little hard on government, for example,” Stevenson said. “So we reviewed that. And there was a fair amount of discussion regarding affordable housing.”

The plan was revised to emphasized both affordable “market rate” housing and subsidized housing.

The organization will conduct an annual meeting in May 1997 to review progress on implementing the plan.

, DataTimes