How Does A Community React When Worthy Values Collide?

It’s a little early to call Spokane Winter Lights a tradition.

After all, when the first cars start navigating the two miles of animated illumination at Qualchan Golf Course tomorrow evening, it will be Winter Lights’ second year.

But last year an estimated 100,000 people viewed the exhibit at $5 a carload, netting more than $33,000 for Spokane city parks and recreation programs.

If the inaugural performance turns out to be par for the course, Winter Lights will be shining for years. Thus are community traditions born.

Still, for all the holiday joy the light show spreads, and for whatever budget pressure it takes off taxpayers, there is a price to pay. Just ask the nearby residents whose December will be a string of nightly traffic jams in the streets leading to their homes. At times last year, cars backed up 20 and 30 deep onto U.S. Highway 195.

In compromise, this year’s show will start an hour later and will run 10 fewer days than last year. Whether that pleases everyone is doubtful, but the situation is a good reminder that the kind of tradeoffs communities must make arise when legitimate values conflict with one another.

It’s Winter Lights and the people it attracts vs. the neighbors. It’s a county trying to deal with solid waste disposal in an environmentally sensitive way vs. the people who live downwind from a compost facility. It’s people who have respiratory illnesses vs. other people who are trying to make a living growing grass. It’s travelers motoring down the freeway vs. the people whose homes will be torn down or devalued when a new on-ramp is built.

The public discussion such conflicts generate often deteriorates into name-calling and demonizing. The challenge for a community is to approach such issues with recognition that there is merit on both sides. And to remember that acknowledging all points of view and their respective virtues is part of what it means to be a community.

Choosing between good and bad is a snap. It’s choosing between good and good that stymies us.

So here’s the question: What does it mean to be a community, and how does a community deal with the conflicts that inevitably come up between worthy values?

This is not the usual “Bagpipes” request for crisp, two- or three-sentence responses. But if it’s worth extra time and thought, it will get extra space.

, DataTimes MEMO: “Bagpipes” appears Tuesdays and Thursdays. To respond, call Cityline at 458-8800, category 9881, from a Touch-Tone phone; or send a fax to 459-5098 or e-mail to dougf@spokesman.com. You also can leave Doug Floyd a message at 459-5577, extension 5466.