The question I will be asking at the next BP meeting
is a simple one: If the demand for a business park is great enough to build
one, why isn't the private sector willing to step up and invest in
it? For example, like the Palouse Mall owners and many other small business
owners, the Bennetts are willing to finance buildings and other capital
development across the highway from the BP site, bear those costs, and profit
from their capital development investments and lease revenues -- so why not
a business park? On the other hand, why can't these high-tech, small businesses
provide for their own infrastructure and superstructure needs themselves?
It would appear to come down to a matter of assuming financial risk. Should the
taxpayers assume the risk that the private sector is now unwilling to take? This
raises other questions that Greg Burton might research: How successful
have other business parks in the region been -- in other words, how
big a risk is it? Aren't there business parks elsewhere funded by
the private sector -- if not, why not? Why can't the development go
into the industrial slum that qualifies Moscow for the proposed finance scheme?
As a fiscal conservative, I would want to know the real risks and
likely benefits of the park, and I would then want to be able to vote on
it, given that the costs and benefits of this industry subsidy would directly
affect me -- just as major infrastructure development bonds are debated and
voted on. To handle it otherwise -- say, the decisionmaking of some unelected
"nonprofit" (Won't a segment of local businesspeople profit??) council --
smacks of the very Soviet-style central planning and socialism (i.e.,
nonrepresentative, governmental intrusion into private enterprise) that
political and economic conservatives decry.
I will be asking the panel on Thursday to address these concerns.