In The New West magazine: Spotlight North Idaho
On the Agenda In the Panhandle: Youth, Growth & Silver
The decline and near demise in the 1980s and '90s of logging and mining in North Idaho left a landscape of company towns -- Sandpoint, Priest River and Clark Fork among them -- almost bereft of companies.
The towns searched for new industries and leveraged the area's newfound resort profile with hopes of establishing a diverse and more stable economic base.
"If you go back to 2000, and you compare Bonner County to the rest of the state, we've grown manufacturing jobs faster and added more manufacturing jobs than anywhere else," says Karl Dye, the president of the Bonner County Economic Development Corp.
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From The New West magazine
Boise in Its Own Little Bubble
The Treasure Valley Repo Bus Tour embarked on its maiden voyage in March, driving about 25 pre-qualified and hopeful homebuyers on a tour of Boise and nearby Eagle and Meridian, hunting for deals on foreclosed homes.
"In this market it's ‘Think outside the box.' What can we do to generate some business?" says Nate Wilson, who helped organize the monthly bus tour.
In 2005, Wilson's agency, the Boise branch of Keller Williams Realty, had 600 agents. In mid-April, the count was down to about 380.
Boise has been hammered by the national housing slump and the sub-prime loan debacle. In April, there were 200 homes in Ada County scheduled for a trustee sale, the last step in the foreclosure process, compared to 42 last April. March saw 245 defaults filed, up from 99 in March 2007. In the fourth quarter of 2006, single-family home permits plunged 39.6 percent.
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From The New West magazine
Revenge of the Resource Economy
For years now, talk in the Mountain West has been about the "amenity" economy displacing natural resources as the key to prosperity. But as the housing downturn marches across the region and commodity prices soar, the old standbys have returned as key economic pillars.
Clearly, the industry powering much of the growth in the Mountain West over the past decade -- growth itself -- is limping. Residential real estate, while healthier than much of the country, continues to weaken, especially in larger cities like Boise and Salt Lake and in resort markets like Big Sky. The luxury second-home sector is also taking a hit, with high-profile projects like Tamarack Resort in Idaho and Promontory in Utah seeking refuge in bankruptcy.
Yet still-tight labor markets, continued job growth and commercial construction -- all of which are at least partly related to the natural resource boom -- have kept the overall economy in positive territory.
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A PREDATOR BECOMES PREY
Can Wolf Hunting Help Conserve the Species?
Hunting outfitter Ray Rugg toes a crusted depression in the snow. "Wolf tracks," he says. The tracks crisscross this small meadow past a piece of front leg and scraps of hide, the last remains of a white-tail deer.
On this damp early Spring afternoon Rugg's only looking for signs of the six wolves he frequently sees on his ranch in the rugged Bitterroot Mountains west of Superior, Montana. But come September, these predators will become prey. Rugg plans to guide hunters into these mountains on both sides of the Montana-Idaho border when the first legal wolf hunting season in the contiguous United States begins.
"I already got a line of clients waiting to put in an application if the hunt goes through," Rugg says.
As the first wolf hunts begin in the Northern Rockies, state and federal wildlife officials hail the transition to state management with public hunting as a major step forward in wolf conservation. They say it will develop greater acceptance and a conservation constituency for the contentious carnivore among hunters like Rugg and the public at large, because citizens will have a hand in management. But critics contend that a more enlightened ethic is unlikely, and the wolf's long-entrenched malevolent symbolism, and the backlash it incites, will persist.
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