Tacoma and Pierce County are a mess primarily because the County engaged in huge suburban sprawl subsidization which encouraged the near abandonment of the downtown and many of the urban centers. Pierce County, like Huston has been a train wreck for growth management.

Its far better tax wise to have the growth occur in the city center rather than in the suburbs which require even more expensive and subsidized road building and utility extensions.

Having taxpayers subsidize suburban growth has made living 30 miles away from Tacoma appear to be a free choice when the fact is that it has externalized a great many financial and environmental costs.

Tacoma’s City Council, Economic Development Board and all of the related groups (public and private) clearly don’t know what they’re doing. They’re pushing policies that may or may not work, but they push them anyway.

And all the while they’re pushing these bad policies they’re impacting taxpayers, businesses and anyone else who gets in the way. Ultimately it is the city council that decides on policy, so they are the ones who need to think things through, but they don’t.

We should seriously consider replacing some of them in the next election (2009).

I think Tacoma’s problems have more to do with a history of population loss to suburbs, a slowly recovering but historically weak economy, and perhaps substandard city planning. But too much planning doesn’t seem to me to be the issue.

One has to wonder how this might have turned out differently, if the City Council were spending their own money. Might they have been just a little more diligent about studying the potential consequences of their actions?

Tragically, we ain’t seen nothing yet.