Our View: Valley residents pay energy price for suburban sprawl

Every day in 2004, Idaho spent about $4 million on petroleum and natural gas — money that left the state and went largely to Montana. Energy prices have only gone up since then.

Published in the Idaho Statesman editorial page
March 4, 2006

Every day in 2004, Idaho spent about $4 million on petroleum and natural gas — money that left the state and went largely to Montana.

Energy prices have only gone up since then.

Put another way, the money we spend on energy roughly approximates the money we spend on K-12 public education. Any money we save on energy costs is money we have available to spend, in state, on needs closer to home. Our decisions about energy use — and the land-use policies that drive energy use — can prove costly. That's the message from Northwest Environment Watch, a Seattle-based nonprofit group that tracks demographic trends for a region stretching from Northern California and Idaho to British Columbia and coastal Alaska.

And it's a critical message for a state that, for all its growth, still embraces a love of the highway and a general lack of interest in public transportation. Northwest Environment Watch deals in statistics. Here are two salient numbers for Idaho and Boise:

• Totaling gasoline use and nonindustrial electricity, Idaho used more energy per capita in 2004 than any other area of the Northwest. Our per-capita use exceeded the Northwest average by about 14 percent.

• As Ada County grew by 46 percent in the 1990s, much of that growth occurred in low-density neighborhoods. In 2000, only 7 percent of Ada County residents lived in compact neighborhoods with 12 or more people per acre — the lowest percentage of seven urban areas in the Northwest. Even Ada County's attempts at higher-density "smart growth" have produced mixed results. Developers are building pockets of smart growth, "but they're all spread out," Northwest Environment Watch executive director Alan Durning said at an Idaho Environmental Forum speech Friday.

Is there a correlation between gasoline consumption and sprawl? Of course. Highway fuel use drives our high energy consumption, and the easy assumption to make is that Idaho guzzles more gas simply because it's a rural state. However, the real-estate market drives consumption, Durning said. Idaho is a collection of small- to mid-sized cities, he said, and the prevailing growth model is to develop outlying farmland, not the city's core.

Sound familiar?

In rapidly growing Ada and Canyon counties, sprawl is often the growth pattern of least resistance. Outlying farmland is available. Higher-density "infill" development plans often arouse the kind of grousing usually directed at rush-hour traffic jams or high gasoline prices. So it's no surprise that as we grow, we grow outward. It's a little bit human nature and a lot market reality. For developers, turning farmland into a subdivision can be expedient and cost-effective. For home buyers, these new homes offer more square foot for the dollar.

But bargains come at a price. We pay a big chunk of that price at the pump — part of the $4 million-plus that leaves the state every day to feed our energy habit.