News - Local

Tuesday, Jul. 22, 2008

Lon Allan: Economic viability part of big picture

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My wife and I just filled out our household shopping survey to be used by Applied Development Economics to write up yet another recommendation about how this city can achieve economic viability.

We got the survey in the mail a few days ago and sat down a couple days later to fill it out. It took us about 20 minutes to answer the questions.

I hope all of you who receive the two-page survey will do the same, in the interest of getting the most accurate look at Atascadero’s shopping habits. The survey was mailed to all of the city’s almost 11,000 households.

This is your opportunity to participate in what ADE hopes will be a genuine measure of our shopping habits.

I wish there had been a “him” and “her” aspect of the form, because we disagreed on some assessments of our shopping habits. As it was, the survey we mailed in was a consensus of those habits. Even at that, I think it provides a realistic picture.

I also wish the survey I mailed Friday had contained something about how we felt about Atascadero’s shopping opportunities—you know, something that said, “Yes, shopping stinks in Atascadero, but I don’t mind.”

Having all the shopping amenities at our fingertips doesn’t make Atascadero a better place to live, after all.

It can help in a small way, of course. An economically healthy community can pave more roads, hire more cops and firefighters and maintain its infrastructure better than a city that’s broke, I’d agree.

But having a healthy economic profile isn’t the only measure of whether Atascadero is a good place or not.

I participated in one of the first public workshops along with about 20 other local residents in June. We were put through the SWOT test — you know, list Atascadero’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

As we went through the exercise it became obvious that one man’s strength was another man’s threat. During this same exercise at a meeting on downtown Atascadero, I suggested that Wal-Mart, for example, would be a threat to the downtown’s economic viability, while another member of the panel said it would save it. We both insisted our recommendations be recorded.

At the ADE public forum, Wal-Mart was the 800-pound gorilla in the room nobody was allowed to talk about. The proposed store is what drove the need for yet another economic study for Atascadero.

I’ll be eager to see the results of this survey, even though I don’t think this study is going to include anything the other five or six similar studies haven’t already said.

The first sentence in the instructions to the home survey reads: “The City of Atascadero is studying how its shopping areas can better serve local and regional patrons.”

So this becomes something larger than just providing services for Atascaderans. It suggests that we want to go after those shopping dollars from people in nearby communities, too. And that’s the underlying issue we’ve been arguing about already: How big do we want to be?