Leaders of a bedroom community with an economy hinging on three gambling-based businesses hope it will become a city of economic diversity and niche markets.
The city of La Center has contracted with Austin, Texas-based AngelouEconomics to form a new economic development plan to provide more in-town jobs for residents and find means for more economic diversity.
“The industry is the card rooms right now,” said La Center City Planner Dale Miller.
The town’s population of 2,500 is served by 1,100 jobs – 650 are at the New Phoenix, Chips Casino and Last Frontier card rooms.
In 2007, the town’s median income was $65,035 – 9.4 percent higher than Clark County’s overall median – but only 6.1 percent of La Center’s residents work in town.
In June, AngelouEconomics surveyed La Center’s civic and business leaders and a handful of citizens to identify past stumbling blocks in development, assess readiness for attracting and directing development and determine future economic directions.
The research showed the town has more than doubled in size since 1990 and has managed to maintain a rural atmosphere with few businesses.
La Center’s gaming industry has brought the city an average of $3.2 million in annual tax revenue since 1998, which the report said represents “a significant transfer of wealth from those outside La Center” and means the city “has been able to avoid making the difficult choices that are required to diversify the tax base.”
“Very few cities in the country rely so heavily on gambling to fund the public provision of service and infrastructure investment,” the report said. “While the tax benefits of gaming have proven enormous, the potential negative consequences … are largely unrecognized by the community.”
Miller said diversification has become a major concern for the city and that he hopes to see a better balance develop between jobs and housing.
“We’re a bedroom community just like all of Clark County,” he said. “But it’s more pressing here because of our size. We don’t have the breadth and diversity of urban services that most cities have.”
The report listed the Cowlitz Indian tribe proposal for a casino-based development near La Center as both an opportunity and a threat to the town.
But Miller said the city isn’t looking for more gaming.
“The city council is against the proposed casino,” he said. “We already have the gaming industry and we don’t want to see it go away. But we want to have a more streamlined tax revenue system. Diversity is everything.”
Retail leakage also was cited as a concern, with residents making 81.6 percent of their retail purchases outside La Center.
“(It is) a condition that exacerbates the city’s dependence on gaming revenue” and weakens the community’s economic footing, the report said.
Opportunities for the town highlighted in the report include plans for downtown redevelopment, the possibility of an Interstate 5 interchange connection to La Center and the town’s place in an economically growing region.
“The landscape is changing,” Miller said. “Vancouver and Washougal are pretty much built out, Battle Ground has been in the cross hairs for development for a while and now we’re seeing the cross hairs go on to the Discovery Corridor” in North Clark County.
The Discovery Corridor refers to a strip of land straddling I-5 between Salmon Creek and La Center, which is tapped as the future home of information- and technology-based industry clusters.
“The area in itself is enough to support more businesses and industries,” Miller said. “But we need to figure out how to do that most effectively.”
AngelouEconomics’ next step in creating the city’s sustainable economic development strategy will be an analysis to help identify target industries to bring to La Center.
Charity Thompson can be reached at cthompson@vbjusa.com.
