MICHELLE WILLARD, Post Content Editor
Posted: Friday, February 5, 2010 11:47 am

Residential growth does not pay for itself, a consultant says.

Rutherford County needs a better balance between residential and commercial/industrial growth, the consultant for the county’s Comprehensive Land-use Plan said at a meeting Thursday night.

Parsons Brinkerhoff presented an update to the Rutherford County Comprehensive Land-use Plan Steering Committee this week that outlined the county’s past and future economic development.

“We’re the 13th fastest growing county (of the 300 largest counties) in the United States,” said David Hafley, the Parsons Brinkerhoff’s project director. Rutherford County has a good manufacturing and industrial base, but the explosion in residential growth wasn’t good for the county’s bottom line.

“What are the costs that the county is incurring as a consequence of the growth,” he asked. “Do we have the fiscal resources to support the plan we want to develop?”

MTSU Business and Economic Research Center Director David Penn, another consultant on the project, presented what he sees as three Rutherford Counties: Suburban Rutherford, Industrial Rutherford and Campus Rutherford.

Suburban Rutherford consists of the county’s population that commutes to work out of the county.

“Thousands of county residents commute daily to jobs in other counties, primarily Davidson County,” Penn said, adding the demand for jobs in Davidson County is closely tied to demand for housing in Rutherford County because of the commuting populace.

“Workers choose to commute because of lower housing costs, quality of life considerations and concerns about the quality of public schools,” he said.

And while Rutherford County is attractive to families, those who work out of county cause leakage in sales tax revenue to the counties where they work, Penn said.

That leakage is especially important in light of a Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations report on the cost of land use in Robertson, Blount and Tipton counties.

Hafley said the study showed the fiscal impact of land uses by comparing the revenue generated by residential, commercial/industrial and agricultural uses against the cost of providing services to those uses.

“Even though the counties are different, Robertson is roughly a similar county to Rutherford County,” Hafley said.

In short the study found that for every $1 generated by residential property Robertson County spent $1.15 providing services. Blount spent $1.20 and Tipton spent $1.05.

But for every $1 in rev from commercial and industrial use Robertson County only spent $0.20 providing services. The cost of providing services to agricultural land was even less.

“This is important to the way we think of land use growth in Rutherford County,” Hafley said. “Residential costs more than it produces.”

This means, in the long run, banking on residential development to increase the tax base can have negative consequences for the county’s bottom line. And the county would be better off by encouraging more commercial/industrial growth and preserving open spaces for farming.

Michelle Willard can be contacted at 615-869-0816 or mwillard@murfreesboropost.com.