Brownfields Update for the Pacific Northwest

Priest River is a small lumber town in northern Idaho that has been rocked by the effects of the economic downturn and recent lumber mill closures. Over the past year, an interdisciplinary group of students from a University of Idaho service-learning program has partnered with the town to plan for a more sustainable, prosperous future. Cleaning up four Brownfields sites is central to the community’s vision.

Priest River (population approx. 1900) is in northern Idaho at the confluence of the Priest and Pend O’Reille rivers. For a town whose economy has long depended upon lumber mills, it has shown surprising resilience in the face of the industry’s ups and downs. However, two of the last three mills have closed in the past two years and the one still in operation has cut back on production, sending the community into an economic tailspin.

The town has considerable assets, including the social capital of its tight-knit community, natural beauty, and inspired group of civic leaders.

Priest River’s difficulties came to the attention of Steve Gill of the Idaho DEQ while he was assisting the town with issues involving four large Brownfields. Gill had heard of Horizons Idaho, a University of Idaho extension program to assist small, rural communities with alleviating poverty and achieving sustainable prosperity. Horizons had worked with 49 other communities across the state but had not been to Priest River. When Gill approached the University, representatives introduced Gill to administrators of the Building Sustainable Communities Initiative (BSCI), an interdisciplinary, service-learning program that takes a bioregional approach to urban planning and design. A component of BSCI is the Learning and Practice Collaborative where students engage with a community in creating a vision and helping convert that vision into reality. The University agreed to take on Priest River’s master plan as a project.

The BCSI began work this past summer. Undergraduate students in architecture and landscape architecture converged on the town, collecting information about community assets and taking surveys of citizens’ aspirations for the future.

On the basis of this information, the students, created a bioregional atlas of the town, a multi-layer “map” of cultural and biophysical data.  Last month, the University hosted a community meeting to undertake a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis of Priest River.

A special guest was David Buerle, founder and Managing Director of Innovative Leadership (ILA), a company specializing in rural leadership and innovative rural community economic development. ILA has helped communities throughout the Pacific Northwest address economic development challenges such as how to stimulate new economic growth, diversify from timber-based industries and manage population growth. Buerle introduced the town to the Futures Game, a community planning decision tool.

After the undergraduate students have completed their work and provided the community with a roadmap for the future, a group of graduate students from BSCI will work with the town for up to two years. They will help the community advance their master plan with implementable actions that incorporate sustainable solutions. The goals of the master plan are focused on creating a livable community that can attract business and good jobs to replace those lost to the passing of the lumber mills.

Integral to the master plan will be reuse scenarios for the four Brownfields sites. They are a former landfill, a closed lumber mill, a dock/commercial facility and an old pole-treating site on the Pend O’Reille River. Assessment work funded by the DEQ and EPA has already begun on two of the sites. The BSCI and the Idaho DEQ will assist the community in these efforts.

The University also assisted the town with providing information to the EPA stating their interest in technical assistance from the HUD-DOT-EPA Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities. The partnership is seeking pilot communities to demonstrate the integration of economic and environmental sustainability through an interagency agreement “to align resources and initiatives to help improve access to affordable housing, more transportation options, and lower transportation costs while protecting the environment in communities nationwide.”

For more information on the activities and redevelopment efforts in Priest River, contact Steve Gill, whose information can be found under the Contacts tab of this newsletter. You also may contact the Mayor of Priest River, Jim Martin, 208-448-2123 or jmartin@priestriver-id.gov.