Paul Scott comment: "Here's how the Decorah City Council should spend its time at Monday evening's visioning meeting"

The Decorah City Council will meet Monday evening to hold a goal setting and planning session for the next year.  City council members deserve to be praised for being willing to do this.

What typically happens at such meetings is that a laundry list of items will be compiled, some of which will get worked on during the next year and some of which will be forgotten or just not worked on in the crush of other issues.  12 months later, another goal setting session will come up with the same laundry list.

In order to be effective, a goal setting and planning session needs to ask the question, "What can we do that will have the most impact on making Decorah a better community?"  Let me not only suggest that asking this question would be beneficial on Monday evening, but let me suggest an answer as well.

The answer needs to start by taking an overview of Decorah and coming up with the conclusion that our community is doing very, very well.  In fact, I'd suggest that the problems Decorah faces now spring up from its successes—not its failures.

Decorah is becoming a tourist destination and a retirement destination.  That means the community is benefiting from having people outside Decorah come here and spend their money.  By all means, this is a good trend!

But this success has had unexpected consequences as well.  Because real estate prices in Decorah might seem reasonable compared with those of homes in the Twin Cities or Des Moines metro areas, the prices of new homes in Decorah have gone up.  This is good news for realtors, bankers and construction workers.  It's difficult news for young people already living in Decorah who want to buy a house.  Not only are there fewer and fewer houses which qualify as "affordable housing," but when those houses do come on the market, they might be bought by someone wanting to operate an AirBnB instead of living in the house.

In short, Decorah's boom in popularity has benefited the community as a whole, but has hurt a few people—especially those in their 20s and 30s who want to live in Decorah.  As all costs rise, younger people get caught trying to make a living with salaries that have not increased as quickly as costs have risen.

In the past few years, the City of Decorah has tried to help the housing market by granting property tax abatements to people building new houses.  But when the city council a few years ago lifted the dollar cap on this program, it encouraged the construction of brand new expensive houses and condos—not modest affordable housing.  It's time for the city council to reimpose this cap, or eliminate the tax abatement program entirely and spend those funds more directly on affordable housing or any other program that would benefit younger people, such as child care subsidies.

Decorah is booming, which is good news.  Now the task is to work on making sure every community member benefits from the town's growth.