MU to help Columbia study growth

By Jake Carah

Published Jan. 25, 2008

MU and the city of Columbia are teaming up to solve a growing problem.

Last December, the city asked MU's Community Policy and Analysis Center to work with city officials to predict the city's growth.

The ultimate goal of the study is to find "a better way to predict population growth," CPAC Director Thomas Johnson said.

The study is an expansion of Imagine Columbia's Future, the city's recently completed visioning process, Assistant City Manager Tony St. Romaine said. He said MU and the city of Columbia are splitting the study's $25,000 price tag.

The project is part of an "ongoing relationship with MU and even Stephens College in helping structure and to make this a valuable community exercise," St. Romaine said.

He said the study would help the city plan the growth of infrastructure and services to accommodate Columbia's growth.

He said the data would be used when the city considers the expansion of utilities like water, electricity, sewers, parks, roadways, sidewalks and bike facilities.

"One of the things we realized that we needed was a good baseline demographic estimate," St. Romaine said.

The city in the past had relied on the U.S. Census Bureau for the most up to date estimates, he said.

"When it comes to actually estimating growth into the future what our population will be in 20 years from now, only we the various stakeholders in the community have an innate understanding of how the community reacts to certain things, to what our future demographics will look like," St. Romaine said.

Johnson, who leads MU's side of the project, said in an e-mail that Columbia is growing, so city officials want to be able to plan infrastructure and public services better than in the past.

"The biggest factor affecting the need for infrastructure and services is population growth," he said.

The study's leaders, including Johnson, had a meeting with a city-appointed advisory panel of nine Columbia residents on Tuesday.

"We met to get acquainted and to get a list of questions that they had about the city's economy," Johnson said.

Research associate Jill Lucht, who started working with CPAC last September, is coordinating the project with the city.

"We are working with an advisory panel of Columbia citizens to estimate growth rates for employment, labor force and per capita income," she said.

These estimates are based on trends from the past 10 years, Lucht said.

Johnson said the project is a response to larger enrollment at MU. He calls this "good growth" because it raises property value without changing quality of life. He said some people on fixed income can be negatively affected.

The "econometric model" developed by the CPAC will provide projections of trends in areas such as housing demand, school enrollment, population and local government revenues and expenditures Lucht said. She said the study will predict a total of 38 variables.

Johnson said collaboration between a university and its community is especially important in smaller cities.

"Small communities have certain advantages but many disadvantages," Johnson said in an e-mail. "The disadvantages can be overcome by close cooperation between the university and the community to encourage good growth (or at least good change)."