If town sticks to the plan, will the houses be built?

A group opposed to the Florence Copper Project says the town would be way better off financially to stay the course and develop the acreage for housing, as called for in the town’s current General Plan. The group known as Protect Our Water Our Future (POWOF) claims that once the property is platted and begins building 250 houses a year, it will earn the town an average of $1.8 million per year. At full development or “build-out,” the town will rake in almost $4.8 million per year, according to the study by economic and real estate consultants Elliott D. Pollack & Company. This revenue would be in the form of construction tax, sales tax and property tax paid by these new residents, plus greater state shared revenues the town would earn on the increased population. Pollack’s study doesn’t, however, say how much these earnings would be offset by the cost of providing town services to this new subdivision — containing as much “civilian” population as currently lives in Florence. POWOF retained Pollack to review the copper project’s own economic projections, found in “The Economic Impacts of the Florence Copper Project,” prepared by George F. Leaming PhD at the Western Economic Analysis Center (WEAC). WEAC found the Florence Copper project would inject more than $17 million per year into the local economy, for each of the approximately 17 years of mine life. The area covered by Florence Unified School District — much larger than the town itself — was considered “the local economy.” Pollack found these and other numbers to in the WEAC report to be overly optimistic. The town of Florence alone was forecast to earn $654,000 in annual tax revenue from the mine. (The town was expecting to earn even more, approximately $1.7 million, but the state told the town it wasn’t allowed to collect its own severance tax on copper.)

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