Legislative Support for Growth Management in the Rocky Mountains: An Exploration of Attitudes in Idaho

Abstract

Rapid growth in the largely rural Western Mountain states has created many of the same concerns that have led to support for managed growth in other areas of the country. However, the literature exploring support for growth management has focused mostly on urban and suburban areas. This paper begins to build a more rural-based framework for understanding the support for growth management, by presenting the results of a survey of state legislators in one of the rapidly growing Mountain states—Idaho. Analysis of two sets of independent variables investigates whether legislative support for growth management is driven more by objective factors such as actual changing demographics, or by perceptual factors such as quality of life ratings. The results indicate that both objective characteristics—growth rate and region of residence—and perceptual factors—the level of concern about such problems as water pollution and the availability of affordable housing—are important predictors of legislative support for growth management in Idaho. Prospects for managed growth in Idaho and other states in the dynamic, rapidly growing Mountain region are discussed in the light of these findings, and with respect to the unique political culture in Idaho and in the Mountain states region generally.