What growth cap is best?

Douglas County commissioners and planning commissioners have scheduled a joint meeting for Feb. 1 to discuss a growth element as part of the master plan.

That element is expected to include a growth cap and several alternatives that have been proposed for the speed of Douglas County's future growth.

There have been a lot of opinions expressed about growth in Douglas County and who benefits from it.

But one doesn't have to delve too deeply into the 1996 Master Plan to find a very interesting chart.

Chart 2.5 lists the number of people who lived in the county in 1995 and sets forth four growth options ranging from 2 percent to 3.5 percent.

If the county had adopted the highest of those options, its population in 2005 would have been 46,075, not the 50,108 people reported by the state demographer's office.

Those are neither supposition nor opinion. They're facts.

Another fact is that residents voted to limit growth to 280 homes per year in 2002 and have been fighting a protracted legal battle to protect that vote ever since. The lawsuit to prevent implementation of the vote was not instigated by the county, but was joined by county commissioners after it was filed.

It is our opinion that a reasonable growth rate for Douglas County is one that allows county services to keep up, ensures businesses will remain prosperous and offers residents the reassurance that the Valley they chose to live in still looks something like the brochure in a decade.