A Service of The Arrow           Friday February 4, 2000 11:34 AM

ARROW STAFF

While we, the faithful and beloved students of FHS, are newly denied any incentive to be in class by the school board, Stream International is being lured to town with a rather dandy one — rent-free location in Gateway West Mall. Needless to say, the poor business people without such an incentive are a little upset. At least I know I would be!

Why would the city council offer to do something so much against the will of the small business owner? One word: jobs. Stream International promises to offer 500 jobs, with salaries of $7.50 per hour and up, and our city sees it as a nice neat way to boost the economy. The idea behind this is that if 500 people get jobs, and they suddenly have money to spend, they will spend it in Kalispell circulating more money to local business. The problem? For the citizens of the valley, their `disposable' income, supposed to circulate to local business, goes to places other than Kalispell — for example, Missoula.

The other hope for Stream International is that it will draw people to the valley, because its an international corporation and offers jobs in tech support, a very useful skill in this day and age. This is a very good point. That is, it would be if we want people to come to Kalispell, or assume that for some reason they will flock here to benefit from a limited supply of jobs that are offered at twice the wages elsewhere.

The idea of a tax incentive for new businesses that have certain qualifications has been widely debated, but until Stream, has gone relatively unpublicized. It makes good economic sense to bring in jobs, but what is the overall cost? For some, this incentive means that Stream is getting paid $3.5 million in tax money to be here and increase competition for employers and wages. For others, it is simply seen as a relatively sound method to introduce 500 over-minimum wage jobs in a cutting-edge field.

In either case, for this new business to really provide money-flow through the valley, we need someplace to spend it. Their ideal employees are up-and-coming high-schoolers and FVCC students, who businesses see as having `disposable' income, but where in Kalispell will they spend that money? Walmart? Get real. Maybe the real problem with our economy is simply that most people go someplace other than here to have fun and spend money.

There are two sides to the issue and both deserve to be debated — we can only hope, in the case of this particular incentive decision, that both sides are consulted.

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