For the last decade, the Town of Mount Pleasant has drifted with the current of what appeared to be the secure tide of American suburban expansion.

The established pattern of sprawl, civic dilution and an unending quest for highway asphalt continued.

Now major development is at a halt. A thousand empty houses sit unsold.  Sales tax revenues shrink.  Budget cuts for town services are projected years into the future.  

The massive flaw at the core of the suburban South’s assumptions about the future has been exposed.  It consumes too much.  It produces too little.  It cannot go on.

The core assumption has been our belief that the fantastic prosperity of our childhoods was the birthright of capitalism and Christianity realized in the Sunbelt thanks to air conditioning and mosquito abatement. It’s not purely a Republican/conservative delusion.  The same 5 percent per year economic expansion allowed liberals to go to the moon, Woodstock and the Great Society all at the same time.  From 1945 until 1973 we had so much we could bury our mistakes, errors and waste under the taxes we could collect on the more which kept showing up nearly every year.

When we stopped growing, we started borrowing.  Soon that will have to end as well. This hardly means residents of the East Cooper area must accept a miserable future.

We drive huge, nearly empty vehicles over massive roads between huge parking lots. Our children attend big schools far from our homes. We shop in big stores where we buy things made far away.  Many of us spend our adult lives driving our children long distances from place to place.

The Town of Mount Pleasant, like every other community in the American suburban South, must carefully and efficiently adapt to new realities.  We can’t count on another million dollars in impact fees from new construction to cover our next overpayment on waterfront parkland.  Our next mistake will be covered by cuts in recreation and police protection.

The politicians who declared Mount Pleasant was and should be a “bedroom community” were wrong.  Their decisions to dissolve our economic development board eight years ago and the failure to replace it with a successful effort by paid staff squandered the town’s opportunity to bring employment and tax base home.  Low density, single family neighborhoods never pay their way in taxes.  Retail commercial property can’t cover the difference.

When Benefit Focus left Mount Pleasant for Daniel Island, a nearby restaurant lost 20 lunches a day, 100 a week, or 5200 a year.  There were 10 restaurants in the area. That could be 52,000 lunches a year on which the town is not now receiving sales taxes.

When leases which factor in gross sales are recalculated, rents will be reduced or not rise to their potential.  Lower rents mean lower property values and lower property taxes.  People who don’t work in Mount Pleasant aren’t paying sales sale taxes there on the stuff UPS delivers to their offices that they buy online.  Daytime sales for office supplies fall. Utility revenue and municipal franchise fees fall.

Recruiting employment and tax base was the most important challenge of the last decade in Mount Pleasant.  It will be a tougher challenge in the next decade, but now we’ll confront it with fewer resources. Mount Pleasant has two things to sell.  First it has and must retain first rate public schools that possess the confidence and support of the community. While primary responsibility for this remains with the school district (a separate entity), the town needs to be supportive of our existing schools and bringing more public school alternatives here.

The second resource the town has are its natural and cultural resources.  Our historic neighborhoods, groups like Creative Spark and the Village Playhouse, the new senior center, our libraries and the town’s own recreation department are cultural resources which contribute to our quality of life.  Each of these provides employment, generates economic activity and helps keep Mount Pleasant from becoming a generic nowhere like suburban Atlanta.

Our natural resources include green spaces, parks, waterfronts and public waters.  Residents must be able to enjoy and access these places. We must shed the delusion our culture, history and natural resources are for tourists.  People shopping for places to live in the next generation will be mobile, informed and the contest to secure their contributions to our community will be competitive.

If we want to recruit employment and tax base and sell those thousand houses, we’ll have to continue to invest in infrastructure to support our cultural and civic life. We need to secure our remaining green space and make what we have useful. We’ll have to transition to a transportation network to access them where using an automobile is an option, not a necessity, for some parts of town.  Cycling, walking, CARTA busses and low speed electric vehicles must be able to function for the growing half of the population who can’t drive.

Both you and I need to decide if either of us are the people who can help our town move through this change by running for office in the November elections.  

An effective campaign will need to be planned and organized over the summer and run in the fall, so the time to decide is now.  Please comment on this column on the newspaper’s Web site to let me know what you think I should do.  Letters to the editor are also welcome.  Feel free to announce your own candidacy.  We need open, public debate, not the managed politics some people insist on attempting to arrange for our town.  I’ll make up my mind on June 1 and put it in this paper that week.

(William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I’OnVillage.)