How do you help a bookstore grow sustainably?

A real estate office?

A dog food plant?

These would seem to be the questions Flagstaff city officials were asking when they hired Becky Daggett as the city's business expansion and retention specialist. If there is one word that City Hall has adopted as its new mantra it is "sustainable," and Daggett embodies that concept in spades.

For nearly a decade, Daggett has led Friends of Flagstaff Future, an advocacy group that grew out of the 2020 visioning process and the subsequent regional land-use plan. It emerged as a counterweight to the business-as-usual agenda of the Chamber and the builders, championing compact, mixed-use development and a politics of place and preservation. It aligned itself with the narrow council majority that opposed the Wal-Mart supercenter, losing narrowly at the polls when that issue was taken to referendum.

Meanwhile, City Hall has been sending mixed messages on sustainable growth. Its New Urbanism planners talk about neighborhood shopping while approving a massive expansion of the regional mall. Despite an anti-sprawl land-use plan that calls for infill development first, most new projects on the drawing board are huge subdivisions on the outskirts of town. And although City Hall has declared a crisis in affordable housing, it continues to pile on expensive design and energy codes that, along with proposed impact fees, threaten to empty the city of its middle-class workforce.

Webster's defines "sustainable" as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. We can see how that terms applies to recycling, reclaimed wastewater and better bus service. But how does it help the owner of, say, a small computer repair business figure out how much to pay his technicians and invest in training to avoid high turnover while still staying competitive? And when a small business finally grows big — let's take W.L. Gore — does that make it by definition unsustainable?

It's these mixed messages on sustainability and affordability from City Hall that will make it difficult for anyone hired to help expand the local workforce to be effective. Daggett's background, which includes a degree in sustainable development, is in land-use planning and grassroots organizing in the nonprofit sector, not in hands-on work with struggling for-profit businesses. As such, she is a lightning rod for the discontent in some sectors of the business community with a City Hall mindset that they perceive as unmindful of how difficult it is just to balance a checkbook or meet a biweekly payroll, much less do so sustainably.

Nobody wants to see someone as intelligent, personable and committed to her community as Becky Daggett set up for failure. But in this case, her hiring by the city seems more an ideological statement than one based on the realities of the job. We urge her to keep her head down as she gets down to work, the better to avoid the crossfire between warring economic camps that she — or anyone in her position — can do little about.