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McCall hosts housing forum in an attempt to combat one of the biggest problems in Valley County

Posted at 5:37 PM, Aug 13, 2018
and last updated 2018-08-14 13:22:30-04

Tourism continues to grow in McCall and the surrounding Valley County and that was pretty evident with the traffic and people at the beach on a Monday afternoon.

"Tourism is the bread and butter for a lot of our communities in the west central mountains," said Andrew Mentzer the executive director of the West Central Mountains Economic Development Council.

Although the tourism industry is booming, business face a shortage of workers and fueling that is the lack of affordable housing in the McCall.

“It is a huge challenge, a lot of our service industries our restaurants have had to cut back services because they don’t have enough workers," said McCall Mayor Jackie Aymon. “Local housing, workforce housing or whatever you want to call it is probably the number one issue and one of the biggest obstacles of economic development in our community.”

So community leaders hosted a housing forum with a goal of streamlining two to three large projects down the road that can give employees a place to stay, the forum featured a one-stop shop for developers to learn creative ways to fund and build housing for workers.

“We are also talking about the process of how you get development done," said Mentzer. "So this is really a technical meeting where we are bringing in everything from appraisal to finance to modular.”

Community leaders hope that getting everybody together and providing information can help solve the problem of affordable housing so that the tourism industry moving forward can continue to thrive.