Demographic deficit

COEUR d'ALENE — Kootenai County experienced three more births than deaths last year.

Neighboring counties Bonner and Shoshone had more deaths than births.

"If Kootenai County is surrounded by a wall all of last year and no one can get in or out, the net population growth of the county is three," Idaho Department of Labor economist Sam Wolkenhauer said Monday evening.

In that same time, the county grew by 4,000 people.

“We really can’t sugarcoat this,” Wolkenhauer said. “All of the growth in our county is due to in-migration. We have essentially no surplus of births over deaths."

This is why local school districts experienced flat school enrollments with little or no increases this year. Wolkenhauer said on a state level, organic growth accounts for about a quarter of a percentage point due to births over deaths.

“In North Idaho, we have either none or it's negative explicitly in some of the rural counties around us,” he said. “This creates a very important but very distorted picture of the area and we need to understand what that means for us.”

Wolkenhauer spoke to members of the Coeur d'Alene School District's long-range planning committee, providing a snapshot of the area's demographic profile and how it is tied to economic conditions.

The bulk of growth, about 60%, has occurred in the 65-and-older age group.

“This absolutely dwarfs the population growth of the younger age groups,” he said.

This has three important ramifications, Wolkenhauer said: People 65 and older don’t attend public school, they don’t generally have children in their homes who attend public schools and, according to research, those 65 and older are less likely to approve levies and bonds because they’re on fixed incomes.

“We’re setting up a demographic deficit that has very important implications for essentially everything in the country," Wolkenhauer said.

This not only relates to school enrollment, but has impacts on Social Security, the local workforce and more. People are also more commonly having smaller families or no children at all. Idaho’s growing population is moving away from child-bearing-age families.

Fewer children are being born now, which means fewer children in the future. Since 2010, Kootenai County has had about a 5% increase in births, Wolkenhauer reported.

“We are in this remarkable circumstance where Kootenai County is the fastest-growing county in the fastest-growing state in the country and yet births are really not increasing," he said. "They’ve been flat several years in a row now. There’s a very important sort of under the hood shift going on in the demographics of the country.”

This is the paradox, he said.

"How can it be that we’re in this robustly growing county and school enrollment can be flat year over year, the number of births can be flat year over year?” he said. “This is us essentially paying the bill for this demographic shift that we’re going through.”