ROCKFORD – At a time when most Palouse towns are searching for an economic spark, Rockford’s enviable challenge is catching lightning in a bottle.
About 10,000 cars pass through the town center daily, bound for the gambling, boat docks and golf courses around Lake Coeur d’Alene just a few miles away. With increasing frequency some of those motorists admire what’s outside their windshield as they pass through this southeast Spokane County farm town.
There’s talk of a 42-house subdivision, no small matter for a town with fewer than 200 homes. Parking spots are suddenly scarce on First Street, the main drag for the town of 500. Noon on Thursday at Fredneck’s bar and grill looks like a hot Friday night used to. And there’s actually a wait for seating at the Harvest Moon Cafe, which locals couldn’t fill two years ago.
“We’ve gone from 2,500 cars a day to somewhere around 10,000 cars,” said Gary Wagner, Rockford mayor. “That’s casino drivers, lake drivers. Our traffic has quadrupled in the last couple years.”
It’s been years since Rockford’s downtown exhibited so much bustle, said Larry Gady, who dined at the Harvest Moon recently. He pointed to the packed tables to prove his point.
“I don’t know a single person in here, and I’ve lived in Rockford since 1961,” the farmer said. In a small town, that kind of occurrence happens as infrequently as a lunar eclipse.
The feeling from City Hall to the town fairgrounds is that there’s more to come. But there’s also a concern that if Rockford doesn’t play its cards well, it won’t be doing much more than looking both ways before crossing the street.
Rockford is not a destination like the Coeur d’Alene Casino 10 minutes down the highway, Wagner said, and it’s not a Wal-Mart community-in-waiting, either. It’s a farm town with a huge Norman Rockwell upside.
There’s little to no cellular phone service here. Reception tends to cut out at the town limits, right where motorists turn east into Rockford off Highway 27. In three blocks, the city’s core features 100-year-old two-story brick buildings with a couple apartments upstairs and street-level businesses. It is small town simple, and its goal is to stay small town.
“They have a lot of traffic coming through the community, and I think they’d like to take advantage of that,” said Bill Grimes, whose private planning firm, Studio Cascade, helped Rockford develop a blueprint for its future. “But in the long term, I think Rockford is trying to define what it is rather than be defined by what’s driving through it.”
Restaurant owner Nancy Swanson is ready to do whatever it takes to move Rockford forward, with or without the city government.
“We’ve just got to do it and by golly if we have to beg for forgiveness then we will,” said Swanson, who owns the Harvest Moon with her husband, Craig.
The sense of community compelled developers Tim Villard and Steve Swanson to plan a 42-lot subdivision just east of downtown. Steve Swanson, no relation to the owners of the Harvest Moon, sited Rockford Estates after weighing the community’s distance to Lake Coeur d’Alene as well its closeness to downtown Spokane, less than 30 miles away.
“I never thought I’d like looking over the Palouse, but the Palouse is beautiful, Steve Swanson said. Also, everyone is headed in the opposite direction from where you are.”
Or at least, they’re only passing through.
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