Rexburg sees growth, looks to 2020 census

The city of Rexburg is nearing the end of its Vision 2020 master plan. It was a comprehensive plan created in 2008 to prepare for “desirable future physical development for the city.”

According to master plan, Rexburg grew 20 percent between 1990 and 2000, or 2 percent each year. Things began to change after Rick’s College became Brigham Young University-Idaho in 2001. It grew 16 percent in 2003. Rexburg Mayor Jerry Merrill says it now grows about 6-8 percent each year. While the city has been growing and developing, the mayor says it can be difficult to stick to a plan more than two or three years into the future.

“Even with a good comprehensive plan, sometimes it’s a living document,” Merrill said. “And based on what’s going on, maybe a part of town develops that you didn’t think was going to five years ago, so you have to end up changing the plans and trying to make sense the best you can of what is happening.”

Nearly 20,000 students attend BYU-Idaho. Rexburg is trying to avoid being an overcrowded college town. Apartments for students are being built close to campus. There’s also the recently new development, Hemming Village. Its proximity to the college campus makes it a hot spot for students.

“We’ve tried to keep them as close to campus as we can so that people can walk to school,” Merrill said. “That cuts down on problems with traffic and parking and all those kinds of things because in any university town, those are always going to be problems, and we have our share of those problems.”

The city is continuing to see what its citizens want. It recently partnered with Madison County to create a parks and trails plan for more outdoor recreation areas, and it’s now doing an economic development survey to find out what jobs and businesses the city wants to see.

“We’re surveying the citizens again to find out more about jobs and job creation and what kind of businesses they would like to see here and what kind of things they are interested in so that we can match up the wants and the needs of our citizens with businesses that are looking for what we have here,” Merrill said.

The city will get a good idea of just how much it has grown with the upcoming 2020 census. It has created a Correct Count Committee to inform the community about the census. The city says it is important for people to participate because the funding it gets from the federal government is based on census numbers.

“So money to fix our roads, money for schools, a lot of different things is based on census numbers,” Merrill said. “And if we’re low on our count, we lose out on potentially millions of dollars that we could use to be able to make life better for people. So we want to make sure people understand that.”

The census officially begins April 1 next year.