Foster takes over development job for Kalispell

The Daily Inter Lake

Dave Foster has moved around quite a bit.

He was born in Malaysia, served in the U.S. Air Force in Great Britain and attended college in Wisconsin, then had several economic development and planning jobs in Wisconsin, Illinois and Texas.

He applied to become Kalispell's community development director because it looked like where he and his wife, Jean, want to spend the rest of their lives.

"I'm looking for a permanent home," he said.

Foster, 58, has taken over from Susan Moyer, the city's community development director for 28 years. She retired Dec. 29, 2006.

Foster was the director of economic development for Salem, Ill., when he began looking for a final home to call home. Then the Kalispell job came open.

"This just happened to line up with my background," Foster said.

On the job side, the Kalispell post stresses creating affordable housing, diversifying the economy, dealing with a business park and developing the downtown - all topics that Foster has tackled before. For fun, Foster likes to hunt and fish.

Foster wants to make affordable housing one of his main thrusts. The Kalispell City Council has just begun brainstorming how it wants to tackle this subject.

Foster - the son of Methodist missionaries - was born in Malaysia. At age 20, he ended up in the U.S. Air Force, eventually becoming a ground-crew chief for an F-4 fighter in England.

There, he began noticing and studying the cities around his base, becoming fascinated with how they were laid out.

When he left the Air Force in 1973, he went to the University of Wisconsin at Parkside to earn a geography degree, and to the University of Wisconsin's main campus at Madison to earn a master's degree in urban and regional planning.

"My parents' value system led me into public service of some kind," Foster said.

Since then, Foster has held a series of economic development jobs with small cities, technical colleges, regional commissions and public-private organizations in Wisconsin, Illinois and Texas. He stuck mostly with small towns because he likes them better than big cities.

"I'm a Jeffersonian," Foster said. A Jeffersonian follows some of Thomas Jefferson's political philosophies that praise a rural agrarian life, keeping federal power to minimum, and being wary of big cities.

The biggest city in which Foster has worked was Port Arthur, Texas, a Gulf Coast oil industry town near the Louisiana border. Foster participated in Port Arthur attracting roughly $2 billion in new developments in 2000 - a third of the economic investments made in Texas that year.

"It's fun to do deals, to put money together and create jobs. … Increasing the quality of life - that's what it comes down to," Foster said.

Reporter John Stang may be reached at 758-4429 or by e-mail at jstang@dailyinterlake.com