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Every announced candidate for governor has stressed economic development. In their view, the state government has an obligation to gather money from Colorado citizens and use that money to attract more tourists and more industries. The promised result is more jobs and more prosperity for the Colorado citizens who forked over the money.
If it really worked that way, I'd be all for it. I'm never against spending money if it will benefit me. But if economic development works the way it has worked before, then if I help pay for it, I'm either generous or stupid.
I grew up in Greeley, a farming town that didn't have a lot of jobs. If you wanted to make something of yourself, you got out of Greeley the day after high-school graduation. This exodus distressed the civic leaders.
So they promoted the area. Industries like Kodak and Hewlett-Packard moved in, lured by mountain views and slick brochures and all the other tools of industrial promotion. And suddenly there was an expanding local economy with jobs.
The jobs, however, seldom went to those of us who grew up there. At one time, I almost had a job lined up at a Fort Collins newspaper, until another applicant appeared. He had a journalism degree from Missouri and had written for the Wall Street Journal. I was a kid from Greeley. Guess who got the job.
Nothing in my education had prepared me to face the kind of competition I'd have to face, thanks to economic development, if I tried to follow my chosen career in the area I grew up in. Economic development gave us world-class competition without world-class credentials.
During this boom, my high-school friends didn't fare any better. The last time I visited the Greeley area and saw two of them, one was tending horses and the other ran an antique shop. Neither held a position that hadn't existed long before the benefits of economic development. Both told me that although there were good jobs around, those jobs always went to people from Connecticut and New Jersey.
None of us benefitted in the slightest from all that economic development. Even so, we all paid. There are direct costs, like increased taxes on property whose values were driven up by speculation, as well as the need to pay for more law enforcement and the ever-increasing costs of moving water across the Continental Divide.
That's only money. The indirect costs are in some ways harder to bear. Long's Peak used to be visible from Greeley, and it has vanished in the murk that passes for air on the Front Range. You might not have made much money if you live in Colorado, but the mountains always offered cheap and uncrowded recreation.
Thanks to economic development, there still isn't much money to be made if you had the misfortune to grow up in Colorado, and you can't enjoy much cheap and uncrowded recreation in the mountains any more, either.
We mistakenly believed that more water, more industries, more tourists would make us prosper. We never saw a dime of that prosperity. And we most of those those intangible qualities that made Colorado a pleasant place to live. It's one thing to sell your birthright for a mess of pottage, but quite another when you don't even get the pottage. We gave it all away so that people from Connecticut and New Jersey and everywhere else could have the good jobs while they befouled our sky, crowded the mountains, and fished out the creeks.
Now the candidates are at it again. They want Colorado citizens to pay for more economic development, even though, as best as I can tell, economic development doesn't benefit Colorado citizens.
Maybe it's just middle-aged greed creeping over me. But I don't want to be taxed so that more people from elsewhere can come here and occupy all the good new jobs and such scenery as remains. What I spend money on ought to do something for me -- and economic development has always worked against me, my family, and everyone I grew up with.
We may be sadder and wiser, but we're also a minority.
The cycle of stupidity will continue. We'll end up with a
new governor. Whoever he is, he'll be a shill for Colorado.
Our taxes will rise as new industries move in. The
resultant opportunities
will attract new herds of
ambitious greedy people. They'll get the money. We'll get
dry rivers and browner skies.
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